Fullmetal Alchemist (2017) is a live-action movie based on a manga/anime epic. I very much doubt I need elaborate, as the simple fact of its existence almost guarantees it to be awful. That said, I will elaborate.
The manga Fullmetal Alchemist by Hiromu Arakawa is a masterpiece, as is the 2009 anime based on it (called Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood). In fact, I’d put this story almost on par with Avatar: The Last Airbender.
It seems like the better the anime, the worse the movie adaptation is destined to be, and that certainly holds up here.
Whereas Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood is almost as flawless as Avatar: The Last Airbender, the recently-released Fullmetal Alchemist 2017 is very nearly as atrocious as M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender.
The Last Airbender 2.0
The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that this film was even worse than the 2017 American version of Death Note. Why? Because that film at least had a plot! It wasn’t a very good plot, and it had little to do with the source material, but it nonetheless had one. Fullmetal Alchemist 2017 doesn’t have a plot.
Many of my friends were hopeful that this film would be the long-awaited exception to the recent bombardment of terrible anime-to-live-action adaptations. I, on the other hand, had learnt from my previous experiences. Turns out I was right, though I wish I weren’t.
I wasn’t going to watch this thing at all, but some of my friends wanted to watch it. By the ten-minute mark we knew it was The Last Airbender 2.0, but we kept watching—big mistake!
The Casting
The makers of these anime-to-movie adaptations seem quite zealous in their ongoing quest to employ the worst casting in the industry. Usually this entails taking a story whose characters are almost all of various east-Asian ethnicities (usually Japanese) and casting white actors in at least all the leading roles.
Ironically, the few times the source material revolves around mostly European-looking characters, the cast will almost certainly be entirely Japanese. Such is the case with Fullmetal Alchemist 2017.
Most of the characters in Fullmetal Alchemist are Amestrians, but there are also Ishvalans, Xingese, and Xerxesians. None of these peoples are particularly similar to that of Japan.
But you know what? I don’t care about casting Japanese actors to play a cast of mostly Amestrian characters, mainly because far too many acting jobs go to white actors anyway. Anything that helps to balance things out is fine by me.
Actors just need to understand the characters they’re trying to portray, and beyond that they just need to be able to act. That, and you need a director who can get them to act.
If they’re going to have an all-Japanese cast, that’s absolutely fine. The more acting gigs go to actors of colour, the better the film industry will be. With how overwhelmingly white Hollywood is, some diversity is overdue.
What’s important is that they don’t cast some no-talent pop-star to play Edward… And… they cast a boyband singer, didn’t they? Thought so!
The Actors
I’ve not seen many Japanese live-action movies, but with anime the voice-acting is almost always better in the Japanese dub as opposed to the English.
In fact, the only outright bad voice-acting I’ve ever heard in the Japanese dub of an anime was in Black Clover. I guess because of this I just assumed that the Japanese were better at filtering out any bad actors.
If this movie is any indication, however, then it seems all the bad actors just wind up doing live-action instead of voice-work.
The Boyband Singer
The movie decided to hire a boyband singer to star as Edward Elric; it works about as well as you’d expect, which is to say… not at all. Yamada Ryōsuke is devoid of charisma and, seemingly, acting talent.
He even plays Edward back when he was a small child trying to bring his mother back, because the child actors they cast to portray the brothers at that age are somehow even worse.
And if it sounds like I’m saying they awkwardly flip-flopped between having Yamada portray him and having the child actor do so, that’s because that’s exactly what I’m saying. Really; in some scenes young Edward is played by a child actor, and in others he’s played by the same too-old-for-the-role adult who’s been butchering his character the rest of the time.
On an unrelated note, the film decided to represent the failed transmutation as a Wizard-of-Oz tornado. You know, as opposed to the shadowy hands in the manga that shoot out of the ground and rip the boys’ limbs off.
The Only Redeeming Performance
By far the best thing about this film is Satō Ryūta’s portrayal of Maes Hughes; he does a great job, and despite not gushing enough over his family, his character is mostly consistent with how he was in the manga. The actress who plays Lust is also quite good, although neither she nor the other homunculi have much to do in the film.
