Opens as a bureaucratic farce, with lanyard nerds moving from boardroom to slightly bigger boardroom while civilian lives are being lost--most interesting is how Anno and Higuchi capture their futility in the filmmaking, very few compositions in each of the setups match so that the visual information is always slightly shifting (not dissimilar from the dialogue, a bunch of contributing voices not really saying much of anything) while the off-rhythm rapid cuts don't allow you the proper time to even process any information of any kind, putting us in lockstep with the characters' sense of overwhelming panic--and then slowly transitions into an optimistic ode to our ability to collectively overcome our fears. Mankind is a chaotic, impractical mess of lone wolves, nerds, troublemakers, outcasts, academic heretics and general pains-in-the-bureacracy... but together, we're capable of some pretty extraordinary things.