Hellsing Ultimate Review

The 2001 television series ran out of manga and invented an ending. This is the rebuild that does not. Freed from a weekly schedule, the OVA format gives each of the ten episodes a feature-scale budget and roughly an hour to spend it, and the result is some of the most expensive-looking animation in the medium: Alucard's release states, the Millennium airship assault over London, the Vatican's Iscariot section arriving to turn a siege into a three-way war.

It is also deeply unserious about violence in a way that is either its best joke or its central problem depending on your tolerance, and the Major's speech about loving war is the thesis, delivered without a trace of irony. Alucard is not a character who develops; he is a force being deployed, and the actual drama sits with Seras and Integra instead. Studio changes across the run produce visible shifts in style. The score swings between big band, flamenco guitar and choral bombast and somehow holds together. Nothing else looks or sounds remotely like it.