I absolutely love Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood. I has to be in my top three anime of all time if not my favorite. Naturally, when I saw that there was also a follow-up movie for this 2009 version of the tale I was skeptical. The Sacred Star of Milos did have a different director but it was still under the same studio so I didn't really know what to thing. I should have gone in with little expectation. This movie isn't very good. The style and setup is great but quickly becomes generic and predicable.

The story of The Sacred Star of Milos takes place during the Brotherhood storyline, oddly enough. The audience never knows specifically when but from what I could gather it takes place after Alphonse remembers "the truth" (thus he is able to transmute without a circle) but before the brothers know of Father's plans of sacrifice. This bugs me. Because of the pace that the anime has I just don't see anyway that anything other than their main mission could take place between the these two plot points. Before or after, sure, but it's just odd that they chose this scenario of events to play around with in the first place. After doing some research, however, I have found that most of the fanbase doesn't consider this story canon so I don't really know what to think.

Anyway, at the start of the film we are introdced to two siblings, Julia and Ashleigh (strange spelling) Crichton, whose parents are famous alchemists around these parts. Two wolf chimeras slip into their house while they are distracted and kill the father and mother while Ashleigh escapes leaving Julia to fend for herself. Years later, Ed and Al are celebrating the generic Amestris harvest festival when suddenly a powerful Alchemist escapes from Prison and, when the brothers try to confront him, they are unable to detain him because of his strange alchemy. After a short investigation run by Mustang, they discover that this mysterious man is after a girl from Creta named Julia who has been recently detained for illegally immigrating to Amestris. With this information, Edward and Alphonse Elric travel to Table City on the border between Creta and Amestris to learn about this strange alchemy and capture the man.

I do like the premise here. All of the above takes up the first fifteen minutes of the film and I was never disinterested. I truly wanted to see where this went. When the brothers actually get into Table City is when the problems start. On the ride there, the train gets attacked by a group of gliding militants and Ed and Al have to fight both them and a wolf chimera. This action scene doesn't just look amazing but it creates a sense that something isn't quite right because of the warring factions. Then after they find Julia everybody makes up and the story turns into every Fullmetal Alchemist plot ever with the bad guys trying to create a Philosopher's Stone by sacrificing the story. We've seen it a hundred times and it's getting boring now.

It makes me upset because the film started out so incredibly strong with motivations other than "get the stone." We could have had Ed and Al taking sides with the mysterious man or the faction of militants who call themselves the Black Bats. Or maybe the brothers had to try to get them to work together in order to fend off either the Amestrian or Cretan military. Or the plot could have been weaved into the Brotherhood plotline nicely with meaningful conversations about Chimeras or Humunculi. After the first half hour of the film it feels tedious because of how similar it is to everything else Fullmetal Alchemist. Just another story about douche-canoes wanting more power through the Philosopher's Stone.

Despite the story and theming problems, the movie isn't all bad. The animation is top notch but I am very torn on the style. It's hard to explain.

Take this:
Versus this:











The main thing that I notice is the line composition. The Sacred Star of Milos clip is hard and rough while the similar Brotherhood clip is soft and clean. The style is different but not necessarily bad. It just took me a long time to get used to. The music is also very good. The nation of Creta is based on real-world Spain so, fittingly, the music takes a lot of inspiration from that region and culture. It isn't anything to write home about but I do appreciate the fact that the creators of Fullmetal Alchemist do their research on everything from architecture to music.

If you've seen the plot of the 2003 FMA or Brotherhood than you've seen The Sacred Star of Milos. The animation and music is different and interesting in its own right and the film starts out strong but the entire experience is predictable and honestly boring.

Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood: The Sacred Star of Milos is not interesting but any FMA fan should still give it a watch.
Saturday, June 18, 2016
I'll be honest, it's not easy for me to pick favorites. It just might be tacky to say this, but my favorite anime of all time is Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood. The original 2003 series showed me the possibilities of what anime could be but Brotherhood solidified the idea that anime, just like everything else in this world, could be art. With that in mind, I simply cannot review this piece of art without spoiling the original series and at least a little bit of this one. So let this be known: Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood is one of my all time favorite things that exists and very well may be the best anime of all time. With that out of the way, I can talk about what makes this show so special.

For my first paragraph I would usually run down the general setup of the world and the characters and their motivations. I don't feel that I need to do that here. If you truly do need this then I recommend you read my FMA 2003 review. For this post, however, I am mostly just going to go over the differences between the two series.

