5 Urgent Questions About the Live Action 'Akira' Remake
If you like anime, you've probably heard of Akira. If you like anime and you haven't heard of Akira, here's the reason why you even know what the word "anime" means. But even if you don't like anime, you've likely heard somewhere that Akira is considered both a classic and a milestone in cinematic history.
Why change the location of a movie whose central theme is how fucked up it is to be Japanese?
I know that sounds disrespectful, but you have to admit that it is, indeed, a pretty fucked up thing to be Japanese. You're confined to an isolated island for the vast majority of your cultural development - an island regularly beset by massive earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and typhoons - and when you eventually do emerge from your isolation, you become the only society to ever have nuclear weaponry deployed against them. Consider all of those factors, and then watch one of those tsunami videos; it's easy to see why so many of their movies seem to think of cities as "those things that just go away sometimes." Akira's imagery relies heavily on this concept of civilization as an impermanent thing: Cities are fragile beings in the movie. They can, and frequently do, dissolve away into nothing right before the character's eyes.
Why did you think a race change was even necessary?
Humanity is basically an international culture now. Japan isn't a place so foreign to us that we can't relate to them as human beings. It's where our video games come from. It's where Mario lives. It's a plane ticket or a Skype call away. If you wanted to, you could do a quick Google search right now, and flip over to a webcam dedicated to watching them poop. That's about as intimate as you can get with another society. We're okay with Asians, Hollywood: They're no longer a mysterious and inscrutable society that fills us with fear and wonder. We don't think they feel rage with their feet, or hover when depressed or anything -- we generally assume they have human emotions and human struggles just like everybody else. Chow Yun Fat had a career over here, remember? Lucy Liu? Hell, Ong Bak even did okay in American theaters, and that was a movie about a guy who
Why the switch to live action?
Akira was so cutting edge at the time it was filmed, that it still stands up perfectly well today, even against modern animation techniques. Aside from the fact that nobody in the movie is capable of closing their mouths completely -- all standing around with bared teeth like howler monkeys -- there's just no cause to change anything about the visuals.
Why the age change?
The cardinal sin in this remake isn't even the whitewashing, it's the age change. Look at that cast list again: None of those people can play convincing teenagers, some of them even when they were actual teenagers. That's probably why Pattinson was chosen for Twilight, actually: The fact that there's something fundamentally off about the way he thinks human beings behave makes him a suitable choice for a vampire, or somebody with mild autism, and maybe even for my screenplay about a vampire with mild autism, but not for a teenager whose hormones and uncertainty cause him to regularly and sometimes literally explode with emotion.
So what it could it possibly be about now?
With all of these factors considered -- the change in race, age, and location -- there's only one thing this live action version of Akira can be about. The same thing every other "meaningful" Hollywood movie has been about since the day it happened: 9/11. Think about it: There's a city, emblematic of its nation, that undergoes a great hardship, but after many years of struggle, they finally rebuild. Then a group of friends, their gang analogous to a controversial real life group, ostracized and hunted by the government, somehow causes the destruction of said city. It was an important moment in our history, and of course it deserves coverage. But why choose Akira to talk about it? Well, because Hollywood believes that the only disaster Americans can relate to is 9/11, but sometimes work is hard and it takes a lot of time, and that sucks. So instead of setting to work on an original script, they're just going to up and steal a movie that perfectly captured what it was to be Japanese in a tumultuous period of history, and make it all about white people problems instead.Oh, but don't go off thinking somebody has greenlit a movie that will only defile a classic and shove it's dick into the ear of cinematic history. That's all wrong.There are actually
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