Huge spoilers for this film and The End of Evangelion.
When I first watched Space Runaway Ideon nearly six years ago, I had no idea what I was getting into. Looking back on it now, I'm happy no one warned me about the absolute horror that is Be Invoked, because the memory of watching it for the first time will stick with me forever. That said, while my initial reaction was one of shock and awe and praying that Tomino would leave me a single shred of happiness by the end of this film (HAHA!), coming back to it for a second time gave me a new appreciation of everything it does so well.
First off, the movie looks and sounds amazing. The soundtrack is really strong and the orchestral music really adds to grandiosity of the film. The animation also takes a significant step up in quality from the tv series. not only in the details and the cinematography of the direction (some shots like Cosmo looking out of the Ideon window and Kasha's death are legit breathtaking), but especially in the fluidity of the movement. The entire film is incredibly smooth and easy on the eyes. The battle scenes aboard the Solo Ship in particular, with characters and mechas running and jumping and firing lasers at each other, are so clean.
Narratively, Be Invoked is a fucking rollercoaster, but instead of the twisting and turning part of the ride, it's just the initial drop for 90 minutes, and you don't hit the ground until the final credits start to roll. The levels of despair that the characters go through in this film are almost unbelievable. Even for depression-era "Kill 'Em All" Tomino, this is another level of relentless. Every single character is dead by the end of this film, and what might actually be even worse is how the characters slowly come to the realization that the they are all completely helpless to stop the Ide as it forces them into a battle that destroys themselves and, ultimately, the entire universe.
I like most of the characters in this series, but Cosmo is really one of the best mecha protagonists I have come across, a hot-blooded super robot pilot pushed to the absolute limits of suffering because of an all-powerful cosmic force and a war that kills everyone he loves. The despair for him and the rest of the characters is amped up tenfold in Be Invoked precisely because we see them as human. The short respite from battle in the middle of the film really allows us to feel for the characters, and I found it all the more crushing this time around because I knew what was waiting for them. Despite this suffering, though, Cosmo and the rest continue to fight the Buff Clan. Likewise, the Buff Clan continues to fight for what they believe in. What I love about how the Ide as a concept interacts with the characters is that its push for annihilation never feels contrived--it might exacerbate the concept, but the human issues of greed, fear, and racism would exist and create conflict whether the Ide existed or not.
It goes without saying that there is on here with these high concepts like Christian death and rebirth and Freud's idea of the id as a subconscious manifestation of humanity. The film allows us to consider these questions on free will and the purpose of human existence and our relationship with a God made in the image of man (or, as the Ide is described, a collection of millions of consciousnesses), but it never really offers any answers. Instead, it leaves it all out there for the viewers to interpret, and as you are distracted by the spectacle of death and destruction on screen, the film works these themes into the background to let you sit with them.
Much has been made about how Anno was hugely inspired by Be Invoked when creating The End of Evangelion and the similarities are obvious. I still prefer the End of Evangelion on the whole, but Ideon offers an incredibly unique take on these broader ideas of human destiny and the possibility of renewal as a collective and as an individual. In fact, I would even go as far as to say that despite the horror of the film, the final scene and the rebirth of the universe at the hands of Messiah seems almost hopeful. I really think Shinji's refusal of instrumentality is an alternate take on the ending to this film: what if Cosmo never woke up? What if he chose to remain in the world that was destroyed by the Ideon? We'll never know the answer to these questions, but it's hard not to make these sorts of connections. The same can obviously be said about the Ideon itself as this strangely sentient mecha that seems to influence not its pilot but the world around it.
But if the influence of Be Invoked isn't enough, I think it's also so impressive how this film changed the game completely for the mecha genre. Ideon was the series Tomino created directly after the original Mobile Suit Gundam, but it came out before the Gundam film trilogy turned the franchise into a smash hit. As a result, Ideon sits sort of on the edge of the "super robot" and "real robot" subgenres. The political drama between humanity and the Buff Clan, as well as the high death count and more serious plot, clearly follows in the footsteps of Gundam, but the more mythical origins of the Ideon seem more like Yuusha Raideen than anything that could exist in the Universal Century. Regardless, I really like how the movie follows through on Ideon's mystical side to create this unique blend of realism and fantasy, and I think it marks a really big development for mecha, especially in how it portrays the Ideon as both a robot and a beast or a force of nature. More than anything that came before it, in my opinion, it capitalizes on the dichotomy that Mazinger Z first set out a decade earlier of the giant robot being capable of becoming either a god or a demon.
All in all, I really love this film. I wanted to write a review of it six years ago and couldn't find the words, and I'm still not sure if I have found the right ones. Still, I can't help but gush over it and hope that you watch it, too.
