Fullmetal Alchemist (Movie Review)

Right, time to join the long history of anime fans hating on live-action adaptations. I love Fullmetal Alchemist - I adore everything about it. The world is logically thought out and rich with history, the characters bold and unique and each valuable. So despite how unconvinced I was that this could be pulled off well as a live-action movie, I was cautiously optimistic. Were my hopes fulfilled? Not in the slightest.

The movie began right off with the tragic backstory of Edward and Alphonse Elric, brothers talented in alchemy who lost their mother at a young age. With their father missing in action, the two boys decided to bring their mother back to life, too young and blinded by grief to see the consequences - in their failed attempt to revive her, Ed lost a leg and and Al lost his entire body (luckily, Ed managed to bind his brother's soul to a suit of Armour at the cost of his arm, which Al spends the majority of the story in).

  I was thoroughly disappointed by this scene - firstly, since whilst the landscapes were lusciously beautiful, the way the scene was directed made it seem like a very common beginning. The music cues were so inappropriate and over-the-top, which would become a theme across the rest of the movie. Moreover, the child actors were awful. They were clearly chosen for appearances only, and didn't convince me in the slightest that they cared at all about being there. Young Ed, especially, is a boy with clearly no need for his face since he can't emote. It also set up my biggest issue with the making of this film - Fullmetal Alchemist's plot is too big and complex to be efficiently condensed into a two-hour run-time.

  The world can't be slowly and steadily built up like it was in the manga. Instead, the laws of equivalent exchange and the remnants of the background have to be shoehorned in through exposition by Al or (in a weirdly dramatic and spontaneous tantrum break-down by) Ed.

  I had some faith that they couldn't possibly go wrong with the writing because they had an incredible resource to tear apart. Well, they literally tore it apart. I expected some characters to go missing, some stories to be forgotten, and the movie to be fast-paced. Instead, they cut the necessary information the audience needs to process the story! Starting the Liore arc in medias res was an awful idea, because I'm fairly sure that anyone approaching the film without prior knowledge of the text wouldn't understand what on earth had been going on in that town (or in general). About five important plot points had just been thrown together haphazardly.

  None of the actors actually seemed to represent the characters they were playing. Yamada Ryousuke's portayal of Ed was difficult to watch, right down to the fact that his signature blonde plait had clearly been stuck on. He wasn't a good enough actor to convince me of Ed's pain, or his crippling height complex. (Whilst we're on the topic of casting, isn't a film with a European-esque setting actually suitable for whitewashing? Unlike Death Note and Ghost in the Shell. The production values here are so backwards.)

  The only thing this film had going for it was the admittedly impressive special effects, although what use are they if the actors can't keep up? The scene with Truth looked great and would probably be my favourite for how cleverly it set up the exchange of Ed's leg and arm, but Yamada Ryousuke's stiffness ruined it. It was so ugly, it was almost funny.

  I understand that Al could have been impossible to play by a real person but CGI wasn't the best choice for him. He was wooden. It looked wrong, he didn't look at all as if he was actually part of the picture. Motion capture has been used in 3D animated films like Mars Needs Moms to portray characters in shocking detail, so couldn't something like that be applicable? I probably don't know what I'm talking about, but it was an injustice to Al - his whole arc is about how desperately he wants to be a living breathing person again, and there's some irony in the fact that they couldn't even give him a tangible form.

The Fullmetal Alchemist movie is awful, not for any fault of the source material. The direction was all wrong. In the first place, there's only so much people can do with a fantasy-genre production, and clearly making any of it feel emotionally grounded and not a forced production isn't possible yet. It felt like jumping into a world I didn't know, with characters the team couldn't be bothered to flesh out. So can we stop already? Let's stop trying to fix what isn't broken. Avatar: The Last Airbender, Death Note, Ghost in the Shell, and now this. You've scarred our hearts enough, Hollywood, its time to back off.