If you were craving a hot mess in the form of another Netflix live-action anime adaptation, Fullmetal Alchemist The Revenge Of Scar might just be the thing for you. Let’s see if this one was any better than the last pile of garbage in this review!
Fullmetal Alchemist The Revenge Of Scar Overview
Fullmetal Alchemist: The Revenge Of Scar, also known as Fullmetal Alchemist Final Chapter – The Avenger Scar, is a live-action adaptation of one of the most beloved, popular, and acclaimed manga and anime properties of all time, Fullmetal Alchemist. It serves as the direct sequel to the Fullmetal Alchemist live action movie that came out in 2017 and is also being produced by Netflix. It is being directed by Fumihiko Sori, who also directed the previous movie.
– Fullmetal Alchemist Final Chapter – The Avenger Scar Review does not contain any spoilers –
Fullmetal Alchemist The Revenge Of Scar Review- Why, God? Why?
Everything even passable about this movie was a product of the original medium being a masterpiece. It is so good that despite their best efforts, the bright minds behind this horrible idea couldn’t manage to ruin it completely. All they had to do was not change much about it, and they would have been golden, but even that was too much to expect from them the last time they tried it with the original movie. If there’s one good thing to be said about this movie over the last one, it is that they didn’t change that much from the original this time around.
The major anti-war sentiments, alongside the major themes of revenge and forgiveness, were majorly kept intact in this adaptation. This movie mostly adapts the war of Ishtval portion of the story with a few shifts to the timeline to make it all make sense in the grand scheme of things, especially considering how bad the first movie messed up the timeline of the show. That, and a few characterisations being the same, are the only saving graces of this otherwise horrendous experience.
The thought process behind making this adaptation baffles me, especially after the first one was derided. Who is this for? If it is for people who already know and love the series, it is a bad idea because a sub-par imitation of a classic that we love doesn’t interest us in any way. If this is for people unfamiliar with the series altogether, this is probably the worst way to experience this good of a story. Either way you look at it, it is a lose-lose situation from the marketing perspective, making its existence even more perplexing.
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Enough about its existence; let us now talk about the movie and how it was made. However, to do that, we are going to have to reference the original once again. It is highly regarded because it takes time to build even the more minute elements of its story to take it to a beautiful finale that perfectly ties everything together. Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood is sixty-four episodes worth of sheer perfection. How could you ever hope to do what it did in over a year in three movies worth of time? You couldn’t without drastically messing up the pacing of the movies.
Which is exactly what happened here. Events flew so fast that even an audience that didn’t know anything about the franchise before watching this would be confounded by the rapidity of it. There isn’t much time for motivations to become clear and backstories to be sorted out. The movie hastily shoves in everything it can, from Lisa’s parents to Hohenheim, to boost the movie’s lore, but none of it matters that much if you don’t have enough time to spend with those characters.
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The biggest flaw in this movie is one that has been levied at Japanese live-action movies for a while now- the acting. Enough can be made about how accurate these characters were to their anime counterparts, but the performances here were sub-par at best. Wooden delivery and expressionless faces from the majority of the cast were a serious detriment to the movie’s emotional and dramatic nature, and many characters were finding it difficult to change their expressions.
The dialogue also did the performances in Fullmetal Alchemist The Revenge Of Scar no favours. The same dialogue that works in the setting of an anime or a manga looks wooden and shoddy in a movie, especially when the delivery is as wooden as this. Cheesy isn’t a word that should be used in a review, but the minds behind this movie have left me no choice. When every line of dialogue is making you wince, there’s not much you can do about it except say that it is cringe-worthy. The writing staff took a long vacation during the production, presumably.
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The movie does succeed in translating some great set pieces from the anime into this medium. The ruins of Ishtwal and the Capital all look great, and the character designs, including the clothes everyone wears, are quite faithful to the original. Some of the same locations as the first movie are visited, but that’s the only relic of that movie that this one kept around. The events of that lay pretty much forgotten as this one is a beat-for-beat remake of the anime, much better than the creative liberties that were taken in that monstrosity.
The characterisations of Edward, Winry, Ling, Scar, and some others were handled gracefully without compromising much. However, Mustang, Greed, and a few others were not that lucky. The new characters, like Lieutenant Armstrong and Hohenheim, were portrayed as best as the movie could, considering how unrealistic their actual bodies are when compared to other normal-looking people in this world. The jury is still out on Fuhrer King Bradley and Selim, although the latter doesn’t look too promising, only getting a pass because he is a literal child.
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A notable omission from the paragraph right above this one is Alphons because he deserves his own paragraph right alongside the discussion about the production quality of this movie. Due to the nature of him being a walking and talking suit of armour, the creators thought it would be better to CGI him in every shot that he’s in, which is fine by itself but leads to several problems with his characterisations. The biggest one is that probably because of how expensive CGI gets, he is taken out of every shot he possibly can, leading to him missing a lot of the movie despite being there.
Fullmetal Alchemist The Revenge Of Scar features some decent setpieces but also some terrible frames full of CGI mishaps that made the overall appearance of this movie look a lot worse than it was. Some examples of that happening have been posted in the gallery, but it was a mixed effort by the graphics team here. Some of the scenes, like the train caper and a few fights, looked great. Some others, alongside a few designs like Sloth, looked bad and took one out of the experience of watching a live-action Fullmetal Alchemist adaptation. Combined with the uninspiring music makes this a mediocre production.
Verdict
Fullmetal Alchemist The Revenge Of Scar was a terrible adaptation of a classic. Everything good about it is because of the original, which it does its best to mismanage horribly. At its best, it is just a poor imitation of a masterpiece. At its worst, it is an unwatchable farce with horrible pacing, acting, and dialogue.
Watch Fullmetal Alchemist: The Revenge Of Scar on Netflix!