I had heard rumblings of a live action Fullmetal Alchemist movie for years, but was pretty surprised to just find it on Netflix one day. The film is an adaption of (largely) the first quarter of the story from the manga with a few liberties in the adaption. It's certainly a Japanese film with an all-Japanese cast, which may be unsettling to some, but really didn't bother me.
Live action manga/anime adaptions given Western production and release really struggle across the board, either with making money, or with being interesting, and frequently both. Consider films like Aeon Flux, Speed Racer, Ghost in the Shell, or worst yet, Dragonball Evolution. Each of these movies either felt the need to heavily diverge from the source material, couldn't capture the spirit of their movies, or make a lot of money. A Speed Racer movie should, in theory, be easy to do in live action, but getting significant interest from Western audiences would be extremely challenging. The reality is that manga fans are a small subset of Western audiences, and so marketing these movies is extremely challenging. On the other hand, Japanese audiences are innundated with anime and manga, and so making a live action adaption of an anime there is actually much simpler, leading to standout examples such as Rurouni Kenshin. If a live action adaption of Dragonball can't make money, with Dragonball overwhelmingly being the most popular manga in the West, then there would be no prayer of making a financially successful Fullmetal Alchemist movie here. So I was pretty happy to learn that a Japanese studio was doing it, and was willing to accept characters who look significantly different than their decidedly European counterparts as depicted in the manga. The reality is that Japanese speaking white folks who are willing to star in a film who also have the acting chops to pull it off is a very limited demographic, so I really didn't have a problem with the looks of the cast.
And the performance of most of the cast members was actually pretty good, especially for a relatively low budget film. Ed's performance was pretty good, they nailed the look of Alphonse, and the actor who played Colonel Hughes actually nailed it. They also got excellent looking performers for Lust, Gluttony, and Envy, and most of the cast turned in at least above average performances. They also nailed Alexander the dog from the Shou Tucker storyline, showing the true love of the source material ;). Colonel Mustang was a bit too wooden, and really failed to build any kind of chemistry, however. Worst of all was the cringe worthy performance turned in by the actress playing Winry, who resembled Winry in her character almost as little as she did in appearance. She played what I call the anime "woo girl" far more than the tender yet strong, intelligent character that she portrays in the manga.
Real screenshot of Winry from the film
The visuals of the film are better than I
had hoped, but definitely worse than would be ideal. For a Japanese-made
film, I was rather impressed, but the CG necessary to do a good
adaptation of this was definitely out of the reach of the creators.
There are some pretty impressive shots here and there, but for every
impressive one, there's usually one in which the CG-generated characters
lack weight and presence during a fight, the live action doesn't quite sync up to the CG, and the CG doesn't have the degree of clarity and precision you'd like to see.
The film had plenty of nice nods to the manga, with some shot by shot reenactments of panels from the manga, as well as plenty of fan favorite moments. These are all kind of jumbled around out of order, and there are certainly changes from the manga, but most of these are casualties of having eliminated characters such as Scar from the movie, which makes sense. Making a movie about an ensemble manga like Fullmetal Alchemist is a lot like making a movie about The Lord of the Rings: you need to find the essential element of the narrative and cut a lot that doesn't advance that narrative. The adaptation thus focuses, rightly, on Ed and Al's quest for the Philosopher's Stone in order to restore their body.
The film breaks down at three primary levels, however. The first is that Ed and Al are given precious little time to build chemistry together, which is really important considering that one of them is a suit of armor. The kind of tender relationship that they have is challenging to build in a live action film, as a lot of our cues of relationship on film come from body language and facial expression, and a CG suit of armor really can't deliver that type of performance. You don't really attach to either character, thus, or feel any real drama from restoring their bodies.
The second problem with the film is that it offers precious little resolution. It's a movie that ends in a way that demands a sequel, and there's no guarantee it will get one. It was probably better suited for a TV show than a movie, as it just requires a lot of building and plot development that really can't be covered in two hours.
The third, and by far biggest problem with the film, is that despite hitting a lot of nice nods to the anime, it truly and utterly collapses in capturing the delightfully silly tone of the manga. There is precious little humor here, and what is there is falls abysmally flat. Leaving out a character like Teacher was an absolute crime against humanity, and would have provided some much needed levity throughout. I think a good introductory story which follows the boys through their trauma and training under Teacher's tutelage, and facing off against an early adversary would have been a better approach. A film with a tone which is more like Guardians of the Galaxy and less like Captain America: Winter Soldier would have served the source material a bit better, and also given it less false depth and grumpiness.
Fullmetal Alchemist did a lot of things right, but mostly missed the mark in capturing what made the original wonderful. I hope that if it does get a sequel, we'll get some flashback footage with Teacher, introduce Major Armstrong, and deliver that delightfully variable experience that only Ed, Al, and the gang can deliver. I'll give it a 7.0/10.
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