For starters, the humunculi have changed slightly from their 2003 counterparts. The biggest change is their creation. The 2003 series had the humunculi being created from the people that had tried the taboo of human transmutation. I did like this idea because it gave each humunculus a connection to the characters but it didn't capitalize on this fact like I hoped it would. Brotherhood gets rid of this problem completely by having each of the humunculus being created by Father, who is a way more sinister bad guy than Dantes from the original series. Some of the humunculi's names and forms have been changed as well. Instead of Sloth being a liquid version of Ed and Al's mother, he is now a gigantic monster who is actually quite sloth-like. Pride is no longer the Fuhrer. Instead, the Fuhrer takes the name of Wrath.

I feel like these changes, even though they existed first through the original manga, are welcome as their names correspond more to their individual desires. In the 2003 series, Pride wasn't very Prideful, Sloth wasn't slothful, and so on. With these new identities, they each have to deal with the fact that they are based on the seven deadly sins and it makes me even feel bad for them at times. Especially Pride, Wrath, and Greed who all get more screen time then I ever would have expected.

The first twelve episodes of Brotherhood are equivalent to the the first twenty-four episodes of 2003. I have heard this as a complaint as some characters like Hughes and Shao Tucker don't get enough screen time but, to be fair, they don't get a whole lot of time to develop in the manga either. After the first twelve episodes, Brotherhood takes off into a whole new never-before-seen arc and introduces two new Brotherhood-only characters: May Chang and Ling Yao. If you've seen 2003 as many times as I have, these new characters and new surroundings come as a breath of fresh air. Later in the series we get even more characters and even more buildup to the eventual epic battle with Father.

In my FMA 2003 review, I mentioned on how amazingly emotional the soundtrack was. I am very proud to say that Brotherhood does not disappoint as it breaths new life into the music that the series is known for. We don't have the same standout tracks like Bratja but we do get a lot of new and unique tracks to take their place. With that being said, I do like 2003's soundtrack more because of Bratja. That one song is enough to tip the scales for me personally and I do truly wish that Brotherhood had included it at least once in the series.

I didn't mention the English voice acting in my 2003 review, but dang is it impressive. Every single voice actor does their absolute best in Brotherhood. Most of the talents reprise their roles. Alphonse's voice actor was too old for the part so Funimation went for a female actress and Scar's voice actor was replaced for one reason for another. Honestly, though, it's hard to tell. Al's very first line of the show is very noticeably a girl's voice but by the fourth episode sounds exactly like the actor from 2003. Scar sounds exactly the same from top to bottom. And, of course, Vic Mignogna returns as the voice for Edward Elric in quite possibly my favorite performance in any animated show ever.

As for the animation of this new re-imagined series, it is leagues better than anything that 2003 had to offer and I already thought that show's animation was really good. There are just so many moments of pure sakuga in this show. Any battle that involves Ling and the entirety of both the fourth and fifth seasons are just astonishing to look at. The one thing that I do think the show lacks, however, is its color palette. It seems like 2003 knew exactly what it was doing one-hundred percent of the time regarding the lighting and palette of each of its scenes. Brotherhood, on the other hand, wasn't as good. It is still far better than most shows out there even today, though.

Go watch Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood. Just do it. It is my favorite anime of all time and I know that so many others feel the same.

Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood is breathtakingly and believably beautiful.
Wednesday, June 15, 2016
The original Fullmetal Alchemist anime adaption is one of my favorite anime and shows of all time. Despite the alterations from the manga it has still held a special place in my heart all this time. The story was great and the ending was a perfect bittersweet experience. This sequel film continues from the series and is surprisingly great, from its themes to its story.

At the end of the 2003 FMA series, Edward and Alphonse Elric are split from each other and Ed is now on our Earth. Back in the Fullmetal Alchemist universe, Al has been training to become a great alchemist and find his brother despite him losing all memory of the past three years of their adventure to find the Philosopher's Stone. Edward is in our universe in 1920s Germany right after WWI and while Hitler is rising to power. After having some run-ins with the Thule Society, he has to stop them from invading Al's universe and thus clinching the victory of the next war. What a great idea! The original series only touched on the time period of Ed's new existence but Fullmetal Alchemist the Movie takes that setting and has it intertwine with Ed's struggle with this new world. 

