The Second FMA Movie is Somehow Even Worse

a few years back netflix and warner brothers conspired to inflict a live-action full metal alchemist movie upon the world that unsurprisingly butchered the source material beyond recognition ironically by trying way too hard to replicate its most recognizable moments and nothing else well this may shock you especially if you saw it or my video about it but somehow that thing got a sequel well two sequels actually but only one of them's out right now full metal alchemist the revenge of scar a title that raises many questions such as who is scar if you're a movie only fma fan since they completely cut him from the last one and if you're not a movie movie-only fma fan so that's 100 of fma fans i'm addressing now then that fact alone will have you very worried for this movie's storyline which is very warranted but trust me you have no idea how worried you should really be you will though because i did the thing where i watched the thing so you don't have to and now i'm gonna tell you about it but before i do real quick i wanna tell you about two sales that bookwalker katokawa's official ebook store has going on until september 1st firstly tabletop gaming otaku can get 50 off the new goblin slayer trpg and off the slightly less new konosuba trpg so if you want to have a goofy and or grimdark adventure with your otaku friends you should really check that out on the other hand if you don't have friends and need a voice to fill the lonely void bookwalker also now sells audiobook versions of some of their top-rated light novels including overlord 86 and sao with narration by the english dub actors for their respective leads so now you can have craft lawrence himself read spice and wolf to you the first volumes of all those series are going for fifty percent off too with second volumes thirty percent off and remember new users can use the promo code basement to get an additional 600 yen off any of those deals or anything else on the bookwalker store where new deals are always popping up year round links to both promos in the doobly-doo okay now i can tell you about the movie and the first impression that it creates isn't that bad actually we're introduced to scar through a fairly faithful and quick recreation of his late night bridge top duel with the dapperly haberdashed silver alchemist and the fight itself is pretty well done the cgi is still on the janky and cheap side but the camera work and editing are a fair bit more competent this go round for now and the choreography is comprehensible at least a couple shots are really good even if this fight was uploaded to youtube as a cosplay fan film i'd probably give it a like and even as an opening to a professionally made movie well it sets expectations pretty low for the effects which as you'll see the movie still manages to fall well short of but it also sets a clear and consistent tone tells a tight self-contained story and builds a bit of hype which is more than i can say for the last one's speed run through the death and resurrection of tricia elric in keeping with the fundamentals of action movie pacing it serves as an exciting little dollop of intensity to give us an idea of how intense the film is gonna get eventually before it settles into a more relaxed rhythm for the real introduction to its heroes and story an introduction in which they stop a train hijacking while also kung fu fighting off a bunch of unrelated ninjas whom they just met plus a homunculus who showed up out of nowhere culminating in a huge explosion that takes out the train's brakes so ed has to stop it from crashing into central station with alchemy in the lamest way imaginable which doesn't even make physical sense all in the space of about eight minutes with roughly three minutes of dialogue sandwiched between it and the last fight to give us a cliff's notes version of the anime's introduction to ling fu and lanfan a story which for some reason they've chosen to combine with the train jacking plotline from chapter four of the manga and then also squeeze in a contrived moment where ed almost falls off the train so envy can show up to save him and dump some exposition about sacrifices so it's kind of sort of justified when he comes up with the plan to trap gluttony 40 minutes later and i will admit the bit where envy pretends to be hughes did kind of get both me and yazzy for a second there but only because we genuinely couldn't remember if the last movie had killed him off yet so uh no conventionally good narrative pacing does not seem to be a priority here once again the film's goal is self-evidently to make its audience go yay i recognize that as many times as humanly possible in the space of two hours with zero regard for how any of those events or images connect together logically which is super frustrating to see in one fma movie let alone two in a row because the careful construction of the manga's plot is probably the single most satisfying thing about it at least the first time through once you know the mystery it's more the characters that carry it but i guess warner brothers japan figured it was more economical to just milk a few nostalgia