The 1998 sakuga is still unmatched, every frame of combat feels hand-drawn by someone who understood weight and momentum better than most live-action directors. The story is basically a generic artifact heist compressed into 90 minutes, which means the narrative gets out of its own way and lets the animation breathe. Yu Ominae moving through Turkish mountain ruins and Machine Corps firefights is the point. The film doesn't pretend to be anything more than that.
When a covert organization called ARCAM finds what may be Noah's Ark in the Ararat Mountains of Turkey, a rogue military faction sees opportunity instead of history. The U.S. Machine Corps, a radical arm of the Pentagon, wants the artifact as a path to world domination. Standing against them are the Spriggans, ARCAM's operatives, who work to lock away the dangerous relics left behind by an ancient alien civilization. Yu Ominae, a Japanese Spriggan, pairs with Jean-Jacques Mondo, a French Spriggan, to hold back the Machine Corps after it strikes the dig site. Their real problem is Col. MacDougall, a boy with enhanced genes and lethal psionic powers who leads the assault. The two must move quickly to stop him from reaching the Ark and turning it to his own ends.
