Netflix’s Fullmetal Alchemist (2017 Review)

I always seem to be late to the party. Ah well, this isn’t one anybody should be excited to get to.

I tried my hardest not to be angry at the new Fullmetal Alchemist film Netflix was making. Nothing’s worse than a fan who can’ let go, so I tried to do just that. But it didn’t take long for me to start picking nits with the film because, let’s face it, Netflix is expecting mostly fans to watch this one. It’s why they tried to visually recreate it and hit all the famous plot-points, but all they got was a trainwreck. Netflix’s Fullmetal Alchemist live-action adaptation is a cluster-bomb of tossed around plot points, character changes that were downright insulting, horrific CGI and writing that would piss off someone who had no idea what this series started with.

As always, spoiler warning. Spoiler warnings for Fullmetal Alchemist (2003) and Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood.

 

If you don’t know the plot of Fullmetal Alchemist, congrats on avoiding the majority of the anime community.  If you were ever curious, that one anime people won’t stop talking about follows the exploits of two Alchemists trying to fix their bodies after making a horrible mistake when they were children. The movie starts off with that very mistake, depicting little Edward (Ryosuke Yamada) and Alphonse Elric (Atomu Mizuishi) attempting to use Alchemy to resurrect their deceased mother. Alchemy in this universe is a science that allows users to break down objects and create new ones made from those same materials. I have no idea why this means Al and Ed were subjected to a Wizard of Oz tornado but the end result is the same as the shows: Ed loses his leg and Al his entire body.

After sacrificing his arm to get Al’s soul bound to a suit of armor, Edward vows to become a state alchemist. The goal is to gain access to the military’s vast wealth of information in hopes of finding the only thing that can bypass equivalent exchange and get their bodies back to normal: the Philosopher’s Stone. The movie decides to skip Edward’s painful process of getting a new automail arm and leg – automail being an indestructible metal – but I suppose it’s for the best. No use in showing tiny children squirming on a table while they attach the automail to every single nerve in the army. No, instead, what we get is a skinny-synopsis is of the FMA plot that speeds through the main conspiracy plot point within the military, but lacking any of the subtly and finesse that made it oh so interesting in the show.

Effectively, the movie made a big rush to hit the famous plot points of the anime: Shou Tucker’s story, the death of Hughes, the big fight between Ed and Al over Al’s memories, and so on. It’s exactly what M. Shamalyon tried with The Last Airbender and the results here are just as bad: a plot moving at breakneck speeds with moments that don’t connect well and characters you wouldn’t care about had you not watched either anime. Furthermore, condensing the story like this required changes to the plot that just don’t work. For example, it makes much more sense for Barry at Lab 5 to sew seeds of doubt about Al’s memories because Barry is a suit of armor himself; Shou Tucker doing it just because he’s an evil asshole seems utterly pointless. The whole thing results in a “check-list” story that only a marketing exec could love.

 

And, because they have this list that’s desperate to please fans, they will ironically piss them off. In the aftermath of streamlining the story, our charming and memorable characters were also stripped of what made them interesting and left with their basic plot-functionality.  Mustang loses his determinator status, discouraging the Elrics from finding the stone, and poor Edward gets called a genius despite everyone else figuring out the plot points on his behalf. We were also missing several characters crucial to our storyline, but I suspect they’ll be in the sequel. The thought of them “streamlining”  someone like Kimblee or King Bradley disturbs me.

I picture Bradley being stripped down to a pure killer with a cold attitude, which misses the point entirely.

But let’s ignore the issues you’ll have as a hardcore fan. After all, adaptations aren’t supposed to be carbon copies of their counterparts and not everyone who watches will be hardcore fans. I’d argue that most who watch this will be hardcore or casual fans, but let’s entertain the idea that people who have never seen the anime will find their way here. They will still be in for two hours of fail when they see that the writing is full of plot twists that surprise no one and super cheap CGI. The budget clearly went straight to the Alchemical reactions, with PS3-rejects left over for the monsters and poor Alphonse.