Child Actors
As I’ve already mentioned, the child actors are some of the worst I’ve seen. That is, apart from the girl who plays Nina Tucker; she’s probably better than half the adult actors in this thing.
Honda Tsubasa
Perhaps the worst adult performance in the film is that of Winry Rockbell. I’ve heard that Honda Tsubasa, who portrays Winry in the movie, has been good in other things.
I’ve not heard such praise directed at Yamada Ryōsuke, however; apparently he’s terrible in everything. O, and these actors who are playing sixteen-year-olds in the film are, in reality, older than I am!
The Characters
The characters in the movie are, in general, unrecognizable when compared to those they’re based on. They could have at least sprung for some more realistic wigs to put on their horrible actors, but they didn’t.
Edward Elric
I don’t even know what the filmmakers were going for with Edward’s character. In the manga, Edward Elric is highly intelligent and usually able to figure things out on his own—a quality in short supply among protagonists in any medium.
In the movie he’s led by the nose to every bloody revelation. This coupled with the removal of virtually every trait that was essential to his character leads to the movie’s version of Edward being just about as generic as you can get.
Alphonse Elric
Alphonse is barely in the film, likely because the film’s budget was insufficient for even such mediocre CGI.
Winry Rockbell
Winry Rockbell is reimagined as little more than a third-rate rip-off of Pinkie Pie, and that’s if I’m being generous.
She’s more like one of Pinkie’s duplicates from the Mirror Pool, in that this film’s portrayal of Winry has none of the real Pinkie Pie’s complexities.
In the manga, Winry had a tendency to become extremely enthusiastic about automail prosthetics, the manufacturing of which was her passion. In the film she gets similarly excited about virtually everything, because the film thinks you won’t notice if they turn one of her quirks into her entire personality.
Colonel Roy Mustang
Where do I begin with Roy Mustang? Where is there to begin? This film took one of the most beloved characters in all of anime and turned him into… I’m not sure what.
Seriously—the movie’s version of Mustang has absolutely no personality whatsoever. The actor seemed like he could act, but the script gave him nothing to work with.
Shou Tucker
The film’s version of Shou Tucker, far from the increasingly desperate, insane, and arguably sociopathic man from the manga, is just a bumbling moron working for the Big Bad.
He exists primarily to reenact once-powerful scenes from the manga, deliver painful exposition, and ultimately die at the wrong character’s hand.
Führer King Bradley
Führer “Not-Appearing-in-This-Film” Bradley never appears in this film, and it’s insultingly obvious that this was so they could cast a popular actor to play him in the sequel.
Major-General Hakuro
Hakuro, originally just some background character who treated Roy Mustang like crap, is made into the outwardly-friendly-but-obviously-the-not-so-subtle-villain character of the film.
You know what Hakuro’s role was in the manga? He was just some asshole the Elric Brothers saved from train robbers one time! He wasn’t even important enough for his story to make it into the rather comprehensive 2009 anime.
Not only does he fill the roles of Führer Bradley, some unnamed general from late in the manga, and even—I shit you not—Alex Louis Armstrong in the movie; he’s also behind everything Shou Tucker does, things Tucker did of his own accord in the manga.
I cannot describe how terrible this character is. He’s worse than Dietlinde Eckhart! In a movie with as many low points as this one, he would likely be the lowest were it not for those child actors.
Style Over Substance
The director of this movie was Fumihiko Sori, who apparently said:
“I want to create a style that follows the original manga as much as possible.”
Unfortunately, even for all his style, he forgot to create any sort of substance to follow the original manga.
He certainly makes it look a lot more like the source material than M. Night Shyamalan did with The Last Airbender, but I noticed that many of the costumes and sets didn’t look lived-in.
Still, this film doesn’t look too bad considering its budget.
What? No Plot?
I’ve heard some people say that the writers of the film were at least trying to follow the manga as closely as possible. I think that’s giving them far more credit than they deserve. I think it more likely that the film was made for the trailers and not the other way round.
Every scene seems made to look like a famous scene from the manga, but as I watched the film it became clear that what was happening in these scenes was utterly different from their manga counterparts.
