A Love In The Stars: A "Fortuna's Eye" Review

By Winfield Ly

Imagine if you have the power to know when someone is going to die, would you try to change their fate or let it be? However, by changing their fate, you will suffer the consequences of being closer to death in order to not upset the balance of life. "Fortuna’s Eye" is a fantasy romance film where the main character, Shinichiro Kiyama (Ryunosuke Kamiki), struggles with deciding the purpose of using the ability to help others or not. 

He meets Aoi Kiryu (Kasumi Arimura) one day, who is immediately attracted to her, but he sees her hand becoming transparent signifying that her death is near. When the ability is used, the film uses the visual effect of showing partial transparency of the person’s body. It’s an interesting take with using that visual effect, as the clothes are left untouched which I would imagine it makes it uncanny and surreal to see the ability happen in real life. It might be the simple thought of the eyes are showing an hallucination, and you wouldn’t even think about the correlation to death. 

While watching the film, I couldn’t help but notice the similar emotions from the director’s (Takahiro Miki) other film, "My Tomorrow Your Yesterday", which I've also watched in the past. They’re both love stories with fantasy sci-fi elements that introduce their unique premise, but more often than not, the plot direction takes a turn that you least expect for the ending. The movies are best watched at first without any spoilers, and can be rewatched subsequent times to see the foreshadowing that Takahiro laid earlier in the film to connect with the story details throughout the movie as it heads towards the ending.

The acting in "Fortuna's Eye" is really well done, and the two main leads had good expressions to show the subtlety and chemistry for the characters. The cinematography was done well showing what the characters were doing, help set up the scene, and varying up the angles for normal talking scenes. Even after the plot revelations, there are additional angles from past scenes that helps shed light from other characters’ perspectives that we didn’t see at the time. 

Overall, I would recommend this film if you don’t want to see a typical love story where there is a perfect happy ending that we see in other love stories. Much like "My Tomorrow Your Yesterday", it plays with your heartstring and tugs at your emotions. The theme song for the movie was “In The Stars (feat. Kiiara)” by ONE OK ROCK. I found that the theme song to really match with the movie’s theme as it was playing during the end credits. Be sure to check it out and you can watch the trailer for the film below.

For More Information:
https://www.toho.co.jp/movie/lineup/fortuna-movie.html

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Overall Rating: A

Pros
+ Interesting story
+ Good acting and the chemistry between the two main characters were good
+ Nice visuals 
+ The movie can be rewatched multiple times 

Cons
- The movie soundtrack (aside from the theme song) help complement the scenes, but  wasn't very memorable after the fact

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