Michael's Movie Grade: D-
Another bland and ill-conceived live action movie adaption of an anime series (it was a manga first).
Hollywood has a terrible track record when it comes to taking anime and adapting it into live action movies. This film does nothing to improve this track record. This movie will not only dishearten anime purists but also anyone who just simply wants a halfway decent movie. There is simply very little here to actually like. The action scenes are astoundingly bad. These scenes are full of really bad and fake looking special effects as well as fighting moves that look more like people dancing very poorly than them fighting. These scenes are almost unintentionally funny at first but it doesn't take long until even they are not even unintentionally enjoyable anymore, but simply embarrassing. The characters are incredibly bland and feel more like walking clichés than actual characters. Not one of them ever feels real to us and this is one of the worst sins a fantasy movie can have. If the characters don't feel real than nothing feels real including the fantasy world in which the film takes place. Speaking of this fantasy world, the world building is so poor here that even by the end of the picture, we still don't quite understand how this world works. This especially hurts the already poor action scenes as we do not understand just what any of these characters are actually capable of. The storyline is very cliché and familiar and it is hard to watch this without automatically thinking of many other movies. The story problems are made worse by how seriously this movie takes itself. It takes itself so seriously and has such a lack of humor that we are forced to try to take the story seriously ourselves. The movie also suffers from very weak and cliché dialogue. This is the type of dialogue that makes it so anyone who has seen more than one movie before can finish the character's sentences and guess what the next line will be.
Admittedly the actors are good in their parts and do bring a certain likability to their otherwise incredibly bland characters. There are also a few interesting ideas brought up in this film. Unfortunately, these ideas are never really explored and are often brushed aside for something less interesting.
This is simply a poor film that I would not recommend to anyone, whether they are an anime fan or an average movie goer. It is obvious that the filmmakers want to make this into the next big movie franchise but I doubt that after this film that anyone would want this to happen.
