It’s horror porn, gore porn, gun porn, and occasionally just porn. It’s an indulgent, fantastical mess, that always demands your attention except when it’s clearly just playing with itself. You do have to give it a minute once in a while.
So I’m going to bypass some of the usual staples for talking about a series here. Hellsing Ultimate is 10 OVAs released over a period of 6 years. The animation quality is generally movie-tier. The narrative flow is kinda gibberish: I considered reviewing each set of the blu-ray release as its own thing, because while there’s still a really crummy cliffhanger between VIII and IX, that’s still as close as it has to cohesive structure. Four installments detailing Millennium’s coming out of the shadows, four more detailing the Battle of London in earnest, and the final two resolving all the conflicts between the main cast and wrapping up the plot. But within those arcs, the start and stop points don’t make much sense. Like the best part of the series is probably the final battle between Alucard and Anderson, which is split between VIII and IX, while the lowest point is probably Millennium’s initial assault on London, which is mostly V but with some bits of IV and VI.
So yeah, that’s about as coherent as the technical talk is gonna be.
The word for all this is gonzo really, in both common uses of the term. Visceral, emotional, personal, with no sense of objective outside reality, and also using the barest of establishing shots before getting straight to the show. It’s not strictly accurate in the second sense, since there are certainly plenty of times it does slow down and brood for a bit before going back to the action, but those moments get shorter and less frequent as it goes, and after a certain point the talky bits are just as spectacle driven as the blood or the action. I mean, you aren’t going to convince me that Alucard reverting to his WWII appearance and ranting about what a failure Walter is for damn near 10 minutes isn’t meant to be a sort of carnage.
I have to say I’m totally in love with the credits sequences in Ultimate. They almost always present a bit of a tonal contrast with the episode their paired with, while also expanding on background elements in a clear but unobtrusive way. That the music is always quite good helps a lot of course. It makes an odd contrast because, given the nature of the series, there’s times where some sequences you can kinda just check out a minute since it’ll be over the top, long, but not really be anything but gory spectacle, while the credits always pulled me forward in my seat a bit so I could catch the details behind the credits themselves.
Really that sort of thing is all over the place in Ultimate, it does a lot of clever things and can go long stretches with just perfect pacing and flourish, but occasionally it gets completely indulgent and if you’re not into the specific thing of that scene (especially a lot of the gun/military porn) and it’s kinda easy to check out. Of course, that’s sorta the point isn’t it? Horror comedy from a guy who got his start in illustrated porn indulging his personal sense of style, of course it’s gonna be gonzo and over the top.
Which actually provides a nice bridge into the subtextual meat of the show. There’s a line used very late in the series that boils down the main conflict between Alucard and Anderson, which is very expressly echoed by the Nazi villains as well: that deep down immortal monsters are whimpering children looking to die. But this doesn’t really hold true, because the dividing line isn’t between monsters and men. Seras is defined by indomitable drive to stay alive. Walter and Anderson go out of their way to BECOME monsters because they… basically wanted to die on their own terms having one final battle. Sir Penwood, generally portrayed as a coward, ultimately decides to go out triggering a bomb to take as many Nazis with him as he can, even when he reasonably could have escaped. And as might be expected, Integra’s life has been defined by spitting in the face of insurmountable odds and refusing to bow to those who would threaten her, always defeating deadly threats with extreme prejudice.
This undercurrent is really consistent. Men fight until they find a worthy opponent to die to, while women fight to live. And it’s strange because I’m really not sure where they’re going with it. Especially when it comes to the main cast, because for Alucard and Seras it also definitely ties into the vampiric bloodlust, rape vs consent thing they have going on. It’s almost like… there’s this belief that men, by nature, steal and take what they will, but because of this are damned and worthy only in death. Women, meanwhile, use what is offered, but no more, and have earned life. Although this might be tied into the minor preoccupation with purity that’s there as well; Seras can only become a vampire because she’s a virgin, and several mentions are made of Integra’s “maiden virtue”. We don’t really know what’s up with any of the vampires of Millennium, but they certainly go out of their way to sexualize Rip van Winkle’s death. I dunno. It’s messy and has some clear parallels to Japanese gender roles overall, except with a distinctly negative spin; men will dominate by nature, but they are little more than dogs because of it, animals waiting to die. So seemingly the idea is that, if a woman can preserve herself against such assaults, she becomes a proper liege, who will strive towards the greatest good and never taking more than what is offered.
It’s strange trying to decipher the messaging of something that’s simultaneously overtly skeevy but also has a clear respect for its own characters. Of course wild oscillation between effective material and being distractingly over the top is the Hellsing experience isn’t it.
It’s gorgeous, it’s gripping, and it’s certainly trying to say… something. Honestly the real weakness here is I don’t know that it speaks to me, specifically? Well, it’s not, and I know it’s not because I think it’s only actually interested in speaking to one person, Kouta Hirano. But then again…
Rating- 8/10. To borrow a completely unrelated quote? Stay a while, and listen.
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