Netflix's Fullmetal Alchemist Movie is Impressively Bad | This One's For You, Greg

the Full Metal Alchemist live action movie is certainly a movie that exists but for a long time despite my wide array of FMA related content I didn't really feel interested in covering it like whoa live action adaptation of an anime is bad who could have thought it just felt a bit redundant I guess but that was before it happened that was before everything changed [Music] the hot humid summer day I'm playing Super Smash Bros online with a group of friends chatting on the phone with them one of them brings up how they can't get into anime we will call him Greg so I carefully so it's not scare him away ask him which ones he's tried to watch before he doesn't offer many examples but that's okay he probably just forgot what he watched so I have a suggestion for him Fullmetal Alchemist I say I think you might enjoy that one he replies nah I tried watching it it sucked oh which one there are a couple different versions you might have watched an older one or one called Brotherhood it wasn't Brotherhood it was um it was it was a movie oh uh do you remember the title you might have watched the spin-off movie for Brotherhood or the movie conclusion to one of the series which would make no sense without context hmm I don't I don't think it was either of those by now I'm confused he must be remembering wrong if it wasn't one of these then what could he have possibly my mind stutters my brain buzzes with fear you uh was it animated or live action it was live action on its face this might be an easy thing to criticize how could someone mix up the Fullmetal Alchemist movie with the anime that's such a silly thing to do but for someone who doesn't know anything about anime who has maybe just heard about a title called fomodox Mr was simply scrolling through Netflix and saw a movie this is an innocent and understandable mistake and so I turned to Netflix I looked on there through its titles and what I discover still haunts me there was no anime available it was only the live-action film adaptation now I don't know how it is in other parts of the world but in Canada this is the only version of FMA available on the streaming platform which is worse than having nothing because that means that when your regular viewer looks up full model Alchemist and sees this as the only option they're gonna assume that this is it that moment of comprehending what this meant the true Terror of it all it was when I knew I needed to tear this film apart deconstruct it and reconstruct this moment of horror into something positive and in this case what could be more positive than negativity so with that out of the way it's time to critique the Full Metal Alchemist live action film let's do it let's start with the first thing I noticed the appearance the movie it looks really off the color correcting appears far too saturated and yet washed out at the same time I think it's due to many of the scenes having exceptionally flat lighting along with an overall lack of deep blacks in the image normally I might not be too hung up on this sort of thing but I also normally don't notice this being much of a problem problem in the first place like I'm not sure what YouTube is gonna do to the footage but watching on my TV it gave it a cheap almost soap opera look moment to moment the pacing of these scenes is awful too sometimes to the point of being incomprehensible or confusing take this moment where Ed is running away from cornello's pillars of stone he's really close to this wall gets hit and then falls to the ground when he gets up and starts running though this isn't where he was how'd he get here who knows then the special effects there are the rare moments where they look fine and I'm sure people put a lot of effort into them but for the most part they range from mediocre to terrible and unfortunately Alphonse is one of these bad parts which is a big problem considering that he's one of our main characters really looking at the CGI for him I couldn't help but wonder why they didn't do the majority of his stuff with a guy in an actual suit of armor or something he made to look like it this is just one of those basic things you need to get right because he's in so much of the movie and this film simply doesn't the same goes for major moments like the failed human transmutation now poor special effects are enough of a problem on their own because they can take me out of the moment out of the magic of the movie but they're even worse here because every instance where this happens where it looks poor it's just another point where I have to ask myself why why did this happen if for whatever reason this movie didn't have the ability to use proper special effects why even bother the anime looks totally fine and that's part of the wonderful thing with animation it's all coming from people's imaginations just being put down onto paper onto a computer so we don't need to worry about blending real life with animation because it's all animation this way Fantastical television has a great opportunity to look wonderful in animation so why do this but hey maybe the performances will bring a different element to these characters I mean the voice acting was already great in Full Moon Alchemist but whatever maybe this will be cool crap this is certainly something isn't it why does everyone look so stiff and awkward why does Ed keep making these faces why is winry being like this the only person who's doing okay is use he's mostly decent otherwise wow what a time to be alive folks what I think happened here is that the film is trying to emulate the anime right down to how the characters move so it's not enough for the actor to run like a person they need to run like an anime character but these are two totally different mediums I shouldn't need to tell you that you can't just transplant these scenes or the way characters move and react and expect them to work here but they did even though you could just go watch the anime although wait you can't in Canada at least not on Netflix Oh no gluttony what the no no get away from me but so far I've been comparing the movie to its anime counterpart quite a bit so sure the presentation and acting are still very bad but let's set that aside for a second in and of itself how is this story well as much as I'd like to do that I can't because this story doesn't make any sense key moments from the anime and manga have been lifted out and randomly placed into a film run time with seemingly little consideration given to how they actually flow together into a narrative like if I hadn't experienced another version of this story what would be my impression of this whole your Chase I don't know not much because at this point we have little to no understanding of who cornello is why the brothers are chasing him what this place is and what this means for our characters all of that in important stuff it's been cut out in favor of getting to this iconic shot as fast as possible and really the whole movie is like that with these Loosely stapled together scenes that have little in the way of logic conflict escalation or flow for example let's look at the Nina and Tucker section this is important to the Mangan anime so I get why they would want to have it in here but first let's consider how this functioned in the manga there we had already gone through a few episodic adventures with our protagonist and his brother got an idea of their personalities goals and drives through seeing their actions that likely