Warner Bros. Starts Search for Akira's Leading Men
- Thread starter Logan Westbrook
- Start date
Yes I know, thank you very much.Spookimitsu said:
But they weren't ads that have market value to us. They are going to cram the streets full of Pepsi Subway, mcdonalds and other ads. Like I clearly remember the dog food advert in the Akira movie. I didn't have any market value to the western audience or most likely neither to the Japanese audience.
There is difference between Ads and Billboards that create atmosphere and ads that are clearly used to sell something.
I have sat trough my Media class, after all I am studying the bloody subject.
No. See you just plain misunderstood. I'm saying technically Watchmen was far more challenging than Akira would be. Why? Because it was written and drawn as a comic book. Transposing a story that was tailor fitted for one medium to another was going to be more of an issue than Akira would be. Even Terry Gilliam, who had to work around a dead actor and made Brazil for god sake said "it's unfilmable". Akira already proved that it could be done with the anime, so why is everybody up in arms about it?! Sure, they had to cut 2000+ pages to do it, but it worked. Besides the live action film is planned to be a two parts, each summarising three chapters of the total six so how is that bad? Your getting more for ya buck in comparison to the Anime.tahrey said:
So what if they don't use the proper names or they use older actors. Isn't the central story of Akira about Life after devastation? What Disasters do to society at a personal and political level? Names are just cosmetic for the most part. To be honest I would rather hear Travis being screamed every second minute rather than Tetsuo any day of the week. Much as I love the Anime, for all the nightmares it gave me of giant mutant man-babies, that shit just got annoying. Oh and Akira means "Bright" by the way. It's more than just a name.
"Obviously none of these names have been confirmed yet, but it's thought that the movie's stars are somewhere on this list. For the part of Tetsuo - who is likely to be the movie's antagonist - Warner is looking at Robert Pattinson..."
If this happens I will destroy them. I will actually walk into warner brothers with my katana and destroy everybody working on this project.
If this happens I will destroy them. I will actually walk into warner brothers with my katana and destroy everybody working on this project.
Oh! come on! this is getting worse and worse! first Uncharted movie, now this, then what? westernized Gundam movie?..... oh wait! there's one! FFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUU~
10$ says they are going to have names like "Jack" "Joe mc.american" and is probaly going to contain a token asian/black guy/candian/european/extra terrestial etc.
seriously WB what,s wrong with Tokyo?
seriously WB what,s wrong with Tokyo?
I heard they were going to make Zack Efron or however his name it spelled the lead man for Akira.
I must have been day dreaming or something.
I must have been day dreaming or something.
OK, it's been a coupla weeks so I'm necro'ing this, but I only just got to check my messages and quotes.
Also Watchmen seemed to be hailed as a reasonable success because of them at least sticking partly to the original. The names, the characterisations, the setting, the whole feel of the thing may have been slightly tweaked to make it more hollywood friendly, but wasn't dicked about with wholesale such that the only real link to the comic is the name and a vague thematic similarity. Heck, Dr Manhattan even got to leave his wang hanging out.
Besides, depending on how a particular comic has been written, it's not actually that big a thing to convert graphic novel to film. If it's been drawn in a particularly "cinematic" way, it's more or less a readymade storyboard; never mind the whole "fitting it to a different medium" bullshit. The issue here really isn't that it's problematic converting it from page to screen. Even the length isn't so much of a problem; Pete Jackson already demonstrated that you can break a single book into multiple parts and have great success so long as they're still coherent in of themselves (ditto the Harry Potter series), and though it was a bit too extreme in how it did it, Scott Pilgrim (a FAR less "cinematically" drawn comic than Watchmen or Akira ever were) showed a skillful writer can even mash 7 volumes of one hard-to-split-up series into a single 2-hour movie.
No. It's totally some misplaced desire to Americanise - and moreover, Yankee-ise any foreign property for the seemingly ultraconservative hollywood market. Hence things such as the Ring, the Grudge, Let The Right One In etc having to be totally remade domestically (not to mention every other British sitcom... what's next, remade US versions of Monty Python?) because heaven forfend they either just dub the original (the same way the vast majority of the non-english speaking world consumes hollywood titles), or remake it in English with familiar faces/voices but according to the original script and in the same location (such as the BBC did with Wallander).
But heck, if they were giving it the LTROI treatment I wouldn't even mind so much. That was, by all accounts (I haven't yet seen it) a fully sympathetic treatment of shared source material. OK, they moved it to a similar-seeming US town, but didn't just plump for one of the three or four places you can guarantee almost everyone on earth will have heard of. The plot follows much the same way. The names are similar but not exactly the same, because that would seem a touch wierd. Etc.