Alphonse looks passable here at least, but other scenes – holy crap.

It saddens me that this movie didn’t do well, but it doesn’t shock me. The biggest problem almost every anime movie suffers from, this one included, is that it tries to visually recreate the anime without paying attention to what made the story so well-loved or making one of their own that’s just as good. Netflix’s Fullmetal Alchemist had the right idea sometimes – the actor playing Tucker did well for what he was given and the scene with Nina still had punch – but it got buried under shaky, amateur writing more concerned with shoving in iconic moments nonsensically. In true irony, their attempts to appeal to fans have come back around and bitten them in hard in the ass.

The Real Failure of Death Note (2017)

After an eternity of wailing at the worldwide web, the 2017 Netflix film, Death Note, hit the scene. But it only took one day for dedicated fans to decry it as absolute trash.

It was clear from the get-go that this film would be an experiment with terrible odds. I described in a previous post that I thought a westernized version of Death Note was a waste of time, strictly because what little fans did exist would never accept something so radically different. And, as predicted, hard-core fans of the manga/anime booted the film into the reject pile. In an ironic twist, it was also panned by new watchers everywhere.

In concurrence, my problem isn’t what they left out; it’s what they put in. The problem with the 2017 film is not that it’s a bad adaptation, but that it gives fans a sub par version of the story that may be pretty to look at but is horrible in execution. I didn’t come into this hoping for a faithful recreation of one of my favorite series, but I at least expected something competent.

On the basics, we haven’t changed much. The story still concerns a boy named Light, last name Turner (Natt Wolf), who’s the school’s resident genius. But where Yagami was a charismatic overachiever who got bored and frustrated with the world, Turner is a weak-willed idealist, frustrated at the lack of revenge against his mother’s killer. During a particularly nasty storm, a black book falls out of the sky, labeled “death note.” Light takes the book with him and gets a visit from a Japanese Death God named Ryuk (William Dafoe).  Ryuk explains that Light now has the power to kill anyone by picturing their face and writing their name in the book. Better yet, he can decide how they die with very little strings attached. After testing the book out on the man that killed his mother, Light shares it with Mia, a cheerleader he’s been crushing on (Margaret Qualley). The two decide to come together to kill all the world’s criminals, attracting the attention of the enigmatic and eccentric detective simply known as L (Keith Stanfield).

Here we see the real changes to the characters occur, and they don’t make a lot of sense. Yagami-Version of Light was driven by the same idealism and morality that Turner is, but played a far more active role in his own story. Turner is a passive protagonist with a truly bland presence, there to play windsock to the much more driven Mia and Ryuk. In fact, Mia (the new Misa Amane) feels much more like Yagami than Turner ever did: she’s passionate to the point of insanity, willing to kill to continue her work, and willing to manipulate others for her “greater good.”  With these two switching places in such a bland fashion, one would swear this was an Alternate Universe Fanfic.

And make no mistake, what we are given is bad. It may be hard to follow up one of the best-written shows in anime, but this story doesn’t even come close. We’ve taken a psychological thriller and shoe-horned in a sparkless romance, with a side-order of edgy gore. Leading this debacle of a narrative is a plot-hole of a protagonist; he’s apparently smart enough to construct a successful chain of events to save himself but doesn’t see a problem with reading the death note in public, in broad daylight. Worse yet, we’re expected to believe that this yutz and his girlfriend can outsmart L, an adult genius who practically handed the FBI a drug cartel on a silver platter. This L may be more emotionally unstable and driven by anxiety, but he’s not nearly stupid enough to lose to these two.

The last known viewing party

The shaky ground that this film had was that it was marked as a “new story,” a new interpretation with a twist. In fact, the original creators of the series praised the film as being innovative and beautiful, and were excited about those who’d never seen their story seeing it now. In a way, Ohba and Obata were right; people are enjoying Death Note. They’re just seeking out the show and manga to see if it was the same visual disaster the film was. No joke, the day I sat down to watch this film, Death Note anime was trending hard-core on Netflix.

