Amestris Brought to Life

Whenever an anime or manga is turned into a live-action feature, people start to get worried, and for good reason. It’s never easy to transition from a long-term media to a short-term one, which usually results in a hot mess. The question of the day is whether the Fullmetal Alchemist film follows this pattern or not.

I love that they framed the shots similar to the manga.

The answer isn’t entirely simple since it does and it doesn’t. Let me begin by stating that I am a huge fan of the franchise. I read every volume of the manga as it released here in the USA. I watched every episode of the original anime as it aired. I own all the light novels, manga, video games, and anime along with a lot of memorabilia. In short, it is easily one of my favorite fictions out there. The reason I mention this is to point out how wary I was walking into this film. I’m not a big fan of film versions of manga or anime because so much gets lost in the process. Despite all of this, I actually found this film to be acceptable. Neither good nor bad. Let me elaborate.

The dreaded moment of the prologue.

Fullmetal Alchemist is the story of two brothers, Edward and Alphonse Elric, who try to resurrect their recently deceased mother by using a forbidden form of Alchemy. This ritual causes Ed to lose a couple of his limbs and Al to lose his physical body. Ed, with Al tagging along, then decides to join the state military in order to discover the secret to acquiring the Philosopher’s Stone which allows the user to do any alchemy without any consequence, in the hopes of getting Al’s body back. Amidst the brothers’ adventure, a bigger plot is in motion that they get involved in, resulting in a lot of anguish and hard decisions. This is the gist of the story we are faced with, and develops throughout the film.

Isn't the automail awesome?

As is Roy, of course.

Admittedly, despite so much of the manga and the television shows being cut out, I was quite impressed with how they managed to pull off telling the story. To name a few things that were cut are stories involving: Major Armstrong, Izumi Curtis, any Homunculus besides the 3 featured in the film, Hohenheim, Fuhrer King Bradley, Ling and Scar. This sounds like a disaster, but let me explain why I think it worked. The story focuses with laser precision on the brothers’ adventure from the start of the series up to the end of the Laboratory 5 incident. Specifically, it focuses on their hunt for the Philosopher’s Stone and them actually finding it. By removing all these characters, all of their associated plot is removed as well. It helps that all of the characters missing are not really integral to the plot of the franchise until the latter half (with Scar being an arguable exception), so having them missing really helps the film gain a foothold without being too dense. Even after all that, the film is still a little over 2 hours.

They got Al's armor absolutely perfect.

An example of how removed plot points and consolidated factors work well is the very beginning of the story. The beginning still revolves around the priest with the fake Philosopher’s Stone, with Rose and the Chimera completely removed from the picture (well Rose does make an appearance, but isn’t named and is merely used as a plot tool). The movie begins with the boys chasing the Priest, fighting him and subduing him. In the fight, in order to get around the lack of Chimera, the Priest summons stone creatures that resemble the Chimera from the manga/anime. It’s a clever way of capturing the core of that entire arc both visually and thematically while condensing it as much as possible. Another example is the lack of Hughes’ daughter. This may seem devastating to us as fans, since his doting love for his daughter is a defining feature of him as a character. Surprisingly, they managed to retain his doting love for his family and expressed it really well, while being able to remove any scenes about his daughter in the process. I’m a little upset with that removal, but as far as character representation goes he still felt wholly like the Hughes I know and love. If it is any consolation, Gracia was pregnant during the film, so the idea of them having a daughter wasn’t completely lost in translation. The whole movie runs like that, with a lot of ultimately unimportant sequences in relation to the main plot consolidated into important ones in order to keep things going.

Hughes always taking care of his friends.

It’s for this reason that I ended up enjoying the film. The first act’s acting actually felt really amateurish for some reason, but improved significantly over time. I can’t put my finger on why this is the case, but it made me cringe a lot when I first started watching. Beyond that, it just gets better and better as we go through the story. With the plot ending at Laboratory 5, it is clear the purpose of this movie is completely focused on Ed and Al finding the stone. This means that Hughes and Tucker play major roles and they’re arcs are as horrifying as they were in the manga/anime. Going back to the acting briefly, I want to mention that I was largely happy with all of the actors’ representations of the characters. The only ones who didn’t quite feel right were perhaps Envy, Lieutenant Ross and at times Ed. It’s not necessarily that they were acted poorly, but more that the former two were vastly underrepresented in the film thus making them both feel like unnecessary characters. As for Ed, his core character feels right, but something about the way it’s presented and delivered didn’t feel entirely right.