allowed the readers into a false sense of security with Tucker this would be just another fun episodic Adventure right but no after Nina got dogified it was clear that something had changed what Alchemy could represent the Direction the Story could go in the way this and the brother's subsequent plot with scar led to a larger narrative that's what this moment was about so how does the movie go about placing this in here well there are a couple changes made that could actually work for one Tucker is now also so trying to help understand owl by hypnotizing him and he's the one who makes Al think that maybe he's made of false memories instead of Barry the chopper cool I'm down for that in a movie where we don't have all that much time for Side characters it's a perfectly fine idea to give Tucker this role similarly Tucker ends up being a big part of the creation of these weird zombie soldiers so he's given a role throughout the whole movie instead of being written out when Scar attacks him again if we're gonna spend precious time on him in a movie I don't think this is a bad idea I actually think it's good but there's still a big problem none of this goes anywhere like sure Tucker makes this Army but what does it do nothing it drops from the ceiling eats hakuro who served as something of a Bradley replacement thus far and the Gang kills him if this was all he was gonna do before being unceremoniously killed by a homunculi just why bother changing things and pretending he's gonna have a bigger role beyond that Ed and Nina barely got any time together anyway so it's not like I actually cared about this version of Nina of course it's not like they had all that many scenes in the manga or Brotherhood either but again again that's where the story's structure and the shock of that structure changing that was able to do some of the heavy lifting similarly Al's identity crisis doesn't mean anything here sure I was honestly never the biggest fan of it in the manga anime either but at least there it was about bringing these brothers even closer together and having Winery help them through their problem they were having showing them that they can't purely rely on themselves and that they need others here though I don't know they punch each other for a bit because this randomly comes to a head this isn't used at all to explore the pain of Alice condition when Regis yells a pet and I don't buy a single thing but easily my favorite weird plot moment has to be Ed's not flashback to his encounter with the truth and I call it a not flashback because the movie does the most unnecessarily confusing thing here see instead of just having Ed's encounter be a normal flashback it's a flashback and a nightmare so now Ed is experiencing exactly what he did then but he's also at his current age instead of being the age he should be if I had never experienced a story before I think my brain would have melted heck my brain kind of melted here trying to figure out who thought this was an acceptable idea there's just there's no reason for it why does it need to be his current age in the nightmare just have him remember what happened show them at the proper age there you go maybe they were worried about getting a compelling performance out of a child but honestly I don't think they need to be concerned because it's not like this movie's got some fabulous acting throughout anyway but you know what I don't think I even blame the actors who knows what the heck was going on behind the scenes with this and beyond that these people basically had nothing to work with like who are these main characters in the movie who's Ed well we know he wants the Philosopher's Stone to help his brother and himself get their bodies back but what about his personality beyond that he doesn't have one his arrogant moments than the ore are gone and there's nothing here to replace them so we don't get an idea of his overconfidence and headstrong nature which is one of the most key parts of his character meanwhile his actions are entirely inconsistent like he doesn't want Al involved in some research because he's worried it's dangerous and yet after after Marco gets murdered in front of him he lets winry stay behind alone to clean things up what you just saw someone die Ed if this is going to be a character who's concerned about and protective of his friends maybe even to a fault he wouldn't be bringing her here in the first place never mind leaving her behind after this also Ed's intelligence is gone because now we barely focus on his human transmutation being some sort of impressive feat and he doesn't even discover where Lab 5 is now other characters do that for him and there's really nothing left for this guy to even do and because Ed's personality is mostly non-existent Al suffers too because so much of his character just stems from this contrast to Ed that is the one who's so certain of things while Al's a bit more soft-spoken mild-mannered considerate and concerned obviously this is part of their fun Dynamic Gentle Giant vs arrogant little guy that kind of deal and Al also suffers from his removed material like their discussions with rose because again now we don't get to see his gentler side Mustang meanwhile has lost pretty much everything that he had going for him too and the manga anime despite Ed's annoyance with him Mustang would still try to help them I mean that's part of why they went to go see Tucker in the first place but now introducing them to takara's hakaro's idea so guess that's gone for Mustang then there's Mustangs leadership abilities and his friendship with Hughes those two things are mostly gone since he no longer has his gang of loyal allies and his relationship with Hughes seems far less friendly even in the moments where they could have leaned into his care for his comrades they didn't like the Lost vs Mustang moment this wasn't just about Mustang blasting lust with flames this is about him swooping in to save people after they believed he was dead about his anger at seeing someone try to hurt them but yeah that's not happening here oops also Winery Winery is sure she's uh yeah I'm not even gonna bother I knew it going in you probably knew it too this is bad this is not a good adaptation it's not a good movie on its own it's bad but you know who didn't know Greg Greg didn't know Greg was an unknowing blameless victim to this movie and how many others are there like him there was no reason for this there was no reason to make this and the fact that some poor suckers out there are gonna watch this and think that this is even remotely representative of FMA makes me kind of sad but of course this can't be the end they had to make two more of these complete the trifecta make the full deal the whole story cover it and that means that I have two more movies to cover so yeah come on back next time if you're interested in seeing that either way thanks for watching I hope you enjoyed this video and see you next time

Channel: Lowart

Views: 23,549

Keywords: fullmetal alchemist, full metal alchemist, live action, fma live action, fullmetal alchemist brotherhood, fma movie, the revenge of scar, the final alchemy, fma netflix, fullmetal alchemist netflix, mothers basement, live action fullmetal alchemist, fma 2017, fma brotherhood, fullmetal alchemist vs brotherhood, full metal alchemist brotherhood, fullmetal alchemist: brotherhood, fma 2003, fullmetal alchemist movie, fma 2003 vs brotherhood

Id: 1LnQ6i75Kio

Length: 12min 55sec (775 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 11 2022