Tokyo. Two teenage boys, Nine and Twelve, post riddles on the Internet posing as the group “Sphinx”, and claim that the solutions are clues as to where their bombs are going to blow up. Detective Shibazaki is brought on the case and helps solve the riddles, yet bombs detonate in a subway and a shopping mall. Classmate Lisa is blackmailed by Nine and Twelve into helping them. It turns out that Nine and Twelve are only doing this to raise awareness of the secret government project called Athena, which gave 5-year old orphans a drug that would turn them into super-soldiers, but all the kids died except Nine, Twelve and Five. When they detonate an atomic bomb in a balloon in the stratosphere, the army helicopter kills Twelve, while Nine also dies. However, the media uncovers project Athena.
In the anime “Terror in Resonance” (sometimes also translated as “Terror in Tokyo”), the director and screenwriter Shinichiro Watanabe delivered an analysis of people resorting to terrorism, trying to understand, but not justify or accept the two (anti)heroes who want to use the said method to achieve their goal. Unlike other groups who use terror to impose or spread their ideology, the two teenage guys Nine and Twelve actually have a more selfless goal, to uncover a scandal of which they themselves were victims of, giving an observation that injustice will cause a rebellion in search for justice—though such a motive is kind of far-fetched and unconvincing: instead of planting bombs to gain media attention, why not simply contact the media or the Internet and directly tell the world what they know? Why go through all these riddles and code words when they have journalists? That is a rather big flaw of the storyline. However, one has to hand it to them: despite several bomb explosions, the final death toll is surprising—not a single person was killed, zero, since the two guys took meticulous care to evacuate people or postpone their plan. Those are professionals. One of the highlights is the great episode at the Haneda airport, crafted and executed with a lot of passion, especially in the scene where Five is in the control room, observing a guy on the airport via dozens of cameras, until she spots a clock and realizes the events on the screen are presented in a 5 minute delay, and that she is late on their ploy. Another great moment is when Detective Shibazaki and his associate inquire about the secret military project at the home of an old former official, who tells them that they should leave now “if they ever want to feel safe on the streets at night”. The animation is stunning, especially in the sequence of the Shibuya crossing, where so many people and details can be seen in just one frame, yet the characters never truly engage to the fullest and seem kind of grey and stiff, which hinders the story.
Grade:++
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