It's not just the concept of this movie that is good. The film has a strong story of Ed trying to come to terms with this new world, Shamballa's version of Al inadvertently helping the Nazi's plan, and the original Al trying to find Ed. The only problem then? It is only one hour and forty-five minutes. Because of the short running time it doesn't have a whole lot of time to balance all the stories it is trying to tell. If the movie was longer or even a miniseries than there could've been plenty of time to flesh this world out, even though it is our own. Even though it could be better, The Conqueror of Shamballa does do a surprisingly good job of keeping itself in line. 

The visuals and music are what you would expect: great. The animation is as top notch as the show ever got and the music by the same composer, Michiru Oshima, is different but still fantastic. The musical style takes an even more European approach with large chunks of the soundtrack being played by the Moscow Ochestra. I can't really compare it to the soundtrack of the show though as the style is just so different but I do love it. The only problem I have with the animation is its use of 3D. I'm sure it looked great in 2003 but now it just looks dated. 

Despite all the praise I've given this show, there is just something that bothers me about it. Maybe because its the product of something so different than its original source material or maybe because I just feel anger that there are two versions of this great story. I can't quite explain it. Besides my personal beef with the film, Fullmetal Alchemist the Movie is a really good finale to the original 2003 adaptation and, though the ending isn't to my liking, it does a whole lot right from the animation and music to the story itself.

The Conqueror of Shamballa is great!
Saturday, June 11, 2016
Fullmetal Alchemist was the first anime that I ever experienced. I had seen American cartoons before but this was something completely new to me, despite its setting being European in nature. Amestris looked and sounded beautiful and the tale of two brothers trying to regain what they once had instantly gripped me. In 2009 there was an objectively better series called FMA Brotherhood based entirely on the original manga, but the original series will always have a special place in my heart.

Two boys try to bring their mother back from the dead and in doing so the older brother loses and arm and a leg and the younger brother loses his entire body; his soul bonded to a hollow suit of armor. They have since left the goal of resurrecting family and only now want to get their old bodies back using the Philosopher's Stone. This setup is what originally grabbed me when I was younger. Before this anime I hadn't experienced a show - a cartoon - to take itself as seriously as this from the get-go. No 'cartoon' before had dealt with death as serious and down to earth as this one. The darkest animated show that I had seen before this was Avatar: The Last Airbender who's themes drastically differ from this. From the first episode, I was on board with wherever Edward and Alphonse Elric would take me.

Fullmetal Alchemist's characters don't stop with the brothers. Winry Rockbell, an all-the-time-worried but strong mechanic acts as a shoulder for the brothers to lean on throughout the entire series. No matter what personal problems they may have, she serves as a constant reminder of not only where they came from but what they are fighting for. And then there's Mais Hughes. Though he is a fuzzy goofball at heart who tends to brag about his daughter, he is really an intricate investigator who will only answer to Colonel Mustang, his best friend. Mustang is quite the character. He is usually cool and collected but brash leader who tends to lead his troops into less-than-ideal places. He does have an eccentric side, however. Anyone who has seen the show remembers the "tiny mini skirts" ordeal. Mustang is one to not take anyone's crap, but still has a less serious side. I could go on for hours with each of the characters getting a paragraph a piece. Even the 'bad guys', the humunculi, have their own unique personalities, though not as expressed as the main protagonists.

'Bratja'. 'Brothers'. This song breaks my heart. No matter how or when I hear it, I cry. This song represents a bond. The bond between Ed and Al that, though clawed at, will never even scratch. This song is the lifeblood of anything Fullmetal Alchemist. The plucking of the strings create an intense melancholy and the russian choir singer starts out cold and distant but is picked up at the chorus for an uplifting feeling. No pun intended, this song is about brotherhood. Every single track in this anime is fueled by pure, raw emotion. 'Taboo' is the short, ominous theme about the sin that the brothers committed trying to bring their mother back and the repercussions of that action. On the flip side, 'Reunion' is just that. A reunion between family or friends. I don't have to even talk about why 'Koukai' is amazing. This soundtrack means so much to so many people for a great reason. The fact of the matter is that it is spectacular. To me, at least, no soundtrack to any movie, game, anime, or T.V. show has topped it or ever will top it.