So Akira allegedly means bright (did you know that one, or go look it up on Wikipedia just to make a point? It is, despite that, still a regular name, such as in... I dunno... Akira Toriyama, Akira Kurosawa, or Akira, Y'know, That Guy Who Works The Register At The Convenience Store In The Back Streets Of Ibariki)... well then let me pitch you a less egregious but still hopefully hollywood friendly concept. Dreamt up in a matter of seconds whilst I'm sat here on lunchbreak but still more creative and respectful of the material.
Call it "Lucy" (ok, the central character is now a girl, but hey, we're putting a LITTLE distance between us and the original, and said character is a complete MacGuffin anyway - so long as it remains an first-grader with a meaningful name (it means "Light" in Italian/Latin; feminine form of Lucifer, you could say) who spends 75% of it in deep sleep, we can get away with that - more people will spot and nod knowingly at the roman form than the japanese)... Set it in New Paris, some decades after a limited nuclear conflict has taken out half of europe and everything's been decontaminated. You can have a backdrop with a half melted Eiffel Tower and crumbling Arc de Triomphe visible in the "dead zone" outside the new conurbation. They have to have efficient, high density housing to make the most of the remaining usable land (of which there is still some alongside the new route of the seine, unlike manhattan which would basically become a lump on the seafloor if it was hydrogen-bombed), and are building from scratch, so the high-rise, expressway-tangled neon nightmare of the original is entirely plausible.
No wait ... it has to be coastal because you can't otherwise have the ship threatening to bombard the city halfway through (and destroyed by Tetsuo), unless you just cut that out. So, London instead. Almost as cliched as New York, but not as much. Further shock value because you don't immediately associate that city with this kind of thing. I don't know if a warship would make it up the Seine to Paris from the sea, but you could certainly reach whatever reconstructed ruins are left of London up the Thames.
Or, you know, whatever. Some other place that's not NNYC but has at least one landmark that can be shown destroyed and is now functioning as the effective capital of *insert country here*.
Then again I can't remember if we ever saw the Tokyo tower or whatever in Akira. Maybe better to have it so there aren't any landmarks. Even THEY got ruined.
(I'll bet you dollar to a dime that Ruari can't resist putting the half submerged, dismembered torso of Lady Liberty poking out of the Hudson at some point)
Because hey ... like you say ... it doesn't matter how much of the original we keep, does it, so long as the concept remains? But this way it's not being given the same name (or character names) etc, obviously trying to crib off the original adaption's fame and noteriety for cheap publicity, so it stops the fanboy wails.
Man, I bet you'd have sung a very different tune if it was something you had a particular regard for. Imagine they made the Watchmen as a far future instead of alternate present thing, a lot cleaner rather than being a crapsack world. The hero costumes all look different, and their ages/voices/demeanours are messed about with quite a lot, and it's been transported halfway round the world. Dr Manhattan ends it far more sympathetic to mankind. They get rid of the headshot wound from the smiley logo. Everything's a lot more jokey and lighthearted, in the manner of Mystery Men. But... hey... it doesn't matter does it? So long as the central underlying theme of largely superpowerless Heroes in a world that doesn't care for them so much anymore is kept?
I mean ... disregard that it's now more or less a completely different animal just with the same name.
Now let me just call out a few things...
Until maybe 5 years ago, 10 at the outside, you couldn't have made a convincing live action version that included that crucial element. It would have been slightly too obvious prosthetics and animatronics, or fake-as-all-hell-looking CGI.
They cut 2000 pages out both because a/ some of them hadn't been drawn, or even fully scripted/sketched yet, b/ a sudden lack of time and money that the project heads neglected to let their underlings know about until it was pretty much too late to make a decent fist of adapting the rest of it... which is actually a typical anime problem. It's successful in the context that they managed to make a good film at the end of it, which if you come to it cold doesn't seem to be TOO disjointed. But in terms of adapting the comic it's a relative, Bakshi-doing-LOTR failure. If not for the sheer amount of money spent on it, you could argue it was more of an exercise to promote the last couple chapters of the manga. Nausicaa was certainly intended that way, though with something less of a budget and less time pressure; as only the first 25% or so was written at the time the anime was made, they just converted that into film, and wrote their own happy ending to bodge on the end, when really that segment of it was just the beginning of the saga proper.