bucks out of existing fans instead of treating this new retelling of the now decade-old classic story as a potential new introduction for a new generation and hey it works for disney but disney is generally working with you know movies when they make their lazy live live-action remake movies not long-form serialized animated storylines with many precisely placed moving parts with the disney model you take an old beat up engine and put it in a shiny new chassis that may not really suit it but at least looks good on a poster what warner bros is trying to do with these movies is more like taking an entire jet engine apart stuffing a bunch of semi-random bits from it under the hood of a truck and just sort of hoping it'll go well we saw how it went last time which covered actually i'll let past jeff handle this because i barely even remember it anymore in 2 hours and 15 minutes full metal alchemist covers in this order which is not the canon order edna's origin story the lior incident the showtucker arc the search for dr marco al's existential crisis the murder of mays hughes the assault on the fifth laboratory the homunculus zombie army zom-monculi i guess and the death of lust if i recall correctly the way they decided to tie all those very disconnected bits of story together without using any of the important villains that they might want for the sequels or bury the chopper because he was out of their cgi budget was to turn show tucker and hakuro the random emestrian general who the dude with the gun arm hijacked that train to kill in chapter four into the central antagonists of the whole movie which i mean repurposing a character most fans won't even recognize is one way to keep your surprise big bad surprising but it really wasn't hard for the sequel to do better than that or at least more marketable most of the semi-random bits in full metal alchemist ii the revenge of scar have been taken as you might guess from scar's character arc which as you might remember was sort of an ongoing thing that ran throughout like the whole anime well not anymore now there's barely 30 minutes between him and ed's meet cute and him and winry's meet shoot the whole point of scar's character in the original manga was to serve as a legitimately dangerous recurring threat that could thread together the elrik's early episodic adventures while we're still waiting for the big bad to reveal himself and take on that role and after he does the story of scar's life on the lam and eventual redemption helps to connect the meandering mystery focused front end of the series to its snowballing conflict-driven back half scar almost always shows up alongside or in some cases against other villains as a complicating factor in their conflicts with the lryx rather than making his conflict with them the focus he's simply not the sort of villain who can carry a film by himself hell he's not really a villain at all more of a sympathetic antagonist turned brooding anti-hero in a more conventional shonen he'd have been ed's rival in my opinion this movie really should have been about kimberley with scar serving in a supporting role but to do that they would have had to put him in the first one first and subplots like scars are the first thing you cut when you don't know if you'll get a sequel so you're trying and failing to make one self-contained movie out of two entire seasons of television even if basically every scene in that subplot is essential to the overarching story so then when you do get a pair of sequels to wrap up that story that suddenly leaves you with no other option than to cram it all into the interqual so the finale can focus on father whose entire storyline that also spans the entire manga will have to be crammed into that movie because this one's already too full of scar [ __ ] this does at least make the movie feel a bit more cohesive than the last one in that all of the semi-random bits that have been crammed into it are mostly related to scar the warren ish fall or the royal visitors from zhing with just a smidge of the homunculus conspiracy mixed in to set up the final act and sequel but when i say cohesive i mean it in a purely aesthetic sense because all of those plot points were originally separated by weeks or even months of other [ __ ] going on in the anime and connected by complex chains of events that this movie definitely doesn't have the time to show so the justifications for moving the characters between those plot points are virtually non-existent like even the setup for ed's first fight with scar so mustang pulls him in from the station to warn him there's a serial killer on the loose and to sign guards to him then he and al immediately run away from those guards and accidentally step on may who's like 30 now so they have to buy her lunch then she calls ed shorts so he gets hilariously mad then he chases her over to the one set that they have for literally every street scene in central where oh no it's scar or a twinkie jayrocker and arguably brown face cosplaying his scar run away oh crap his hand can make stock rubble effects come out of the wall and it turned al into polygons oh geez he's got ed's arm now and