A girl is nude in the shower.

There are numerous intense battle scenes throughout the film, some of which display very graphic violence. These include:

A scene in which the character "Millia 639" defeats a troop of soldiers sent to kill her, mutilating their bodies in the process. A later scene in which both Millia and the character "Max Jenius" engage in intense combat, and once they cease fighting due to exhaustion, both are visibly and copiously bloodied. A scene in which the character "Roy Focker" commits suicide by shooting both himself and the character "Kamjin" with a vulcan cannon to prevent Kamjin from killing Hikaru, Misa, and Minmay.

Near the end of the movie, a background character is decapitated by a falling girder.

"Moruk Lap Lamiz", a minor character, is vaporized in an intense heat blast.

It is implied that the entire population of the Earth was killed by the Zentradi attack that occurred just prior to the beginning of the film, and many occupied spacecraft are destroyed during the movie.

In none of these scenes is the violence shown to be desirable or pleasant. The human characters speak of how they do not wish to be fighting or killing, and much thought is given to the toll war takes on humans. By the end of the movie, this view has also been adopted by the remaining Zentradi characters, who join with the humans to stop Gorg Bodolza's fleet and restore peace to the Solar System.

In the most recent Blu-Ray release, the three decapitations are edited out or heavily blurred to dull them.

In the Japanese soundtrack, the words Chikusho (coll. "damn it") and Kuso (lit. "shit") do occur. There are no currently commercially-available English translations, but previous translations have varied considerably dependant on the tastes of the particular translator and the audience the distributor was aiming for.

The character "Roy Focker" is depicted as a borderline alcoholic, who is very often drunk throughout the course of the film. other characters are seen drinking alcoholic beverages as well. The character "Captain Global" smokes a Meerschaum pipe in a couple of scenes. There are no scenes of, or references to, recreational illegal drug use.