Are You the Messiah?

The confusions presented by a supposed messiah are many. Most importantly, is he really the messiah? And if he is not, who is? Also, what is the mission of the true messiah? All these issues appeared in the anime film Akira.

Fifteen minutes through Akira I was under the belief that the freaky-looking kid had to be the messiah. After all, he had superhero powers that he seemed either puzzled by or scared of. Then, however, Tetsuo appeared on the scene and seemed to slowly assume the role of a budding superhero. Faced with new powers, he was scared and confused and unsure of what to do. With the chants of the general public echoing “Akira” in the background, the possibility emerged that Tetsuo was one and the same as this reputed messiah. The conspicuous cape worn by Tetsuo and theme music that played every time he entered the scene only reinforced this belief.

The last twenty minutes of the film, besides being completely bizarre, changed my opinion of Tetsuo. While Tetsuo did have great powers, unimaginable powers that allowed him to easily gain control over Neo Tokyo, his powers were not used for good. Is not the purpose of a messiah to save humanity from evil? Ignoring for a moment the specific purpose of this messiah, Tetsuo did not fulfill this general role. In attacking the city and almost destroying it, I believe that he instead played the role of the messiah’s nemesis, even his antithesis. While the messiah would come to embody all that was good, Tetsuo embodied all that was bad.

Akira’s emergence towards the end of the film firmly established him as the messiah. Despite being dead, he in a sense rises from the dead when the children call him, a move messianic in itself. Did not Jesus rise from the dead? Neo too rose from the dead. Resurrection, or we could call it rebirth, is a common trend among messiahs. Akira goes on to save the city by destroying the evil that is ravaging it. The depiction of him as pure energy also seems to reinforce his role as messiah. Pure energy represents all that is good, wiping out darkness, or evil, wherever it flows. Akira had to be the messiah.

Having established Akira as the messiah, I must ask what his purpose was. Akira never fully reveals this to us, choosing instead cleverly, and irritatingly, to cut off the words of the children at the end. In my paraphrased words, ‘Could he be the…’ and ‘It has begun.’ The viewer does get the impression that if the children had completed their sentences they would have said, ‘Akira is the messiah.’ The latter statement, however, does give some hints as to the messiah’s purpose. Something begins again. Earlier the crazy, Albert Einstein look-alike scientist says that all the signs point to the universe beginning again. The head military man complains about how the city of Neo Tokyo has degraded into a trash heap. All these comments lead me to believe that the role of the messiah is not only to rid the city of an evil villain, but to rid the city of the overall evil, the degradation of which Tetsuo is merely a symptom. He does this by flooding over the city with his pure light and causing its rebirth. The big bang type images at the end are accompanied with the words “I am Tetsuo”, but as discussed earlier I believe that Tetsuo was the false messiah, the antithesis of the true messiah. Though, these words do bring up the possibility that the world is reborn only in the collision of not millions of subatomic particles but the forces of good and evil.