Fuck quantity, give us quality.
No it's not genius. Here's a tip: By changing something, you make it different. And if you make the same kind of unpopular, corner cutting changes that other disasterous, box-office-flop adaptions (Bay, somehow, excepted) made, you'll lay yourself open to derision and accusations of making a generic, unchallenging actioner totally out of step with the groundbreaking work that it's stealing the title and plot framework from.
Plus you'll be making a straight-up shitty movie, and who really wants to waste their life doing that - or watching them?
The central point of the story is of people vs authority, you could argue. The kids vs the man. And, in the end of it all (spoiler town!) effectively becoming the new Man themselves. And thus the cycle of rebellious youth vs stuffy administration gets to continue. If you focus on the apocalyptic elements alone, you're missing both the main narriative thrust, and the rich tapestry of characterisation and subplot on top of it, all much tied in with that same theme. The biker gangs vs, at first, the police and the school system, and then against the military. Later Kaneda and his ragtag band against the new kingdom Tetsuo and Akira have effectively set up. The Colonel and Kei against his/their superiors. Nezumi working quietly behind Miyaki's back. Infighting in the ranks of said bands. Etc. It's a massive allegory for the societal turmoil that Japan was experiencing at the time, as well as your typical 1980s cold-war-speculative-horror.
There is a small element of what you say, but it's part of the wider plot, and doesn't even properly kick in until about 2/3 the way through the manga or later (or in other words, it can't possibly be introduced until a cliffhanger ending for the first part (or, if there's three, the second) - and preferably it should just happen as an out-of-the-blue shock about 15-20 minutes into the second part of two) when Akira loses his shit a couple in-story days after being woken up. The anime adaption barely touched on it, it happened so late in. The nuclear conflict that led to the creation of Neo Tokyo was a generation or even two generations earlier... in other words, about as far back as Hiroshima was when the story was written (but far more devastating). Some of the scars are still there, particularly amongst the much older generations, but the kids know nothing of it. Society has very successfully rebuilt from that slight knock in the intervening decades, and the world they see is very much a normal, modern, neon lit and slightly dirty one that just happens to have a twisted ghost town sat at the edge of it.
It's something that could do with being expanded and played on in the live action movies - THAT difference would be most welcome - but it's not an excuse for uprooting the setting and cast wholesale.
I mean ... how many different films get built around the same general concept or feeling that's as vague as what you said? There must have been fifty that use the description you use for Akira alone. Yet they're all identifiable and unique vs each other. You couldn't jam the titles from one onto the main feature of another, show it at a theatre, and expect no-one to notice.
Honestly. The two of them leaping around that stadium, screaming each others name - one in murderous anger, the other in an attempt to call back to their previous friendship and to call his buddy back to the real world, is one of the classic moments both of the anime AND the manga. You cannot make the film without it. You think that it'd be any less annoying to you if it just happened to be a different name with a different accent?
TETSUUUOOO~~~~~~
*pant*
oooooooooooooooookay and I'm done. For now.
Seriously now. What. OK, so you try to make the point that Watchmen is different because it was written and drawn as a comic, then immediately turn around and make the point that Akira will somehow be different because ... it was written and drawn as a comic book. But it's had a (not entirely brilliant, I would say - it covers about 1 1/2 chapters out of 6 in ok fashion, then jumps pretty much directly to a hashed-together ending) screen adaption already made of it... 20 years ago... "proving" it can be done (what, and no other big screen adaption of a comic or manga title before or since did so? Nausicaa, Ghost in the Shell, Appleseed, Dragonball (animated), Spiderman etc for starters without me even digging deep into my mind? BTW I think it was more the subject matter of Watchmen and the SFX that would be required, as well as Moore's own reluctance to be involved, that made THAT difficult)??? Make your freaking mind up.Quantum Roberts said:
Also Watchmen seemed to be hailed as a reasonable success because of them at least sticking partly to the original. The names, the characterisations, the setting, the whole feel of the thing may have been slightly tweaked to make it more hollywood friendly, but wasn't dicked about with wholesale such that the only real link to the comic is the name and a vague thematic similarity. Heck, Dr Manhattan even got to leave his wang hanging out.
