Fullmetal Alchemist (2018)

Look the CGI was fabulous and on point and I mean they got the characters looks down and correct but the point of the movie is that it's based off of the series it shouldn't have major plot diversion which is what it had.Roy Mustang didn't meet Ed while he was dealing with father cornello, nor did Ed choose to leave Alphonse with shou Tucker, who basically completely Alters one of the major plot lines and while I understand it's physically impossible to cram a 50 something episode TV series into a 2-hour movie I don't expect so much Cannon Divergence.

Okay, So I know any live action anime adaptation will usually have its fair share of issues but the way it was written makes no sense regardless if you know the story or have never seen it before. Everything seemed forced, I watched this with my brothers, one of which has never seen the anime or manga, and they tried to cram so much backstory in that they lose most of the value. We get only small glimpses into the character's lives that if you are not already aware of their backstories the characters become nearly meaningless. Not to mention they created a really forced ending which only had a very vague resemblance to the source material. It would have been far better to have split this up into multiple movies or even made an entirely new plot. The CG wasn't near as bad as I was expecting,but overall the best part of the movie was set design and costumes. The acting was definitely sub par, at times it felt like the actors were emotionless. The english dub on Netflix was bad, characters would all be in the same room and Edward's voice sounded at times like he was far away. On top of that there was a scene where Edward punched a wall and they forgot to put in the sound, It was bad enough me and my brothers broke out laughing at how bad it was.

The film starts off good enough but loses emotional steam after the first half. You stop caring about the characters which leaves you to focus on very dry action. What I gather is that the source material must be incredibly emotional and engaging but the film just fails in bringing it to life.

I grew up as a hardcore FMA fan, so this was something I had to see. I don't have high expectations of live action movies, because they can't quite grasp the effects of an anime, but when it came to character appearances of a European-setting with an all Asian cast, they did pretty well. I was pretty disappointed on the emotion of this movie, it wasn't nearly as moving as the anime, I feel like rather than almost following the original script with slight little plot twists, the story should have been written on a small segment of Ed and Al's journey, it wouldn't have been as rushed and they could focus on details. I think Ed's character was decent, yet he wasn't as loud, rebellious, and mouthy as the anime version, he was too serious most of the time. Al felt really distant as a character, and when it came to characters like Mustang, there was a lost connection. It would have been nice to see more action too, at least have an actor or stunt double that knows martial arts to play in the fight scenes, that would have helped liven it up. Overall this movie was better than I anticipated, yet there were a lot of holes in the story, if they were filled/changed it would have been fantastic.