Adam Wingard may be confident, but you cannot cover up a bland protagonist and flat story with claims of originality and re-adaptation. In the end, Death Note 2017 was just another clunky, horrific live-action adaptation of a good anime. Another one bit the dust and no one was really shocked, me least of all. 

Western Death Note a Waste of Time

They define insanity as repeating a task and expecting a different result. Case in point, another live-action Death Note looms on the horizon, like a vulture over a dead horse.

For those of you living under a rock, Death Note was a 2006 series about a young high school genius, Light Yagami, who finds a notebook that allows him to kill with a stroke of a pen. Light decides to use this power to eliminate the people he deems bad and create the perfect society, catching the eye of a notorious but reclusive private detective, only known as L. L decides to hunt down Light if it’s the last thing he does and Light likewise goes on the hunt for the detective who dares defy him.

Death Note was a huge success, both in anime and manga format. So popular in fact that they garnered three live action movies and even a stage musical. There’s a fourth movie scheduled for release next year, but what everyone is buzzing about is a live-action tv series that’s coming out on Netflix, which retells the story from a western perspective. Now let’s not mince words; this is whitewashing, but is it something that at least has a chance of survival?

No. Not at all.

This is the pretty boy face of failure

• Just How Lost In Translation Are We?

First of all, this otaku is beyond dubious about taking a Japanese story and changing it around to take place in the western world. I won’t pretend to be an expert on Japanese culture, but I know enough to understand that it’s very different from the states. Awful translations usually attempt to compensate for this by changing things around in story (a la rice balls to jelly donuts) and the results are a trainwreck waiting to happen.

Case in point: One Piece, the common example of western dub gone horribly offensive. Besides just trying to dumb down a shonen show for small children, the show also removed any references to Saki, most of Zoro’s Japanese sword moves, any Japanese sounding nicknames, and vice-versa. What was left was a shell of a show that used to be fun, that looked amazing, but felt like a half together parody.

Because balls of rice are just too hard for kids to understand

Now, to be fair, Death Note’s cultural references to Japan are pretty low, mostly limited to Ryuk, the Shinigami (Death God in Japanese Shinto). One could also easily point out how Death Note is steeped in Christian and biblical symbolism. But this story still takes place in modern day Japan, or what was modern in 2006, and I shudder to think how they’re going to change all of that for the sake of a western audience.

• I Don’t Trust the Captain of This Ship.

So we need some talent to get this off the ground, right? After all, I’ve always said you can accomplish just about anything with some good writing and clever characters. We start off on a great foot with Netflix, a media giant that’s given consumers high-quality original shows, including Stranger Things and Hemlock Grove. But that comfort stops when you start looking at who else is at the helm.

Our leading technical man is the big problem. Director Adam Wingard seems like he’d be a good pick, having made the successful horror/thriller movie The Guest, but he’s also responsible for V/H/S, The ABC’s of Death and You’re Next.  It seems that Mr. Wingard has some experience in what makes good thrillers, but good horror seems to slip through his fingers.

 

Your attempts at fear amuse the Shinigami. But not by much.

• But You Know What’s Really Pointless?

There’s a fourth Japanese movie coming out the same year.

Death Note: Light Up The New World is scheduled for release next year as well, around the same time as the show. It’s an all Japanese cast, live action, and set years ahead of the original story. It’s got a fresh story, new characters, and even some returning faces from the original movies.West Note, as I will call it, has to compete with an alternative when it comes out, an alternative that I see crushing it if the web is to be believed.

So, besides being controversial, what does West Note have to offer? It gives us decent actors, a concept people are pissed as hell about, and a director who’s been stuck in b-horror hell. It’s a reckless, stupid idea that reeks of desperation and I’m not gonna stick around and watch this dead horse get beaten within an inch of its life.

What are your thoughts on the new series? Make sure to (civilly) leave a comment and discuss below. If you want more content, don’t forget to like and follow.