Besides, depending on how a particular comic has been written, it's not actually that big a thing to convert graphic novel to film. If it's been drawn in a particularly "cinematic" way, it's more or less a readymade storyboard; never mind the whole "fitting it to a different medium" bullshit. The issue here really isn't that it's problematic converting it from page to screen. Even the length isn't so much of a problem; Pete Jackson already demonstrated that you can break a single book into multiple parts and have great success so long as they're still coherent in of themselves (ditto the Harry Potter series), and though it was a bit too extreme in how it did it, Scott Pilgrim (a FAR less "cinematically" drawn comic than Watchmen or Akira ever were) showed a skillful writer can even mash 7 volumes of one hard-to-split-up series into a single 2-hour movie.
No. It's totally some misplaced desire to Americanise - and moreover, Yankee-ise any foreign property for the seemingly ultraconservative hollywood market. Hence things such as the Ring, the Grudge, Let The Right One In etc having to be totally remade domestically (not to mention every other British sitcom... what's next, remade US versions of Monty Python?) because heaven forfend they either just dub the original (the same way the vast majority of the non-english speaking world consumes hollywood titles), or remake it in English with familiar faces/voices but according to the original script and in the same location (such as the BBC did with Wallander).
But heck, if they were giving it the LTROI treatment I wouldn't even mind so much. That was, by all accounts (I haven't yet seen it) a fully sympathetic treatment of shared source material. OK, they moved it to a similar-seeming US town, but didn't just plump for one of the three or four places you can guarantee almost everyone on earth will have heard of. The plot follows much the same way. The names are similar but not exactly the same, because that would seem a touch wierd. Etc.
So Akira allegedly means bright (did you know that one, or go look it up on Wikipedia just to make a point? It is, despite that, still a regular name, such as in... I dunno... Akira Toriyama, Akira Kurosawa, or Akira, Y'know, That Guy Who Works The Register At The Convenience Store In The Back Streets Of Ibariki)... well then let me pitch you a less egregious but still hopefully hollywood friendly concept. Dreamt up in a matter of seconds whilst I'm sat here on lunchbreak but still more creative and respectful of the material.
Call it "Lucy" (ok, the central character is now a girl, but hey, we're putting a LITTLE distance between us and the original, and said character is a complete MacGuffin anyway - so long as it remains an first-grader with a meaningful name (it means "Light" in Italian/Latin; feminine form of Lucifer, you could say) who spends 75% of it in deep sleep, we can get away with that - more people will spot and nod knowingly at the roman form than the japanese)... Set it in New Paris, some decades after a limited nuclear conflict has taken out half of europe and everything's been decontaminated. You can have a backdrop with a half melted Eiffel Tower and crumbling Arc de Triomphe visible in the "dead zone" outside the new conurbation. They have to have efficient, high density housing to make the most of the remaining usable land (of which there is still some alongside the new route of the seine, unlike manhattan which would basically become a lump on the seafloor if it was hydrogen-bombed), and are building from scratch, so the high-rise, expressway-tangled neon nightmare of the original is entirely plausible.
No wait ... it has to be coastal because you can't otherwise have the ship threatening to bombard the city halfway through (and destroyed by Tetsuo), unless you just cut that out. So, London instead. Almost as cliched as New York, but not as much. Further shock value because you don't immediately associate that city with this kind of thing. I don't know if a warship would make it up the Seine to Paris from the sea, but you could certainly reach whatever reconstructed ruins are left of London up the Thames.
Or, you know, whatever. Some other place that's not NNYC but has at least one landmark that can be shown destroyed and is now functioning as the effective capital of *insert country here*.
Then again I can't remember if we ever saw the Tokyo tower or whatever in Akira. Maybe better to have it so there aren't any landmarks. Even THEY got ruined.
(I'll bet you dollar to a dime that Ruari can't resist putting the half submerged, dismembered torso of Lady Liberty poking out of the Hudson at some point)
Because hey ... like you say ... it doesn't matter how much of the original we keep, does it, so long as the concept remains? But this way it's not being given the same name (or character names) etc, obviously trying to crib off the original adaption's fame and noteriety for cheap publicity, so it stops the fanboy wails.
Man, I bet you'd have sung a very different tune if it was something you had a particular regard for. Imagine they made the Watchmen as a far future instead of alternate present thing, a lot cleaner rather than being a crapsack world. The hero costumes all look different, and their ages/voices/demeanours are messed about with quite a lot, and it's been transported halfway round the world. Dr Manhattan ends it far more sympathetic to mankind. They get rid of the headshot wound from the smiley logo. Everything's a lot more jokey and lighthearted, in the manner of Mystery Men. But... hey... it doesn't matter does it? So long as the central underlying theme of largely superpowerless Heroes in a world that doesn't care for them so much anymore is kept?
