Anime: Eien no Hou

Let'so be quick about this, even though the movie seemed to drag on forever… I watched this to review it for our anime club, and, like all shows I do this to, I try to avoid any information about the show to give it a completely unbiased and fresh review. That was a serious mistake.
It starts slightly into the future, with four friends constructing a machine from diagrams in the Thomas Edison Museum, and the fragments of a dream. The device is supposed to be a "spirit phone" with which you can converse with the spirits of the departed. (Wasn't this realized in the movie "Tunnelvision?" :grin: ) From this stepping point, it could have made a good movie or series, but no… Though the foursome obviously succeed, that's where it gets downright stupid and awful. :brickwall:
In actuality, this seems to be an "indoctrination" film for a religious cult (like the "Left Behind" series of movies in the U.S.). The animation is wonderful, but the "story" is uneven, illogical, and horribly told. No plot, just drag the characters through the afterlife, as if they lived in a Newtonian Universe with no will of their own. An absolutely horrid mish-mash of religious tenets from dozens of cultures.
If you want this kind of thing, stick with the classics… the Greek and Roman stories of travels and escapes from the underworld, or anything in recent anime with shinigami.