Fullmetal Alchemist (2017) ★☆☆☆☆

The foremost problem is obviously that the movie looks like shit. There is an underlying decision to try and make it look like the cartoon in a way that just does not work at all. The sets are sterile, sparse and over-lit, the CGI is charmless, the costumes honestly mostly work but everyone’s hair is awful. Roy Mustage looks like he just aged out of a second-rate boyband. Maes Hughes is just about the only character that works.

So why would I ever rewatch this? Because I watched it in Japanese years ago and recently learnt about the awful nostalgia-bait English dub where they brought back the original English voice actors for Edward, Alphonse and Winry and no one else and I wanted to both experience this and subject some friends to it. It’s an extra layer of trainwreck on top of the rest of it and is kind of fascinating to watch. Because they did get the original English actors back, not Brotherhood, and Aaron Dismuke as Alphonse is very, very noticeably not eleven years old any more, but you won’t be hearing that much of his voice anyway because Alphonse’s horribly-out-of-place-in-live-action armour is too expensive to have on screen so he gets immensely sidelined.

Meanwhile Vic Mignogna’s lines sound like he recorded them over the phone, which makes them feel even more out of place besides the much more subdued performances of the rest of the cast who aren’t reprising old roles. The English performances also feel constantly at odds with the body language of the on-screen actors, who are contributing to the attempted animesque style with some extremely hammy acting. On top of this is the fact that they have dubbed this more like an anime than like a live action film; trying to carefully sync lip movements to lines in a way that only calls attention to how what is being heard absolutely does not match what the on-screen actors are saying at all.

But gawking at a trainwreck is only fun for so long and, while the script does an admirable job at condensing so much of the story down to just two and a quarter hours, it’s two and a quarter hours of an incredibly poor rendition of a fantastic comic and show and the humour of poking fun of it wears thin before the movie is even half-way done.