I mean ... disregard that it's now more or less a completely different animal just with the same name.
Now let me just call out a few things...
Really? The biggest challenge to that really was the flying machines and Dr M himself. Vs rendering, in such a way as to make convincing against the other live action stuff, an entirely false futuristic city next to an H-bomb crater, some enormous underground military bunkers with lift machines 50 yards wide and monstrous refridgeration facilities at their core, people leaping around half constructed stadia shooting laser beams and mindblasts at each other, teleporting, dancing around on laser killsats, riding crazy motorcycles (and the action sequences involved with such that would make the Matrix interstate scene seem like a walk in a park)....... oh and let's not forget all the crazy shit that Testuo's involved with. The dreams. The manipulation of reality around him (crushing interior parts of the aforementioned ship for a start). And his infamous mutations. Not just the big-baby-inflation thing... which goes on longer and gets a lot worse in the manga than the anime, but the less extreme but still grotesque uses of it before then, such as having his arm extend to smack someone several metres away, in similar globby fashion. One thing that CG is still not fully matured for is organic effects like that. They can make it good, but not quickly, easily or cheaply. If it's rushed, underfunded, or under-talented, it'll look awful.
Until maybe 5 years ago, 10 at the outside, you couldn't have made a convincing live action version that included that crucial element. It would have been slightly too obvious prosthetics and animatronics, or fake-as-all-hell-looking CGI.
I think our definitions of whether or not something "works" have fatally diverged, and it's going to be impossible to come to any consensus here. You're going to think I'm an overly perfectionist stick-in-the-mud, and I'm going to think you're either a clever troll, or a hateful dork with absolutely no quality standards, the type that, in the guise of a contractor or end user causes me hell at work because you'll rip something up, patch it together in a half-arsed manner that works for 15 minutes after you walk away, and go "myeh, it's good enough. what more do you want, the moon?". Maybe both. Each of us being quite convinced of our own righteousness.
They cut 2000 pages out both because a/ some of them hadn't been drawn, or even fully scripted/sketched yet, b/ a sudden lack of time and money that the project heads neglected to let their underlings know about until it was pretty much too late to make a decent fist of adapting the rest of it... which is actually a typical anime problem. It's successful in the context that they managed to make a good film at the end of it, which if you come to it cold doesn't seem to be TOO disjointed. But in terms of adapting the comic it's a relative, Bakshi-doing-LOTR failure. If not for the sheer amount of money spent on it, you could argue it was more of an exercise to promote the last couple chapters of the manga. Nausicaa was certainly intended that way, though with something less of a budget and less time pressure; as only the first 25% or so was written at the time the anime was made, they just converted that into film, and wrote their own happy ending to bodge on the end, when really that segment of it was just the beginning of the saga proper.
Wow! They're not butchering it QUITE as much as the original production crew did back when this was actually less of a big deal! LUCKY US! We should now shut up about how, other than making it closer to the length it should actually be (I'd argue 3 movies, or 2 pretty long ones where you get an intermission in some showings), they're ruining the rest of it.
Fuck quantity, give us quality.
"So what"... so what so what so what. So what if a huge chunk of it gets altered for no good reason. It's still the same thing in the end, right?
No it's not genius. Here's a tip: By changing something, you make it different. And if you make the same kind of unpopular, corner cutting changes that other disasterous, box-office-flop adaptions (Bay, somehow, excepted) made, you'll lay yourself open to derision and accusations of making a generic, unchallenging actioner totally out of step with the groundbreaking work that it's stealing the title and plot framework from.
Plus you'll be making a straight-up shitty movie, and who really wants to waste their life doing that - or watching them?
What an utter load of horseshit, and this from the one who then counters with a point that the name Akira isn't generic and actually does mean something... in fact, something arguably analogous to "lucifer". (OK, not your exact words ... but hey, if the name IS more significant than just being a pin in the baby book, maybe that's what Katsuhiro Otomo was going for?)
The central point of the story is of people vs authority, you could argue. The kids vs the man. And, in the end of it all (spoiler town!) effectively becoming the new Man themselves. And thus the cycle of rebellious youth vs stuffy administration gets to continue. If you focus on the apocalyptic elements alone, you're missing both the main narriative thrust, and the rich tapestry of characterisation and subplot on top of it, all much tied in with that same theme. The biker gangs vs, at first, the police and the school system, and then against the military. Later Kaneda and his ragtag band against the new kingdom Tetsuo and Akira have effectively set up. The Colonel and Kei against his/their superiors. Nezumi working quietly behind Miyaki's back. Infighting in the ranks of said bands. Etc. It's a massive allegory for the societal turmoil that Japan was experiencing at the time, as well as your typical 1980s cold-war-speculative-horror.
