Attack on Titan colon The Manga colon The Anime colon The (Live Action) Movie is sort of inconceivable to me. I just don’t understand the point of Attack on Titan: Part 1 having been made in the first place. Sure, Funimation picked up the rights to U.S. distribution, which was probably wise from a business perspective. But there are a few sticking points that makes it a weird choice for them.
Because I really do try to be optimistic, I’m going to tell you up front all of the good things about the movie. Mikasa actually looks Asian, it features Potato Girl, and it’s subtitled for all the weebs that hate dubs. Without any further ado, let’s wade waist deep into the shit.
This movie is shot in gray-o-vision, which certainly doesn’t help the fact that almost everyone is dressed in drab beige. It’s really easy to lose the hero characters among the generic extras. And the almost omnipresent shaky cam makes that even worse. This is the sort of reason that you usually give your primaries a distinguishing hair color or article of clothing or something to set them apart from the crowd, and it goes back to stage plays, where people in the cheap seats needed something to differentiate the characters. And, oh, is everything a jumbled mess.
If you liked Attack on Titan, a simple heads up; all of the important things that sort of set up motivations? That shit got jettisoned, because they only had an hour and a half to fit what was easily four hours of basic plot and buildup. You will know that you hate this movie within the first ten- no four minutes. Yes, really. They decided that there really needed to be more post apocalyptic shit lying around as if it hadn’t been disturbed for a hundred years. Like husks of helicopters, or an unexploded bomb that this movie’s resident dipshit, Eren, decides to stand around on and punch when he gets pissed off.
Which is important, because this motherfucker spends eighty-five percent of the movie stumbling around for no readily apparent reason, ten percent looking absolutely incredulous, and five percent actually acting in character. And I mean literally stumbling, as in every step he takes looks like he’s about to kiss the ground. Except for right near the end, where he’s almost competent before you know what happens.
Can I talk about the costumes for a minute? Like I said above, it’s mostly a sea of beige. Which really makes the last half of the movie hard to follow. They had one thing that they could’ve easily gotten right, and they fucking blew it. Mostly because they were averse to almost anything that wasn’t some shade of gray or incredibly muted. You have seen pictures of better costumes from cosplayers, and it takes until nearly the middle of the movie for things to at least start looking close to right. And even then, the movie is so damn monochromatic that it still looks off.
The movie literally swerves its way off a cliff in the first fifteen minutes, and there are no survivors. Remember how there was that plot point about there being no known female titans, and how the sudden appearance of one pretty much means something is up? Well, several are among the first to walk through the gaping hole in the wall. At least all of the titan makeup is suitably creepy, even if it is overwhelmingly gray. The Colossal Titan being an effect of special note. Which reminds me; I really should have put the sheer number of practical effects in with the good things. I’m a sucker for practical effects.
To further complicate things, some characters are renamed outright, or merged with other characters. Levi is pretty much merged with Erwin, is renamed to Captain Shikishima, and really acts like neither of them (though to be fair, I have no idea if they drew on their characterization from further on in the manga, as I really haven’t read it). So much gets changed or dropped that a lot of the occurrences they do include lose a lot of impact. And they do make (slightly altered) use of some of the more infamous scenes from the series, true. But they clearly didn’t ask why those scenes had the impact they did, as clearly evidenced by their placement.
But there is one point, at the 45 minute mark, where it really shits a hole through the bed. Two words: titan baby. You already know you hate it. And no, I don’t mean that they show how or in what form titans reproduce (I’m certain those that read the manga already know that). I mean that there is a titan that is literally a baby. At that point, I threw up my hands and chanted the mantra of St. Egoraptor.
All in all, there is little to recommend the movie to fans of the franchise (unless you really need to have that sort of laughter you get when something you like is utterly ruined in front of your eyes). And I really can’t imagine a demographic on the North American continent other than that who would be willing to watch it. As far as film adaptations of specific series go, it is one of the worst cinematic abortions I’ve seen since M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender.
B. Simmons
Attack on Titan: Part 1
Film