So, the BD is finally out.
Goddamnit DEEN. God damn it.
Ok, so trying to cram a novel larger than Order of the Phoenix into an hour and forty five minutes was kind of a suicidal project to start with, I understand that. The majority of the atmosphere and value of Nasu’s writing, particularly during combat scenes, is in the narration, which makes it very hard to represent graphically and thus many scenes would lose impact (Caster getting FALCON PUNCH’d for instance). I understand that too. I knew this was likely to end being a disjointed, horribly paced collection of scenes meant to be fanservice for the fans and otherwise unintelligible for anyone who didn’t read the novel, and I would have been perfectly fine with that, but SON OF A BITCH, you could have spent a bit more time on the climax scenes.
In the novel, there are several minutes worth of narration in between Shirou falling to his knees against Archer and when he gets up. This isn’t clutter, that part was absolutely vital, it’s pretty much the whole point of the guy’s characterization. That introspective could have easily been done there by having him think to himself in between visions. But no, he gets up immediately and the entire psychological struggle gets dropped in favour of “He screamed harder and won”. Alright, that’s how the battle probably looked from Saber’s perspective since she didn’t know what either was thinking, but the fact is that the entire narrative value behind the whole thing was lost.
Still, that was still passable, Vs Gilgamesh was a goddamn travesty. The whole damned reason Shirou won that fight is skipped in favour of… oh, hey, “he screamed harder and won” again. And somehow, Emiya was not playing during that fight.
But most of all, Shirou has no character. UBW was awesome precisely because it focused on Shirou, an extremely atypical, psychologically convoluted and very badass dude. Movie Shirou is a dude who swings swords really hard. Fuck you, DEEN. TWO SCENES. That’s all this movie needed to work, TWO SCENES done right. You somehow fucked that up.
Overall, it’s pretty, and “okay” if you want to waste two hours watching coloured sparks flying to the sound of clashing metal, but it could have been SO MUCH MORE if they had just done that right. This is the same studio that managed to miss the one vital scene in the Fate anime, so I’m guessing I should not be surprised.
