Heavenly Sword (2014)

I stumbled upon the Heavenly Sword blu-ray more by accident at the bargain bin of a local electronics store. Being an ever hopeful viewer of video game movies (despite many previous experiences with the genre), I've looked up some gameplay videos ("that's actually pretty cinematic") then went out and bought the movie. Since I've already committed the error, you may not need to repeat it yourself. It's bad. And sad. If I understand the closing credits right, this movie was made by a small team (some 20 people?) on a shoestring budget of 6 million, and I generally applaud small independent productions, even if they aim high and end up .. not quite as high. Enthusiasm covers a lot of cinematic sins. Heavenly Sword however was a wholly different thing, especially compared to the game it originates from. The game has mo-cap actor legend Andy "Gollum" Serkis and the late Terry "Discworld" Pratchett's daughter Rhianna at the helm, and impressive graphics for its time and hardware (2007). It's a mixture of hack-and-slay, sniping, quicktime events and a whole lot of action-adventure tropes rolled into a playstation title. The movie is significantly less than that. Its storyline is at times disjointed, its animations and environments are just bad compared to the game, and the framing and editing of scenes is a step down from the game's cut-scenes as well. I needed to watch the game footage to get the movie's storyline in order, and noticed that the game manages to elicit more emotional response than the movie.How a movie that came out in 2014 manages to look worse than the real-time graphics of a game from 2007 (with the assumption that - since it's an official franchise product - the producers must've had access to Sony's graphics and animation data that the game already had 7 years earlier), is completely beyond me. Lowlights are the three boss fights, with the showdown against the water witch being the absolutely worst, both in terms of action and in terms of graphics. Some more doubtful design decisions are sweeping camera moves during quiet "character moments", and turning the moats of the tyrant's impressive fortress from the game's exaggerated-yet-realistic water into ludicrous lava.Using the gameplay as a template, shortening and framing the combat scenes cinematically and rendering the cutscenes with more advanced and fine-tuned facial animations and cloth/hair simulation could've made this into an impressive production. As it is, it was interesting to watch, but definitely not enjoyable. Can not recommend this. 3 / 10, and this includes a pity bonus of +1 point.

SPOILER ALLERT: You already know what happens in this movie. First of all, the stilted animation, the barely 3-D faces, with no expression on them let alone movement. The graphics are pixelated in places and background hardly deserves the name. Honestly, primary school children could do better with crayons.But I could forgive that. Yes, I would completely accept the creators limitation in this regard and appreciate the life spent upon this endeavour if the vocals weren't so fake-sounding. The tone, cadence and timbre in all the voices are incredibly jarring. I wish these guys had listened to any English dub anywhere if they could not do this in Japanese, Chinese or Korean with subtitles. You'd think they didn't know what angry or sad people sounded like. To be honest, silence and subtitles would have been a massive improvement.Sadly, what they were actually saying was no improvement. You've never heard a cliché they didn't say. The plot line was devastating but I can live with a girl inheriting a magical sword. What I can't live with is a cliché killing off everyone she knew in her life in 12 seconds except for her one crazy but strangely wise and blood thirsty companion she didn't know was her sister. Six-year-olds have better plots in their fantasies. Ten-year-olds have much more imaginative characters. I'm not a troll okay? I wanted to like this I was on board but 23 minutes and 41 seconds in I just knew that this was it. It wasn't going to get better and anything I can muster up in my imagination about how this thing continues and ends or even how it began would be eminently better than whatever predictable, agonising procession of pixels this Frankenstein could lumber up. I am sorry. My friend if you watch this film, you'll see what I mean but don't. Stop reading this. Go life your life.

"Heavenly Sword" seemed more like something that should have remained in a PlayStation game and not made it to the big screen. Especially because it looked like something from the early 2000's. The animation and textures were not up to par for 2014, not by a long shot. And it totally pales in comparison to the 2001 "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" and the 2005 "Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children".The storyline was adequate and had some good moments, but it seemed like everything was just skipped over lightly and without going into depth with anything much really.A lot of the animation was rigid and wooden, and the outdated textures didn't really help further the movie in any possible way. I must say that I think they could have used more resources and time on the animation here.The characters were adequate, albeit two-dimensional and lacking personalities.Having sat through the entire length of this animated movie, and with being very close to getting up and doing something else twice along the way, but deciding to stick with it to the end, I must admit that I had hoped for something more than it turned out to be.I have never tried the game upon which this movie is based, but truth be told, then it felt like this entire movie should have been used as in-game cut scenes and not as a feature animated movie.One thing I did think about though, was if this animated movie wouldn't actually have been far, far better if they had opted to continue with the cartoonish animation style that they used in the movie to tell some of the backstory. That was actually more interesting to look at and far more stylish and memorable than the outdated CGI that was this movie.

Graphics was so and so. Close up animation of characters had sharp edges, scenery was beautiful, but the overall feeling was really been letting down by the bad character graphics.Storyline was OK, predictable at many points. Plot was heavely on the difficulty of being of female gender in ancient time. which was surely mention a lot of times. Last, the sword, even though it had huge significance in the story, could have been more awesome.So overall rating of 4 is a combination of: - 1/10 for character animation - 7/10 for scenery - 6/10 for storyline - 3/10 for character voices and identity - 3/10 for the swords awesomeness (or lack of).If you can live with bad animation and have nothing else to watch, this can be recommended.