A landmark for anime.
I enjoyed this film emensely. Its a great science fiction story from Kazumu Hirai's very long and fabled series of Genma Wars novels. The direction from Rintaro in this film is excelent and visionary. Katsuhiro Otomo's character designs also give this film a nice touch. Hamragedon is the americanized name though. Its real name is The Battle With Genma (or perhaps simply Genma Wars). This film was highly influential in Japan, especially for its realism, and it is considered a landmark among many otaku and those in the industry. The anime tv series Genma Wars is also based on the same novels (and manga by Shotaro Ishinomori), which I also liked dispite extremely low budgeted animation. If only that series had the animation and direction of this film. However, get the special edition DVD instead of this obsolete version with horrible picture. The special edition DVD is a very nice package, with a good, remastered transfer, aswell as a very interesting commentary by Rintaro, unlike this crappy disc.

Certainly not the worst...
...but hardly the best either. Speaking as an anime fan starting back in the 80's, I thought I should add a few comments based on my own experience with the movie.

The visual images are pretty darn good (especially in the imagination sense) for anime of the period. Enough so that I chased down this movie years later so that I could finally see it in a subtitled (preferred) form later and understand the story.

The story does have many weaknesses, as previously described, which can make the movie a miss for some folks and indeed some expository pieces can be painful in the dubbed version. However some parallels can be drawn to the classic Seven Samurai style plot, and can be enjoyed as an adventure story rather than endured and studied as a piece of critical work.

That is certainly an unfortunate thing, since better developed and written, this could have been as good as Akira, since some of the same kinds of elements are there. But seen as a movie that did set the stage for movie's such as Akira, it does have it's place.

As such, it's on my shelf and I like to watch it every few years, but you should definitely consider it a rental until you know if you like it or not.

Technical comments:

* Dubbing, as is usually the case with anime (with a few noted exceptions such as Monoke) is very poor and shouldn't be endured. If I understood more Japanese, I might feel different, dunno.

* The DVD has problems working with some DVD-ROM software (computer based watching). It worked fine in my PS2 player, but a cautionary note for PC-DVD users.

Harmageddon is the Worst Anime Available in the U.S.
I would like to say that I am a fan of subtitled over dubbed. Even so, this is far worse in the original Japanese than even the worst dub. The characters are one-dimensional and caricatures of real people. The movie spends so much time building up the first 3 characters that you would expect to feel something for them; you don't. The remaining cast is not developed. You're torn between hoping that they'll die or the movie will just end now. It never seems to. If only good anime was released with this many minutes of viewing! The "evil" character has no motivation beyond wanting to destroy the universe. If you are new to anime, trust me, this will drive you away from it forever. If you're experienced, you know this is everything that you never liked.

Harmagedon, Feels Good
While the animation is somewhat dated, it is a very long and engaging story. Not the best, but very good.