Fullmetal Alchemist 2003 · 5:30am Jan 13th, 2015
My merciful Lord Jesus, I have not seen such wasted potential since Legend of Korra.
(Yeah that's right cry you pathetic knockoff of a better, funny, deeper character)
Let's see if I can somehow condense 51 episodes and a 105 minute film into something shorter than the King James Bible.
Let's be positive first, shall we?
There's actually not a lot to say in this regard, except that most of the character designs are pleasant, the artwork often has a sense of heavy atmosphere and some pieces of music are rich and emotive. I honestly thought I would have more to say originally but whatever good things this series contained is completely tainted by the bad.
The characters in this anime are all terrible people, no exceptions. There is a vast difference between characters being damaged individuals and having human vices and weaknesses and then having each and every character in your story infected with the most toxic bitterness and egocentricity.
Every single character is angry or resents someone else in the most immaturely rabid way and never get over it until the very last episode. If any one of them had simply said an extra line or explained themselves or told the other how they truly felt it all could have been very easily avoided.
Every character keeps making decisions based solely on selfishness or for their own gain, exploiting other character's issues or burdens at best or disregarding them completely at worse. And guess what, it always backfires and things get worse and worse yet still they never change but keep finding new ways to excuse their horrible behavior.
Now there are some very rare cases where such characters can be enjoyable--most Shakespeare plays are focused on the exact kind of people I described. But to get away with that the character's defects or wickedness has to be either darkly charismatic and disturbingly compelling, there has to be a magnetism that draws us to them and makes us want to see the next awful decision or mistake they make.
No one in this anime is like that, they are wretched in a frustrating way. It's just a mobius strip of seeing the same exact people with the exact same faults making the exact same mistakes and hurting the exact same people over and over and never really learning from it.
Edward and Alphonse are tremendously self-centered, they show no genuine concern for the feelings or worries of Winry or Pinako to the very end, the two people who they basically lived with since their mother's death, aka those who provided them with the means to study their alchemy and get this far in their story. They only care about being together at any cost, nevermind those who might miss them or be broken by their departure.
And considering how many mistakes they make for each other's sake coupled with Al's foolish naivety and Ed's stubborn cynicism I think the best thing for them would to be separated for a time, so they stop stunting each other's mental and emotional growth. I don't feel their bond is healthy but rather an obsessive emotional crutch neither of them overcome.
They talk a lot about trying to save others and help them but really in the end I felt they needed to chose to make some actual personal sacrifices for anyone other than each other for once.
As for Roy Mustang, he's a manipulative and scheming puppet master without any sign of true care for the people he uses. Oh characters say he cares for them and wants what's best but I never feel or see anything that cements in my mind or emotions. He toys with such vulnerable people so callously and even at one point says that the ends justify the means when it comes to his greater plan which by the way he never achieves so it was all really for nothing.
And isn't that the mindset of the villain (who we will get into shortly), as long as your goals are reached it doesn't matter who falls? How many bodies will you build the foundation of your future on? All seems kinda sinister to me to tell the truth.
But in the end, he's really nothing more than a hyper glorified cameo, his role is actually mostly unneeded in the grand scheme of the plot. The same can be said to really most of the cast other than the Elric boys: Hawkeye is a total nonentity and the rest of his team are baggage that eat up screen-time like Pac-Man.
Winry could have been cut out of the story entirely, she serves no purpose except to be very grating as she makes Ed spend all his money on her and constantly obsesses over any mechanical object to the point of fetishism. Her role as Ed's love interest is usurped by Rose, who after having her entire belief system violently decimated by Ed and left with only a couple of generic, token lines basically telling her to pull herself up by her bootstraps is then rewarded with brutal gang rape so savage she falls mute, being used as a symbol for another cult that's purpose is to round up victims for a Philosopher's Stone, confessing her love to a man who ultimately rejects her, and having her baby (born from said rape) used for the villain's endgame.
Scar is also here and he gets more screen time than Mustang or the Homunculi despite serving nothing substantial to the overall plot that one of the actual villains couldn't have done. He murders people wantonly, not just State Alchemists but anyone who he perceives is in his way, and never repents or sees the error of his ways, but rather gives up his life ultimately in the ugly, spiteful act of creating a Philosopher's Stone, in other words causing the death of 7,000 men utterly unrelated to his past sufferings.
The Homunculi are shoved to the very fringes of the plot and we're only given glimpses of them until the very end.
This is despite their very presence bringing up some very serious questions about the nature of the Fullmetal Alchemist world: in this version Homunculi are the results of failed human transmutation hinting at the possibility that they are in fact those people merely damaged by the act of forceful resurrection. Yet though this highly moral question is brought up and throw in our face constantly, it is never answered or fully explored.