Nobody interferes when Winry is mad.

In the end it sounds like I’m singing a lot of praise for the film but I’m speaking strictly from the eyes of a fan so far, and have left out the flaws. For one, the CGI in the movie is borderline horrendous. It reminds me a lot of early 2000’s CGI and can oftentimes pull you out of the experience, which is unfortunate because it’s not for a lack of artistic creativity. The actual design and art are absolutely amazing and I’m actually really impressed that they managed to translate from the pages to the big screen with such accuracy. It’s just that it feels like really low quality production, diminishing any design that went into it at all. The best designs won’t mean anything if they are represented with low-poly and minimized detail representations.

Another example of absolute perfect costume design in the form of Lust.

As a fan of the franchise and somebody who is already intimately familiar with the source material, it was easy for me to get into the film. The real issue is with newcomers who are not even remotely familiar with Fullmetal Alchemist. While I’m mostly singing this film praise, the fact is that a lot of the stuff that’s removed causes a few problems for the film. Firstly, the pacing is largely affected. Sometimes it’s really slow then at other times it’s overly fast-paced. There isn’t a proper flow and consistency in the way the story progresses which can easily leave the viewer confused if they aren’t at least somewhat familiar with the story. Another big problem is that the removal of all that development and characters leaves the viewer with a vague understanding of what’s going on at best. There are so many hints at what’s going on in the bigger picture, which fans will pick up on and understand, but newcomers will have no idea. For example, the transmutation circle used to make the Philosopher’s Stone is never explained. The map of Amestris is shown, Hughes indicates that he understands there is a correlation between the transmutation circle and the map of the country, but this is never elaborated on. It’s things like this where plot points are mentioned in passing with no proper context or explanation that’ll leave newcomers completely baffled and disoriented.

Moments like these make Hughes extra precious.

Thus, we explore the core problem of the film: structural flow and plot development. With so much left to assuming the viewer’s prior knowledge (a problem Brotherhood suffers from too, but more on that another time) the only people who will likely get any enjoyment out of this film will be people already familiar.

As a still the CGI doesn't look too bad, but in motion it's cringe-worthy.

It’s exceedingly difficult to translate a manga to a film, and the decision to only focus on the first 4 volumes was a smart move. Despite this, it still feels rushed and incomplete at times. This isn’t entirely a fault of the folks behind this movie, since they certainly did the best they could to condense the plot in clever ways, but rather it tells us a lot about how dense the story of the franchise is as a whole. In order to really have a resolution to the story the earliest logical stopping point can only really be there. While impressed with pulling off what they did, it doesn’t forgive the shortcomings of the film. There’s enough done right in this live-action adaptation of Fullmetal Alchemist to definitely warrant a watch amongst fans, but everybody else would be better off watching either of the two anime or reading the manga.

Somebody is judging you in the back.

Fullmetal Alchemist is a valiant attempt at adapting yet another manga/anime to the big (little, in this case) screen, but is ultimately a failed attempt. With the film having a post-credits scene indicating the intent on continuing the story, we can only hope that they’ll learn from the mistakes they made here and create a better film in the inevitable sequel. I don’t regret watching the film, and will likely buy it when it is available for purchase, but I couldn’t in good conscience recommend it to anybody who isn’t already a fan of the franchise. It was great seeing the story I love put into live-action, but that doesn’t forgive its shortcomings. Take that as you will. Fullmetal Alchemist is viewable on Netflix now.

- Teepu

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OVERALL: C-

Pros:
- Actors bring our beloved characters to life quite well.
- Clever changes, consolidations and removals of plot surprisingly keep the core story intact.
- Nina and Hughes’ outcomes are both as horrifying and heart-wrenching as every other iteration.

Cons:
- Oft horrid pacing will leave newcomers lost and confused.
- Terrible CGI can pull you out of the experience.
- Lack of key characters is perplexing and diminishes the character development of some others.

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