#this is why Netflix need to start taking manga and giving it accurate well written and produced and high budget adaptations

[jemmo]

i just finished alice in borderland s2 and im dehydrated from crying, still kinda confused and extremely in love with aguni

[princesawyer]

So the new FMA is...not good. Unsurprising, considering how most Japanese live-action movie adaptations go. The Attack on Titan movie was literally not worth finishing, and the same goes for this new movie too.

They basically do what you’d expect and try to cram an entire manga and anime series into two hours, and do so poorly. The entire first scene, with Cornello and the town of Reole, is literally a mess. You have Ed and Cornello fighting, in a very empty large stretch of space despite how populated the town appears to be, and we...don’t really know why. They just start with a fight scene, because fight scenes are cool. But the loss of the why is what’s really frustrating to me. The whole point of them being in Reole is to track down a priest with a possible Philosopher’s Stone, an important object the brothers are desperate to get their hands on, and also expose him as a fraud to the believers who think he’s literally god. Ed’s character is supposed to be shown as an atheist, scientific mind who cleverly sets up a trap for Cornello to expose himself as a fake who is using alchemy to perform ‘miracles’. Instead, they miss the opportunity to tell this story, and instead we just have fight scene because fight cool. And they wanted to show off their slightly better than usual CGI for alchemy. Sigh.

They also show the beginning, when Ed and Al are children, their mother Trisha and her death, as well as their eventual attempt at human transmutation. So the child actors are put in wigs that really don’t suit them. And to be honest, they seemed too young to really count as ‘acting’ more than reciting lines without any real facial expressions. That’s off-putting, but not unexpected. They have the peaceful outdoors scene, and then suddenly mom collapses and she’s dead. Nothing else, really, to show that the kids have been practicing alchemy and taking after their father, like she would have praised them. It’s all done in short, quick scenes with painful acting, and then they immediately cut to them about to do the transmutation. Bad acting aside, they switch out the kids with Ed’s current self in a dream sequence some time later. Not as much blood as I would’ve liked to see, and at one point there’s literally just a hole in Ed’s shirt and it looks silly (because there’s no blood lol). The Door of Truth scene was pretty spot-on, but the CGI hands were not good, and I really just didn’t like how they portrayed Al’s body being taken. They lost a lot by choosing to show older Ed binding Al’s soul to the suit or armor, but I assume they did that because of some child actor law in Japan. I could be wrong, and if they could’ve actually shown younger Ed who self-bandaged his amputated leg by the way writing in his own blood...it’s another opportunity missed. 

Al was written out of a lot of scenes, so we mostly follow the story through Ed. The reason is obvious, considering Al’s armor is most likely CGI. Pretty good CGI for Japan, really, so I can see why they’d cut Al out of most scenes. What I don’t like is how they traded all of that with an existential crisis he isn’t supposed to have until much later. In the Shou Tucker arc, Tucker basically puts the thought in Al’s mind that he’s not really who Ed says he is, and that his memories might be created. But canonically, it’s another suit of armor, a prisoner at that, who deviously plants those ideas in Al’s head because...well, there are more people like Al than previously thought, and it caught him off-guard. And Ed was keeping things to himself at the time, which incurred suspicion. The choice to put that arc in the middle of the Shou Tucker arc is...really weird, and it causes a really unnecessary fight scene between Ed and Al (with Winry crying in the background). All this really just gives them a reason to make Tucker one of the main villains, which destroys the whole point of his character.

The Shou Tucker Arc is pretty lackluster, despite the huge emotional effect it’s supposed to have on Ed and Al and...well, anyone who sees and realizes what happened. Ed and Al are less involved with the Tucker’s, the original point of them meeting to use Shou’s library and research to see if they could find anything useful. Instead, they just use the government library, and spend a short period of time with Nina and Alexander. Al is rendered unconscious during the majority of this arc, when Shou gives him the wrong idea about his existence, and Ed ends up going, with Winry, to find Doctor Marcoh. After Marcoh gets killed by Lust and they figure out they’re supposed to find Lab 5, Ed returns to find the house mostly empty, and no sign of Nina or Alexander. Al is also...somewhere, asleep according to Tucker. Ed finds Tucker and his chimera alone, before coming to the conclusion that Tucker has transmutated his daughter and dog into one entity. Al shows up after Ed starts beating the crap out of Tucker, and eventually the government agents come to take him away, while he shouts at Ed and Al crazily about how he won’t be stopped. Well. Instead of Tucker and the chimera being killed by Scar -- who isn’t even in the movie, by the way, what the fuck -- he is released by a character who has been portrayed as a friendly official that gave the Elric brothers the idea to visit Tucker in the first place. Also, he’s actually evil. 

It’s just--it’s a mess.

I could go on about all the different scenes that were included, but altered to lose their meaning. The characters who lost character due to lack of exposition...Even Maes Hughes, a character well-loved by anyone who’s ever seen or read FMA, was given the short end of the stick by having few scenes beyond the ones that led to his eventual murder. And, yes, Envy showed up as Gracia to confuse Hughes, but he ends up turning into Mustang and shooting him in plain sight of two random citizens that run off screaming. Seriously, his death was supposed to be mysterious, but they decided to pin it on Mustang....why? Who knows. They built up tension between them to make it believable, but it...wasn’t.

Riza Hawkeye is mostly just there to exist. Winry is there to be cutesy and cry and be a hinted at love interest for Ed. Ross was there without any prior scenes to be a villain, and...the Homunculi are just. Weird. Gluttony is probably the worst-off, with awful CGI to show his monstrous mouth-belly-thing. Envy is just Lust’s sidekick rather than an antagonist in his own right. King Bradley doesn’t even matter in this movie, despite being Father and being absolutely important to all the Lab 5 and Homunulus bullshit. Bad wigs, bad acting. Al was literally the best character in the movie simply for the fact that he was voice-acting and not an actual actor making bad expressions. It tried to be faithful, but skewed too many different plot points and made them literally make no sense. The movie is not good.

Overall, the movie fails as a good adaptation. I feel like it would do better as an episodic series, with multiple seasons if need be. It would honestly do better with the ‘Netflix treatment’, in my opinion. Include all the bloody, gory bits. The exposition, the philosophy, the good, tragic story elements. Actual character development. And the characters could actually be casted to actors that are white/brown/asian because it makes sense canonically. I’d like to see something faithful to the manga and Brotherhood anime, accurate and well-made, with changes as needed...but nothing to the degree of the Death Note movie, which I couldn’t even stand 20 minutes of. With Netflix shows like Altered Carbon out there, I think they could make a great FMA series. But I can dream.