The Homunculi do have memories of the person they are the "reincarnation" of but it is suggested this might only be the desires of the alchemist who created them foisted on their minds, so questions as to whether human resurrection is actual possible or if they are their own person or if they even have souls either way is left in the air which makes the deaths of the majority of the Homunculi at the hands of our "heroes" more disturbing.
Like the essence of their creation, the Homunculi characterzations offer many problems but little resolution.
Lust is the one with the most screen time (geee, I wonder why) and her backstory is she was a woman who perished from an illness and brought back by her lover. She comes across as extremely emo what with all her whining about desiring to be human and whether she possess a soul or not, despite still doing horrific acts with little to no repentance or remorse.
Sloth is the failed transmutation of Ed and Al's mother and despite how earth-shattering her very presence should be O N C E A G A I N she is never utilized until the last moment and offed almost as quickly as her confrontation with the boys is begun, by Ed himself, and despite her having the appearance and memories of his mother he shows no lasting emotional aftereffects of killing her.
Wrath, the stillborn child of Izumi, has the most justified reason for being the living embodiment of his moniker. After being transmuted as an infant and coming back looking like an alien slug, his mother returned him to the Gate where he was left sitting alone in darkness for years until Ed and Al preformed their own human transmutation, whereupon he stole Ed's limbs and with them was able to use alchemy to finally escape the Gate. When he is accidently found and reunited with his mother, he has no memory and the mental and emotional capacity of a toddler, displaying no malice and might have been able to be raised normally if not found by Envy and fed unrefined Philosopher's Stones (don't ask it made no sense in context either). Then with his regained memories, he is understandably upset and eventually taken under the wing of the other Homunculi, the entire time desperate for a mother of any kind.
And despite all this he is often reduced to merely a hysterical screaming child and while not as annoying as some (*cough* Winry and Rose *cough*) his very justifiable resentment and tragic thirst for a parent to love him is never fleshed out other than him crying "Mommy, mommy!" or threatening to rip Ed's other limbs off (because he thinks this will make him human...somehow.)
Speaking of Izumi is very unsympathetic here. So you want to bring your baby back, understandable, and then only succeeded in bringing back a squirming, wailing worm creature. But she never acts in horror or pushes the failed transmutation away, rather she holds it close as if it were her baby. But then instead of taking it home or even killing it right there in mercy or whatever, she gives it to the Gate despite saying when she looked into it she saw "hell". So you gave this creature who you show no disgust or fear of but rather seem to consider it an innocent, possibly your child, to Hell?
Speaking of unsympathetic we've got two other Homunculus creating parents and their resentful child:
Van Hohenheim aka Ed and Al's daddy, and his lover Dante were the kick-starters of every instance of misery in the entire anime by first creating Philosopher's Stones which not only allow them to use enhanced alchemy without Equivalent Exchange, but also slow their aging and even freaking body snatch when they finally do start to decay.
So basically for decades these two slaughtered mass amounts of people (true Philosopher's Stones require at least hundreds of human lives) and possessing the bodies of other people (it is never said if the person's soul is killed upon their possessing or if they are caught watching helplessly as their bodies are used against their will)
But yeah eventually they had a kid who died from mercury poisoning and Van Hohenheim brought him back as the Homunculus Envy who despite being identified as a boy in this version sounds so much like a woman a couple of times when he was speaking I thought it was Lust.
But this happy trio of destruction was finally broken up when Van Hohenheim left. And here starts the problem with his portrayal in this version, there is no way to gauge his reasons for anything he does.
Firstly, it's stated that he was the one with the ability to create the Philosopher's Stone and Dante never learned how (how you don't learn to create the thing that you require for existence sounds suspect but whatever). But it's never said how many Philosopher's Stones Hohenheim has made, he had to have at least made one more for Dante, so that means he is guilty at the very least of two instances of mass murder.
Secondly, why did he abandon Dante and Envy? Is it because he realized Dante was as stable as Mt. Etna or was he tired of committing atrocities and she wasn't? He states upon meeting her again (after whole decades, she says) that since he was the only one capable of creating the Stone he was hoping she would just "fade away".
Pretty icy for a woman you lived with and had a child with, presumably for several lifespans though like everything else in their backstory it's never specified how long he lived with her. Is he so cold because he's angry at what she's become or because their last meeting was less than pleasant?
And why didn't he take Envy with him or at least try to convince him to leave his mother? Either at the time Dante was not insane (well, as insane) and so he wasn't worried of leaving Envy with her, but that means he just up and left his woman and child purely for his own personal freedom or disinterest. If she was this bad already, why would he leave his child with this lunatic, did Envy not want to come with?