For the time the visuals were fantastic but obviously don't hold up as well as Brotherhood's. I'm fine with this because the original FMA series does a much better job at one aspect of animation: lighting. Anything from Colonel Mustang's explosions to the dark corridors of Laboratory 5 look great.. This combined with the music makes a very personal experience for the viewer that cannot be forgotten easily.

Fullmetal Alchemist is something special to me and I've been ranting about it for four paragraphs now. This doesn't mean that it doesn't have flaws. I found that its main villain didn't have a whole lot of personality but they were sinister enough and their goals, though scattered, were good enough to keep me invested. Honestly, any other problems that I had with the series would be going into spoiler territory and comparing it to its 2009 re-adaptation which I don't think is fair considering, if I reviewed the 2003 series when it finished, Brotherhood wasn't even an idea in Studio Bones' collective consciousness. However, near the end of the show some of the characters introduced get a little ridiculous and I might even do a video comparing the two in the future. For now I don't think I should critique it any more than that.

Fullmetal Alchemist (2003) is utterly spectacular and one of my favorite shows of all time.
Wednesday, June 08, 2016
I've always been a fan of level making programs. Applications that allow ordinary people make levels for their favorite games. These can be hacking tools like Lunar Magic or even whole fan games with level editors built in like Super Mario Bros. X. Because of my love for the creator community I couldn't wait to get my hands on Super Mario Maker. Too bad that I didn't actually get the game until about a month ago. Oops.

Super Mario Maker is simply a Mario level creator. When creating a level you have the choice of four game styles (Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World, and New Super Mario Bros U) and six themes (Ground, Underground, Underwater, Ghost House, Airship, and Castle). When you are building your masterpiece you have a huge variety of items and enemies to use with new building blocks like the Donut Block and the Fire Koopa Clown Car. It sounds pretty simple but it can actually be a little overwhelming even with the game giving you the items in portions as you play the game. Sometimes I forget some features even exist until I am reminded of them through the community levels.

The community levels are where this game really shines in my opinion. For me, building levels takes an immense amount of time so most of my experience with the game has been through experiencing other peoples' creations. It can be hard to find good creations, though. The game itself doesn't have a built-in search tool that works through keywords. Instead, you have to find levels through a separate website and then type in the code of the level into the game. It just seems unnecessarily complicated. Is it so hard to have a keyword-based search bar? It shouldn't be. If I don't want to find a specific kind of level, however, the menus that Super Mario Maker does have work just fine. When the game was first released the 'Rating' tab was filled with levels without a whole lot of substance like 'Auto Mario' levels and really short but hard gauntlet-type levels. Since then, the 'Rating' tab has been updated many times in order to present the best levels.

Super Mario Maker also has a couple other modes in store. The 10 Mario Challenge and 100 Mario Challenge can be a great way to test your skill. The 10 Mario Challenge gives you 10 lives and has you surviving a number of developer-created levels while the 100 Mario Challenge gives you 100 lives and has you surviving a number of user-created levels of various difficulty. You can pick the difficulty you want to play on in this mode but it doesn't matter as it is very rarely you get an actually well-designed Mario level. Most of them consist of things flying at you from every direction or 'Auto-Mario' stages. This mode does have a 'skip' option by holding down the 'minus' button so if you realize a level is bad you can just skip it but this feature does cost you a life. I barely ever go on this mode and use it mostly to unlock the various Hidden Block Costumes that the game has to offer.

Super Mario Maker is fun to experiment with. There are ways to find really well designed stages but the amount of effort you have to go through to do so is way more than it should be. The level creator is really fleshed out and simple to use but I still wish that we had more. Who knows? Maybe we will continue to get updates that add new gameplay options.

Super Mario Maker is a really fun distraction.
Monday, June 06, 2016
At the time of writing this I have completed 50 anime according to MyAnimeList. Out of all of the anime I have seen, I have never been so divided on ERASED. It seems like the entire anime community is also divided as I have seen scores ranging all the way from one to ten. My score? Well for me it's a little more complicated than that.

ERASED, from the start, is a time-travel anime... kind of. The main character, Satoru Fujinuma, has the power to go back in time, usually from five to fifteen seconds. The catch is that he cannot do it at will and is instead willed to do so whenever somebody around him is going to be killed or greatly injured. He has been keeping this power of his a secret from everybody as, obviously, no one would believe him. It is established very earlier on that Satoru's past is a very dark one in which three murders in his home town. One of the murders was one of his good friends at the time and, though the police are convinced they have caught the killer, Satoru thinks otherwise. The man they have, Jun Shiratori (or Yuuki), was friends with a ten-year-old Satoru before the murders happened and the Satoru of today doesn't believe that he could have done it. Everything changes for Satoru when the killer from his past murders his mom for knowing his identity and, when the police are about to bring Satoru in for custody, he is whisked back to 1988 about two weeks before the murders start. From here on out it is up to him to catch the killer and ultimately save the day.