it's wet so roy can't do the roy thing who will save us just try it is that supposed to be armstrong he looks like a veiny pumpkin hey is uh not being saved an option cause i think i'd rather die than look at you thanks but wait check out the even uglier cgi that's been passed down the armstrong family line for generations and if you could ignore how bad those angular rock pngs look for a sec you might notice the massive masking outline around his hand here i have legitimately seen cleaner effects work than this in fan made youtube videos a decade ago how bad was the crunch for this vfx team i hope using all them stock brick and particle simulations for everything scar does helped with that i guess or maybe they just put most of their time and money into animating ed he does look a lot better this go round i i could have sworn he was a tokusatsu actor in a suit in a couple places huh can't really figure out a good way to segue back from this to talking about the bad writing but this movie doesn't give a [ __ ] about connecting its ideas so why should i you might remember from the last film but probably don't that even though they did put maria ross in it she didn't actually do any maria ross stuff mustang was framed for hugh's murder instead so she never had to be fake murdered which also means that she never had to go into hiding in the desert but that's a bit of a problem because going out into the desert to meet her is how ed one discovers the bottom half of the xerxes transmutation circle and two meets the ishvalen refugees who saw scar murder the rock bells both of which are pretty [ __ ] important plot points to hit especially the one about scar in the scar movie since most of his character arc can't happen without it so now they've got to invent some whole new reason for ed to be out in the desert or so you'd think you'd think that a person would need a reason to go to literally the middle of nowhere in one of the harshest climates imaginable but nope when ed gets home to risen bull to get his arm repaired after scar breaks it hohenheim's there and on the way out he's like yo pinaco you know what happened to xerxes it could happen here too watch out and then pinaco's like nothing in jerk seas but ruins now and ed's like i bet so then he walks across the entire desert by himself really that's the whole reason then he gets accosted by the ishvalan exposition gang who delivers some very good exposition with very good delivery during the rebellion we were very lucky a maestrian doctor saved both elder shawn and i we're only alive today because they rescued us great work dub directors kid no notes while ed is doing that winry finds that missing bolt that she forgot to put in his arm that one time which now doesn't really do anything because we're already well past the fifth laboratory fight where his arm was supposed to be broken because of it so instead it's sort of just a macguffin to make her chase him to central so she can arrive just in time to hear him confront scar about the rock bells even though she really should have arrived well before him because he just spent at least a couple days walking through the desert to get that information while there was a serial killer on the loose plus by the time she gets there he's been in central for at least one more day in which he ran into saleem and fuhrer king bradley in front of an embarrassing green screen effect and then spent the night getting eavesdropped on by ling as he and al concock their plan to use scar to lure out the homunculi a plan which doesn't involve roy mustang's crew at all in this version of the story but hawkeye still rolls up in a jeep at the end to shoot scar in the leg and cart gluttony off because that's how it happened in the anime and the screenwriter couldn't be bothered to come up with a new way to end the scene now i'm pretty sure the film's half-assed justification for this is that ed brought winry back to base after she confronted scar and then she immediately asked mustang and his crew for help but if my math is right that means that this one missing bolt causes over a third of this movie's plot i guess i'm getting a bit ahead of myself by jumping into that without talking about winry pointing the gun at scar or wing and lanfon's fight with the homunculi first but there really isn't that much to say about those parts of the movie if you've already seen the anime they play out pretty much the exact same way only with real actors worse pacing and way worse effects with pretty much all of the absolute worst effects having been applied to gluttony for some reason it almost feels like a running gag that every single time gluttony does anything or gets attacked it looks like complete ass well okay the effect where they tie him up in a ball doesn't look half bad but that's about the best i can say for his appearance in this film if this fight was a cosplay fan film on youtube i probably wouldn't leave a like but i don't think i'd dislike it either now when they get back to the doc's place and ed asks hawkeye for an ishval flashback that's an fma fan film i'd hit dislike on is it just me or is this genocide campaign way too risky