There is a small element of what you say, but it's part of the wider plot, and doesn't even properly kick in until about 2/3 the way through the manga or later (or in other words, it can't possibly be introduced until a cliffhanger ending for the first part (or, if there's three, the second) - and preferably it should just happen as an out-of-the-blue shock about 15-20 minutes into the second part of two) when Akira loses his shit a couple in-story days after being woken up. The anime adaption barely touched on it, it happened so late in. The nuclear conflict that led to the creation of Neo Tokyo was a generation or even two generations earlier... in other words, about as far back as Hiroshima was when the story was written (but far more devastating). Some of the scars are still there, particularly amongst the much older generations, but the kids know nothing of it. Society has very successfully rebuilt from that slight knock in the intervening decades, and the world they see is very much a normal, modern, neon lit and slightly dirty one that just happens to have a twisted ghost town sat at the edge of it.
It's something that could do with being expanded and played on in the live action movies - THAT difference would be most welcome - but it's not an excuse for uprooting the setting and cast wholesale.
I mean ... how many different films get built around the same general concept or feeling that's as vague as what you said? There must have been fifty that use the description you use for Akira alone. Yet they're all identifiable and unique vs each other. You couldn't jam the titles from one onto the main feature of another, show it at a theatre, and expect no-one to notice.
Get. The. Fuck. Out.
Honestly. The two of them leaping around that stadium, screaming each others name - one in murderous anger, the other in an attempt to call back to their previous friendship and to call his buddy back to the real world, is one of the classic moments both of the anime AND the manga. You cannot make the film without it. You think that it'd be any less annoying to you if it just happened to be a different name with a different accent?
TETSUUUOOO~~~~~~
*pant*
oooooooooooooooookay and I'm done. For now.
The Audition Room:
"Okay everyone, if you are not a boyish looking white male please leave"
The Writers Room:
"This is too Japanese, there is like compelling deep story and stuff", "you are right, this needs more pointless mellow-drama"
The house of every Akira Fan:
[chic-chic] "They named him travis!" [boom]
I am not a fan of anime, but many of my friends hold this movie dear.
"Okay everyone, if you are not a boyish looking white male please leave"
The Writers Room:
"This is too Japanese, there is like compelling deep story and stuff", "you are right, this needs more pointless mellow-drama"
The house of every Akira Fan:
[chic-chic] "They named him travis!" [boom]
I am not a fan of anime, but many of my friends hold this movie dear.
Addendum: having read back over that... I missed one of the other points. Man's hubris with technology, particularly those that can destroy him and his environment. Specifically an allegory with nuclear weapons and nuclear power... you think you have control over thing X - but then it suddenly flips out and kills you with little warning.
And you can try and bury it and hide it away, but who knows if the procedures may break down in future, or be overwhelmed, and someone else brings it back out of storage?
It's a fairly common anime thing, really, so it maybe doesn't bear so much of a mention. But it is all the same a secondary driving force of the story, and not something one sees as much in western movies any more. It'd have particular poignancy following the trouble in Fukushima - sure, it was precipitated by a natural event rather than a military project that fucked with the wrong biker gang, but the (smaller scale) end result has been comparable. Supposedly comprehensive safety and security regiemes shown to be anything but, a dangerous but tightly controlled thing suddenly unleashed to wreak untold harm...
And you can try and bury it and hide it away, but who knows if the procedures may break down in future, or be overwhelmed, and someone else brings it back out of storage?
It's a fairly common anime thing, really, so it maybe doesn't bear so much of a mention. But it is all the same a secondary driving force of the story, and not something one sees as much in western movies any more. It'd have particular poignancy following the trouble in Fukushima - sure, it was precipitated by a natural event rather than a military project that fucked with the wrong biker gang, but the (smaller scale) end result has been comparable. Supposedly comprehensive safety and security regiemes shown to be anything but, a dangerous but tightly controlled thing suddenly unleashed to wreak untold harm...
Well more like, house of every Akira fan:Hashime said:
Goddamn it, I knew they'd ruin it... oh well, let's watch it through MST3K style for shits and giggles then put the proper one on.
(Same way we treated Transformers, already having a handy, digitally remastered anniversary-edition DVD of the animated film to hand)