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REVIEW: Hellsing Ultimate Blu-Ray 9-10

I'm pretty sure the The Dawn manga has concluded. Prematurely to be sure, but still wrapped up. If I'm not mistaken, the big reveal was that spoiler[Mina Harker's corpse was the source for the nazi vampire experiments.] Unless it isn't and I'm missing something...

All of these things are opinions though, but I will call b.s. on the C+ rating for the dub.

Well that was harsher than I expected. This is why I don't like reading reviews: it ruins everything for me.

You are entitled to your opinion but I have a couple of problems with this review. First off, I am baffled how someone could decide that Hellsing is good enough to watch 8 OVAs and then its suddenly stinks.

penguintruth wrote:

My only problem with this series is that Hirano didn't really do enough to explain why nobody outside of London could interfere. Militaries would be pouring into that place, supernatural monsters or not.

As I recall, The Major made one of the US President's cabinet advisers a vampire, so they had their own shit to deal with. As for the rest of the world....when you really get around to it, the whole "war" took place practically overnight. I really don't think that's enough time for any country's military to get there. Probably for the clean up, but I doubt much else. I mean...the world is having a hard enough time dealing with a bunch of scruffy rapist terrorists. We'd be screwed if vampire nazis started trouble.

First 5 episodes were sooooooo much better than the last 5. 10 was awful. The whole woe is me and kill me eagerness was beyond bore. I hate Seras, the whole Captains character complex failed.....as he was as powerful as Alucard, but let Seras kill him? Nonsense.

I don't get paid to watch anime all day long, and I haven't read the source material so the production levels and adaptation quality don't have a lot of meaning or impact on me as a viewer. But if I agree with one thing Hope said in the review, it's this: At some point Hellsing Ultimate really does stop being fun.

For me, everything started to unravel with the scene where Integra shoots Schrodinger in the face without provocation, for saying hello to her. As the guts and the gore and the body-count really started stacking up from that point on with nary a meaning, purpose or consequence in sight, it slowly dawned on me in a big way that putting violence and brutality and cruelty on display was the only real purpose of Hellsing Ultimate.

There is no narrative payoff at the end of all the carnage. There are no transformative character moments. Nobody wins the war. None of the cast is even really, genuinely, terminally killed. The conversation between the Iscariots in the epilogue tells us they'll just start another war someday anyway. All you take away from Hellsing Ultimate in the end is the satisfaction of viewing multiple simulated rapes, child abuse and near-endless graphic mutilation and dismemberment of Nazi zombie mooks in every form imaginable for a little over 8 hours. In hindsight, that's some pretty sick shit to think about.

I'm not a manga person, and as I mentioned I've never read the source material or internalized its charms and flaws. But I did see Gonzo's Hellsing series when it came out, and it had class, a lot more class than Hellsing Ultimate has at the end of its journey. Seras Victoria was the central figure, if not the protagonist of that series. Within its splashy, stylish framework we got to see her character grow and develop as the undead child of a legendary supernatural figure to something resembling self-sufficiency and usefulness, and there was meaning in that!

Hellsing Ultimate didn't bother with any of that. All it was concerned with when the shit hit the fan was how frequently and unflinchingly it could put rape and murder on display based on whatever flimsy narrative pretense it could come up with. And when the time comes that the audience looks for some kind of meaning in it all, the series disappoints all over the place.

Your criticism is misguided, all this complaining about gore and violence. Hellsing is horror, that is the central pillar, it is more important than anything else, without it the show would just be an action show. If anything it is the TV show and it's lack of horror that is in the wrong, though I do understand that it had TV guidlines to follow.

MarshalBanana wrote:

Your criticism is misguided, all this complaining about gore and violence. Hellsing is horror, that is the central pillar, it is more important than anything else, without it the show would just be an action show. If anything it is the TV show and it's lack of horror that is in the wrong, though I do understand that it had TV guidlines to follow.

I'm not going to waste a lot of time or words on this reply, because if you can't even respect my opinion as an opinion, then its your own understanding of media and criticism that are horribly misguided, and it's unlikely that anything good or constructive is going to come out of trying to have a conversation with you about any of this.

The one thing I would like to say in followup is that Hellsing Ultimate, like numerous quote-unquote "horror" genre films and television in the past 15-30 years, has completely lost touch with what horror actually is. Actual horror doesn't involve mowing down legions of monsters with high-powered firearms or flashy supernatural melee combat. Those are action genre conventions dressed up in superficial horror genre visuals. Hellsing Ultimate, more than most horror genre pretenders, really invokes precious little horror because it appears that few if any of the characters can actually be defeated or killed with finality. Nobody has anything to fear. Even when the protagonist is reduced to a single bloodstain on a rock, he can still respawn like a player in an FPS game and come back to mass execute some more zombie Nazi mooks. It's no more nor less horrifying than playing Call of Duty, and that's just pathetic.

I'm not a manga person, and as I mentioned I've never read the source material or internalized its charms and flaws. But I did see Gonzo's Hellsing series when it came out, and it had class, a lot more class than Hellsing Ultimate has at the end of its journey. Seras Victoria was the central figure, if not the protagonist of that series. Within its splashy, stylish framework we got to see her character grow and develop as the undead child of a legendary supernatural figure to something resembling self-sufficiency and usefulness, and there was meaning in that!