the whole ishval sequence is just atrocious i mean holy [ __ ] ishval itself looks like a cs go map for all of the two seconds we get to see it intact for starters but i don't want to harp on the cgi when the writing is so much worse this one 10-minute sequence takes pretty much all of the intense and emotional ish fall flashbacks that the anime had teased out over like half its entire run time removes everything from them that isn't exposition and mashes them all together into one massive dump including the scenes about scar for some reason even though it's supposed to be hawkeye's flashback what's really weird is there's a bunch of hooks scattered throughout the movie where they clearly intended to insert these flashbacks like when scar has a bad dream or armstrong does a real bad job of pretending to have ptsd shakes but i guess test audiences must have gotten bored with those because we only see tiny fragments of what happened in the past until it's time to hit us with it all at once which creates a ton of problems for the story if you don't know what's supposed to happen in the anime already like when scar holds back on killing ed because he reminds him of his brother but that's the first time in the whole movie that we've seen his brother so we have no idea who he is or what that shot means just like these filmmakers have no idea what storytelling is well okay i can't entirely blame them for quietly shoving all this flashback [ __ ] into the back half of the film because oh boy it sure ain't good cinema man these edibles ain't [ __ ] what is going on but it does effectively create this 10 minute wall of borderline unwatchable exposition that i think will stop a good 90 of viewers from ever seeing this film's finale and part of me thinks they might have done that on purpose because oh boy does this ending stink instead of having gluttony break out and wreck [ __ ] immediately after he's captured like he does in the anime the movie cuts to the next day where al is just sort of randomly walking around town with the little panda thing when he suddenly runs into may and follows her back to where scar is hiding which isn't in the sewers leading down to father but rather in the old mine building from up north near briggs which has been conveniently relocated right next to central so they can quickly bang out the last beat of his character arc before the credits roll the scene plays out roughly the same as it did at briggs with ed and al working together to pin the serial killer to a piece of rubble where winry is then able to confront and forgive him once and for all which then causes the glowing gold ghosts of her parents to show up and nod approvingly which feels kind of happy sciencey if i'm being honest especially when it's immediately preceded by scars brothers saying this when negative thoughts gather the world will be covered in negativity but also we can gather positive thoughts and cover the world in positivity but it's what follows that happy science moment that makes this finale really special because all of a sudden ling runs out like oh [ __ ] you guys gluttony broke out and then they play a sound effect of a wall breaking and cut to gluttony standing there which i guess means this mind building is also right next to the doc's place either that or he waddled all the way across central just to find mustang anyway they fight a bit scar gets away so they decide to take it outside then a ps2 game horse that turns out to be envy shows up to stop gluttony from eating ed which directly results in ed being eaten by gluttony along with ling and envy then the film just sort of ends on a cliffhanger with all of them stuck inside gluttony's false portal of truth waiting for father to let them out at the start of the next one but not before it treats us to one more really special special effect i'll show you something good before you die [Music] this is really bad isn't it thanks ling couldn't have said it better myself at the end of the day full metal alchemist the revenge of scar is just a really [ __ ] bad movie you guys it does make some improvements over its predecessor like the wigs are way less community theater now for example but they are nowhere near enough to save it from its single greatest flaw which is that it's just plain [ __ ] boring the last movie i could maybe see someone enjoying with a drunk enough group of friends but unless you have insomnia and the melatonin stopped working avoid this one at all costs i'm jeff though professional alchemist resurrecting my mom in her basement you

Channel: Mother's Basement

Views: 428,425

Keywords: Mother's Basement, Anime, roast, movie roast, anime roast, FMA, fullmetal alchemist, fullmetal alchemist netflix, fma netflix, revenge of scar, netflix anime, live action, mothers basement FMA, fma live action, edward elric, scar, alphonse elric, scar FMA, Pride FMA, Wrath FMA, Envy FMA, Gluttony FMA, bad special effects, bad movies, winry rockbell, riza hawkeye, ishvalan war of extermination, roy mustang, live action fullmetal alchemist, live action anime

Id: LsX2hPpvBZw

Length: 22min 21sec (1341 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 28 2022