The actors in the running to play Tetsuo, the main character who is given destructive psychic powers after his encounter with a government experiment, are Ezra Miller and Alden Eherenreich. There’s a good chance you haven’t heard of either of them, but Miller is the star of the much praised independent drama We Need to Talk About Kevin, and Eherenreich starred in Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro, so they aren’t exactly unknowns. Garret Hedlund, best known for his role as Sam Flynn in Tron: Legacy, is in talks to play Kaneda, Tetsua’s gang leader and best friend. Gary Oldman, who needs no introduction, is supposedly in talks to play the Colonel, the man assigned to destroy Tetsuo once he becomes dangerous. Helena Bonham Carter and Keira Knightly have also been approached to play roles.

I’d been wondering exactly how they intended to portray this movie and I have to admit that I’m still skeptical about the entire project. They do show intention to try to give the movie some type of credibility by attracting some top talent toward this production, but it’s still very tough to take this project too seriously. The folks at Warner are giving it a helluva an impressionable effort but the original Akira movie was groundbreaking for its time, and deeply rooted in Japanese pop culture of the late 80s, not to mention outright and proudly weird as all hell as a narrative. It’s almost painful to try to imagine how Hollywood may handle the adapting process.

They have to try to make a good and box office successful movie in the adaptation process while maintaining the essence of the work that made it such a hallmark of Anime history in the first place. Some anime fans still undoubtedly find the existence of this production a bit disturbing in the first place, and I may be a long time removed from my days of running an anime site but I do still hold the genre in high regard and would like to some day see an approach that’s enjoyable, taken with care, and retains the appeal of the original property. I just don’t know if this movie is the one to do the job.