Let me just make it clear from here on out that I believe ERASED is a very subjective show and one's enjoyment of it all relies on how the individual can suspend their disbelief and accept certain scenes. For example, it is made very clear from the start of the show that Satoru can only go back in time when someone is in danger so it doesn't make much sense that he is brought back to 1988 after his mother dies. What the viewer thinks of this is completely up to them. I can really go both ways on this. If he was brought back before his mother died then Satoru wouldn't have a reason to find the killer that he suspects killed her. Throughout the rest of the series there is a number of plot holes that, though aren't too major, tended to slightly take me out of the experience. I can't dive into spoiler territory but I can say that there is a lot of cut content from the manga regarding secondary characters.

Damn, Yuki Kajiura. Calling back to my Sword Art Online review, I stated that, though the story sucked, the soundtrack was pretty decent. ERASED soundtrack is pretty great. I've only seen a handful of anime with Kajiura's works (mostly the Fate/Stay Night series and SAO) but from what I've heard she has greatly stepped up her game in the past year and I tend to agree with that statement after this anime's soundtrack. Though not every track is good there are a lot of stand-out pieces like "Only I Am Missing" and "Show Me Your Smile" and a bunch of others. She did some great work on this score.

I have a strong belief that it isn't about the end but about the journey. Though ERASED has a number of plot holes and plenty of cut content from the manga and the ending is lack-luster I still had a great time with it. To me and a lot of others the big picture is what counts for this show and its short comings are just a little too short to really matter. After I finished the show on MyAnimeList I gave ERASED an 8/10. The day after, I changed it to a seven. At one point I even brought it down to a six but then immediately raised it again to an eight. I am still torn on the series but I believe that it is at least worth the watch if you haven't seen it yet.

ERASED is whatever you want it to be. 

 Personally, I had a great time with it. 



Wednesday, June 01, 2016
Every generation there is a movie that does something new and innovative that kicks the industry in the backside and tells it to keep moving forward. Before 2009 it was hard for movie makers to take CGI to the next level because of its complexity. James Cameron changed the game with Avatar. Audiences and critics alike were astonished by how lifelike the world and characters of Pandora were and for good reason. There had been nothing quite this bold before. But does it stand the test of time seven years later?

Avatar is a strange movie. Whenever I talk with friends about it we don't discuss the intricacies of the story or the depth of the characters. Rather, they just say how amazing it was to look at seven years ago. The reason is, the plot isn't very deep or new. In fact, its rather predictable. If you've seen any adventure flick with a theme of "save the planet" than you've seen Avatar. It does have good characters but none of them really resonated with me in particular. This is where the Extended Edition comes in handy because the few extra scenes that it has do a lot to enhance some character motivations. Why does Neytiri not trust the 'sky people'? In the original her motivation could just be interpreted to be because of her culture. In the Extended Edition, however, it is explained that her sister was killed by the military which created friction between her and Grace and by extension, the humans. There are many more examples of this throughout the Extended Edition and I would say that it is the best way to view this movie, despite the three hour run-time.

Seven years ago, when Avatar was released into theatres worldwide, I was utterly amazed by how it looked. Back then I was just interested in how lifelike the characters and environments were but now I can appreciate the film and a whole new light. Not just is the directing very well done but Pandora itself is just beautiful. When I was younger I liked the variety of unique animals but now I even love the alive vines and the bio-luminescent flowers. Though some scenes look slightly more animated than I remember them, the design of the world is absolutely alluring.

The soundtrack for Avatar deserves a round of applause. At its core it may seem like basic tribal music but the way the film uses the score in specific scenes is aw inspiring. The flutes and percussion of "The Bio-luminescence Of The Night" and the high jingles of "Pure Spirits Of The Forest" help shape the world of Pandora to be quite a unique one.

Avatar has aged well since 2009. Though the CGI doesn't look quite as good as it did and the story is too easy to guess, the texture and sound of the world is great enough to keep me coming back.