At the very least a scene in the movie is stripped of all emotional investment, although more often the context is also entirely removed from that in the manga.
Created Feelings
The filmmakers’ priorities are, throughout the film, hard to understand.
With every scene, I was left constantly asking myself, “What was the point of that scene? What was the point of that character? I mean, I know what the point was in the manga, but what was the point in this movie?”
Instead of showing all the things that happened at the Fifth Laboratory, for example, in the movie the laboratory turns out to be an empty warehouse and nothing happens that couldn’t have happened somewhere else. What was the point of semi-including the Fifth Laboratory if nothing happens there?
The subplot where Alphonse wonders if he was ever a real person is also given far too much screen time for its lack of impact on the movie. Unlike in the manga, the movie’s version of this subplot doesn’t lead to any sort of epiphany.
Why Al’s Existential Crisis Matters
In the manga, it was important because after their fight the brothers begin reminiscing about fights they’d had as children, leading to the realization that Al had memories that Ed didn’t.
With the later revelation that resurrection is impossible, this proved that Alphonse was both alive and the real Alphonse, leading Ed to theorize that Al’s body still existed and could be recovered. None of this happens in the movie, despite it devoting so much time to their fight.
Because the movie lacks the plot of the manga—or any plot at all, for that matter—none of these scenes have any business being in the movie. None of them contribute anything because they’re inserted independently of context. That’s all this movie is: scenes that don’t relate to one another because they’re all just stolen thoughtlessly from a completely different story.
It reminds me of when Tommy Wiseau tried to steal lines from James Dean movies, actually. This is not an adaptation; it’s a sequence of iconic scenes from the manga haphazardly strung together without even a hint of proper context.
Misguided Creativity or None at All
I consider this movie to be worse than the 2003 anime. Why? Because the 2003 anime at least had more creativity behind it, even if it was misguided creativity.
Changing the story so that Shou Tucker gets arrested, turned into a chimera abomination, and allowed to continue his research leading to his attempting to create a replacement Nina, while stupid and terrible compared with what happens in the manga, is at least creative in its insanity.
It’s certainly a lot more creative than having Tucker get arrested, released from prison, and recruited by a should-be background character so he can deliver exposition and then die. Obviously neither one’s as good as having Scar break into his house and kill everyone, but one stupid change from the source material is clearly more interesting than the other.
A Story to Tell
At least the 2003 anime had a story it wanted to tell! It wasn’t a story I particularly liked, but it was a story. It had a plot. It had characters. It existed for a better reason than just getting people to watch it because the trailer makes it look good.
Some people even like the 2003 anime better than the manga, because its story resonated more with such people; it made them feel something. I can’t imagine this movie making anyone feel anything.
Final Thoughts
Is this film worth watching? If you have to ask, then you’ve clearly not read anything in this article thus far. This movie is an abomination! It’s horrible. Yes, it’s worse than the American Death Note movie.
I’ve not seen Dragonball Evolution yet, but then, I was never much into Dragon Ball in the first place so I doubt I’d be able to be objective here.
As for whether it’s worse than M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender, I’d have to say… probably not. The Last Airbender movie had acting that made Yamada Ryōsuke look like either Romi Park or Vic Mignogna (take your pick; depends whether you prefer the English dub or the Japanese).
O, the acting in this was bad, with actors like Yamada mugging to the camera and such, but The Last Airbender had actors we know have done better just stare straight at the camera and read their lines in a monotone like bloody shyamalized robots.
Burn This Movie With Fire!
Avoid this movie at all costs. It casts a boyband singer to play perhaps the greatest protagonist in the history of shōnen, it has no plot to speak of, and it poses a very real danger of turning you off reading the manga.
Even the music is nothing but a terrible, droning score with not a single good or memorable motif; it was painful to listen to. It is an anime-to-live-action adaptation, and that’s pretty much all you need to know.
There is no earthly reason to watch this movie, there is no good reason not to read the manga, and if there’s anyone out there who’s trying to make a philosopher’s stone but who’s fresh out of live humans, I think I’ve got a list of filmmakers who’d be perfect.