Fullmetal Alchemist (2017-2022) – review, opinion about the film trilogy [Netflix]. Like Disney!

Fullmetal Alchemist: Brothers was one of the best manga mods I’ve ever seen. It had a great rhythm, very good animation, a very successful soundtrack, and a story taken from the source material by Hiromu Arakawa. Why are you even trying to turn it into a straightforward business? After all, it was already known that it would be weaker. But much less?!

However, FMA is an action-packed story and detailed rewrite of both the terrain, style, and destination of places and objects around the main characters, so you can portray something like this “live” You will need a very good director, a better cinematographer, an army of talented animators and, perhaps above all, a lot of time and space for creative work. In the meantime, the last two episodes of this trilogy aired in the same year, and the budget – I’m filming here – probably won’t impress our filmmakers.

Fullmetal Alchemist (2017-2022) – Review of a trilogy of films [Netflix]. A daunting task

The volume of 108 chapters of the lavish manga has been reworked into 64 episodes of the anime. Turning more than 20 hours of a series into three full-length movies couldn’t be an easy task. Movies shorten some threads practically from the start. For example, the story of Lust is closed in one movie. Some side stories were completely cut out. Greed and its chimera are essentially nonexistent, although the first is finally explored in its second canonical incarnation. However, it must be admitted that the introduction of characters later does not contradict the logic of events. However, these and similar abbreviations make scenes powerful, full of emotion, or simply make the chest more airy, and they don’t have the space or time to sound properly. For someone unfamiliar with the original, it would be strange and cute (and a terrible crime), while for fans, it would be very bad and harmful to the original. But what does it all mean?

Edward and Alphonse Elric lost their mother when they were young children. Father, the famous alchemist, was never at home anyway, so they were basically alone. They desperately begin studying their father’s science books in an attempt to bring their mother back to life using the secret art of alchemists. They did not know that human transmutation is forbidden and very dangerous. Their attempt ended with Ed losing his entire leg and Al’s body. The older brother sacrifices one of his limbs – his right hand – to bind his brother’s soul to the shields in the room. A childhood friend Ed makes special prosthetics of steel, thanks to which he is nicknamed the “steel chemist”. Since then, the two brothers have been trying to find a way to get their missing bodies back. The research directs them toward something called the Philosopher’s Stone. They do not yet know that this path will allow them to unravel a conspiracy that threatens the existence of the entire country, and perhaps also the world in the long run.

Fullmetal Alchemist (2017-2022) – Review of a trilogy of films [Netflix]. This must be something wrong

Most of the actors look very good in their roles. For some reason, blonde hair was abandoned on Elric’s friend Winry, although if the wig was as bad as Ed’s in the first movie, maybe it would have been better to skip it? Fortunately, in the second and third parts, the hairstyles of the heroes look more natural. The Wicked Scar, whose second movie was called after that, has such a man that I kept wondering when the L’Oréal logo would appear on screen – because you deserve it. However, I cannot accept the emergence of my favorite comedian, Major Alex Louis Armstrong. A bald man with a blonde throat looks very comical, but he is very thin and very small – especially when placed next to a giant sloth.

Hairstyles and costumes are one thing, photo collections and special effects are another. And just as the former is somehow still alive, CGI and the obscene, smelly bad-picture objects and cardboard are no longer around. Even ten years ago, these effects seemed pretty bad. Al’s armor still isn’t the worst, as is the fake human doll, but anything that should at least look human is just plain ugly. Sloth and all the events behind it in the third movie remind us of the early PS2 CGI, but at a higher resolution. Envy, in its truest form, has comically strange teeth – though I respect the obligation to reproduce the frames from the original as faithfully as possible – and the pride and its power are so poorly plastered into the picture that it cannot be taken seriously (that’s another scene that ends very quickly and completely loses the opportunity to delve into the psychological features of the characters).

Interiors look like they’re made of plastic, or look cheap on a green screen We rarely have the opportunity to see such poorly made walls. However, it wouldn’t matter if all of this background was put to good use in action scenes. These, however, are also meager. Lots of cuts, important collisions happening outside the frame, non-blood wounds – the blood itself usually looks like a brush painted with red sticker paint.

The “Fullmetal Alchemist” in the live action version is all that a good adaptation shouldn’t be. It’s very fast where you need peace and space to meditate, and very slow when nothing is going on anyway. The director also does not understand that animation, and more specifically emotions and body games, cannot always be translated one-to-one with equally good effect into the language of classic cinema, and as a result moments like the charming ending of the story are almost hard to watch. I don’t understand why I started doing this trilogy. They had no idea, no budget, nothing but a license. waste of time. You better play “Brotherhood” again…wait! Where is the anime on Netflix?!