Avatar is predicable wonderment. 
Monday, May 30, 2016
What ever happened to health bars in shooters? This seems like a very trivial question. The easy answer or at least the answer that most would agree on could be that, as games achieved the hardware to be more realistic, the games themselves followed suit with not only better graphics but with user interfaces. UI.



In most contemporary games, the UI shows information about the user as well as the world around them. In a modern shooter, say Halo 5, it can show ammo, a mini-map, items, and the player's shield. In modern games, mostly shooters, getting at

tacked is something that it shown very clearly on-screen with a red partial-circle in the direction of the bullets flying toward you in Halo, a similar red partial-circle with blood on the entire outside of your view in the newer Call of Duty games, and an arrow with blood smatterings in Uncharted 4. What do all of these have in common? They happen, then you forget about them.

It's very strange to me that games that are striving for realism, especially Call of Duty, are still using this particularly unrealistic trait of the human body. Taking five bullets to the chest isn't going to just slow you down and distract you for a few seconds; it is going to kill you. After the player has taken that initial hit, they are just going to forget about it an move on. In my ideal realistic game, that needs to stick with a person. A health bar would be a perfect place to implement that actual feeling of being shot without, obviously, having the actual feeling.

By this I mean that a health bar is there staring back at you as you trek through your space adventure, treasure hunt, or military simulation experience. When you get shot, a health bar reminds you of that and sticks with you. Say a man gets shot in the leg on the battlefield. By the standards of logic, that man probably won't be using that leg and thus has a higher chance of gaining another injury in the future. A developer can see a health bar in the same way. If a shot to the player takes off a certain amount of health, that player is more likely to die earlier because of it. That will stick with a player and can be a constant reminder of the vulnerability of themselves within the game world.


http://goo.gl/1Vtiuv

I first got the inspiration of writing this after seeing footage of Naughty Dog's “Uncharted 4”. I mentioned earlier that this game uses the same hit-then-forget system that so many other games with familiar shooting mechanics follow but this game seems like a special case for me. Though I have yet to play an Uncharted game (hope to get to that series soon), I do know that this franchise is about high-flying adventure and really wants to give the player a

sense of power not by tedious trips of the stuff, but by a having Nathan Drake being at a low-point, like dangling off a cliff side or escaping a sinking shit, and then rising above to conquer. Sure Nathan gets more tattered and torn the more he adventures, but there doesn't seem to be anything specifically gauging that level of stress. I am speaking entirely in hypotheticals of course because of my nonexistent relationship with the franchise but it's still something that I, at least, think about.


http://goo.gl/s618Wt

The standard shooting mechanic that we have now is fine but after seeing the same thing game after game it gets, frankly, boring. Maybe going back to the health bar mechanics of the early 2000's like in Halo: Combat Evolved or even older classics like Wolfenstein might be a fresh breath of air. I think that, recently, we have gone back to these to give our games a little more urgency. The new DOOM came out recently and has done just that. Sure its health bar/health pack system is ripped directly from it's first title, but I think the success of the game might have an effect of this mechanic coming back into the more mainstream titles like COD or Halo.

Am I basically just rambling now about something that isn't too important in the grand scheme of things? Yes, but I think that this particular ramble has some merit in a debate that I see no one having. Probably because it doesn't need to be had. I just find it humorous that gamers that strive for realism will defend the no-health-bar system of COD as being realistic when it is in fact the least realistic thing about the franchise. I'm no game designer, but realism is a component in the progressing gaming culture that will always lust for the next big jump. But I don't think that we should count something as trivial as a health bar out just yet.
Friday, May 27, 2016
Innocence is boring. This 2004 sequel to the 1995 hit Ghost in the Shell is generic, uninteresting, and boring. I dropped it at about 70 minutes in because I was not invested in the story whatsoever. Why is this? The previous movie and all the other anime based on the franchise are mostly critically acclaimed so why does this one fail where the others have excelled at?

I believe that the problems with Innocence start at the beginning. In this film, it has been quite some time since The Major and Batou have parted ways and since then The Major has been declared MIA. Batou is assigned a new partner, Tosuga, and has been assigned with solving the mystery of the sex doll murders. That's right! A number of customers who have bought androids for their private needs are dying from the hands of their toys. Skipping how needlessly stupid this is in order to get across a point, Batou and Tosuga have to find out who is really behind these murders, if anyone at all.

