Let's start with a little synopsis, though. Spriggan is about Yu Ominae, a 17 (because of course, it's a shonen manga's adaptation afterall) years old members of an organization called ARCAM, which retrieves ancient artifacts to prevent them from being used for... destroying the world.
A cliché old story, which can still be done well... that is, if that was what the movie focused on.
Expect, it only focuses on fighting scenes. Which is not a problem itself, if there's enough time to still have a well-done story, but this is just not such an example.
But said scenes are done *very* well. I'm not a sakuga expert, but everyone can see how good they are and how pretty it looks as a result - the one and only Katsuhiro Otomo worked on it.
The story clearly suffers because of all the attention paid to the animation, though. Bland, boring characters - If we can even call them such, since they're basically plot devices. - without anything making you even remember about them. The MC, Yu, has a bit of a backstory, but it's still not enough to make the viewer care about him.
It tries to throw a "deep" plot with religious symbolism like Noah's Ark, and even "ecologist" bits in 90 minutes. It seems the manga it comes from has many small episodic arcs with no connections with each other (expect, well, having the same protagonist.). Then why not doing a series with like, say, three (?) episodes to each arc instead of this rushed mess?
It's rare, very rare for movies that try to fit too much into so little time to become something good, something you'd recommend to others, something worth watching. It got the production going for it, though! Again, the animation is very very good. I haven't seen and don't know how good the Netflix ONA version is since the CGI is off-putting for me, but the movie's 90s artstyle (may be a bit biased though.) still holds up today. That's just how 90s anime are probably.
So it is probably a 6 out of 10. Nothing to write about home and to suggest if you want a good plot - but if you want something cliché to turn your brain off while watching and maybe doing something else, with pretty animation and just looking for some cool fights, it's perfect for this job.