This whole plot dealing with the murderous androids exists to get across the question of "What actually is a human?" Our two detectives have to ponder this question while reciting quotes from long-since-dead people over and over again until my ears bleed. I'm not joking. Batou and most of the other characters constantly quote Caesar and you-name-it in order to sound philosophical when, in reality, they just sound stupid. I don't even think the initial plot is that bad but I don't care about any of the characters involved. For the majority of the film, it seems like the characters themselves don't even care about finding the answer to this rather deep question.

The utter lack of enthusiasm for action or mystery that any of the characters have isn't the only reason that I was never hooked on Innocence. The problem is that there was never hook to begin with. I get the feeling that the writers wanted Batou to somehow connect this theme with his past with The Major but that plotline is dropped so quickly and cleanly that I don't even get the chance to be intrigued as to where it might go. Because of all this, it makes for a story that is very unfocused at best and at worst just hard to continue with.

One aspect of the original Ghost in the Shell film that I praised it for was its animation. Innocence bumps up the quality of the 2D animation significantly and makes each movement of each character seem very natural and unique. The 3D animation is where it really suffers as, though it isn't necessarily bad, it doesn't fit with the style of the 2D segments at all and is way too heavily used. It seems like most of the backgrounds and anything that isn't a main character is CG which, in a way, explains as to why the quality of the 2D animation is so high; because there is very little of it.

Ghost in the Shell's soundtrack wasn't very great but it did fit the mood of the film. I can say the exact same thing about Innocence's soundtrack. This isn't because the quality of each soundtracks are the same but because each of the soundtracks are the same. The same generic tracks are used over and over again and, honestly, got a little grating on the ears.

Overall, Innocence is a huge let down and not at all what I was expecting from a sequel to a fairly great film. However, one thing that I can applaud this film for is that it helped me appreciate the original far more than I did before.

Innocence (Ghost in the Shell) is dull.
Wednesday, May 25, 2016
Where do I even start? Ridley Scott's Blade Runner is a fantastic piece of 1980s art. From its stellar soundtrack to vast and comprehensive world and relatable characters, Blade Runner impressed to a point that not many other films have. Even after a single viewing of the original 1982 version, this film has to be one of the best I've seen. Ever. 

Blade Runner stars Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard, a former Blade Runner who hunts down escaped replicants and "retires" them which is really just killing them. These replicants are manufactured AI that, for years, have been used all over Earth and subsequently on other space colonies. In 2019, replicants have become illegal on Earth and after an incident with a rogue replicant killing a Blade Runner, Deckard is told of four in total that have successfully made it onto Earth and is assigned to retiring all of them. 

One aspect of the film that I absolutely adore is the fact that I don't know who to root for. Sure Deckard is the protagonist but the rogue replicants have reasonable reasons for doing the things that they do. That reason being that they only have a lifespan of four years, despite looking like average adults. The only reason that they are causing trouble is because they want to find a cure for whatever is making them die after four years. This is exemplified when Deckard comes into contact with a women named Rachael who he knows for sure is a replicant. She, however, has memories from her childhood which convinces her otherwise and, as their relationship grows, the audience gets to realize just how human these replicants actually are. It's an AI story that, though done many times, seems to have been shown to its full extent if not started here. 

Blade Runner looks and sounds absolutely beautiful. Though the technology and effects used are noticeably dated, the cityscape is nothing short of stunning. Even on the city streets, everything is perfectly lit and themed in such a way to give me chills in certain scenes. As stated, the technology is dated but meshes so well with the world that I can lift my suspension of disbelief just enough to get absorbed in it. None of this would matter, however, without the music. Words for it: divine, ravishing, alluring, and even dark. The soundtrack is composed by the Greek composer Vangelis who has written for films of all types but surprisingly no mainstream films besides Blade Runner and he has done a fantastic job of capturing the noir feel of this futuristic (at least by 1980s standards) music with mostly jazz and operatic pieces. The visuals and the sound come together in a romantically stunning dance to give us the great atmosphere of Blade Runner.

I have seen so many films and shows that try to replicate the feel that Blade Runner gave us back in the 1980s. Now I know where it all started. From an absolutely brilliant film about a tense subject. Though other films from the era tried their hand at an AI-centric plot, Blade Runner has the bar set and I don't see it going dropping anytime soon.

Blade Runner is brilliant.
Monday, May 23, 2016
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