Thirdly, his reasons for leaving Ed and Al and their mother are also highly suspect. He says his body started rotting rapidly because apparently every time you body snatch a piece of your soul is left behind and eventually it becomes too weak to support new bodies.
He tells Ed he couldn't bear for his family to see him like that and left. So, no attempt at explaining yourself to your loving wife? Was he afraid he would have to come clean about being over 400 years old, having committed mass counts of first degree murder and being a foreign soul in a stranger's body? Or did he feel the truth would be too much for her to take and would cause less trauma for her and the boys if he just left quietly?
His wife tells Ed and Al that he left to study alchemy, she doesn't seem the lying type so did he tell that to her to make it easier for him to leave or give her false hope that he would return?
The boys find some letters he sent to his wife after he had left but it seems that he stopped sending them because if not they could have used his latest address to contact him. So why did he keep writing if he wanted to stay away forever, he makes no mention of ever intending to return or trying to find a way to become normal as his Brotherhood version did.
Fourthly, in the film he assists the Thule Society aka N A Z I so he can use them to open a portal for Ed back to the Fullmetal world from our parallel world (are you shocked or confused at the mention of parallel worlds suddenly in this review? Then you know how it feels to watch the show. And if that answer sounded lazy and off the cuff than once again you know what it feels like to watch the show).
So did he not know the Thule Society's intentions aka mass genocide and the ultimate supremacy of the Aryan race? For a guy whose lived at least 400 it sounds unlikely he couldn't recognize an evil rising organisation hellbent on world domination, considering his own past.
So if he did realize their wickedness he felt he could use their evil intentions for the benefit of his child, but does that mean he risked the destruction of both worlds for Ed's sake or did he think they could never really utilize the knowledge he gave them since he either fed them incomplete garble or because alchemy can't be used in our world?
Yeah but you see basically his character is a complete mystery, at the worst he is a unfeeling self-centered man only out for his own comfort and at best he is a weak man who is emotionally crippled from years of horrible sin. All I can say is a lean towards the more benevolent interpretation only because in his voice acting and animation he comes across as a genuinely kind and loving individual overall. But he still is a pretty disturbingly flawed person that with more time and focus could have developed into an interesting atoner archetype or something but nah, his entire screen time including the film probably doesn't even come near the fifteen minute mark.
Dante, Hohenheim's old flame and conceptually the Big Bad, has less screen-time than anybody, freakin' Gluttony gets more than her. She has zero depth of any kind, we have no clue what she was like prior to her body snatching days and therefore we don't know if she was always evil or corrupted by years of sin.
Did she convince Hohenheim to create the first Stone, therefore corrupting him, or was he in the role of the corrupter bringing in an innocent young woman into his depraved plans?
We're told Hohenheim was the one who transmuted Envy, is it because she can't perform human transmutation or because she didn't want to? Was it both their desire to bring their child back or only Hohenheim?
Did she ever love Envy, certainly she shows no love for him now, instead provoking his hate for his father even further and never seeming to mind that he calls her "master" rather than "mother."
The most we get to a motive is when she tells Ed she is the "Shepherd of Sin" and that her hording the Stone and spreading myths that all who seek it end up dead or miserable (which isn't really a myth it's kind of fact) keeps mankind from utilizing it for worse reasons. But like, that makes NO SENSE because isn't she the one who keeps reintroducing the Stones to humanity and causing more terrible tragedies than humanity would perpetrate on their own?
I can only assume she's either lying which is all she's done since she showed up or just bonkers. In the end the only solid motivation I could see is she wants maintain her "eternal life" by body snatching until Kingdom come, though for what reason I can't tell, what's the purpose of living forever if she has no desire to rule the world or be with a specific person forever or achieve godhood? I mean what does she get out of it really?
Then there's Envy. We don't even find out he's Hohenheim's son until like the last seven or five episodes and he only had brief cameo appearances before then, so basically he goes from being like this:
To this:
I don't get it, it doesn't add to the story or anything except to make Hohenheim more morally ambiguous and only serves a very minor purpose in the film. It's like if in Star Wars we found out Darth Vader was Luke's father in the last ten minutes of Return of the Jedi but then Darth Vader got shot down in his TIE fighter off-screen and it was never spoken of again.
Of course, no review of this show can be done without speaking of the ending.
Basically, for some reason that I honestly cannot fathom or guess at, it is revealed that the Fullmetal Alchemist world is a parallel one to ours and all their alchemy that we've enjoyed and they love using throughout the show is fueled by the energy of the dead souls from this one.
So...like, does that mean there's no afterlife? Or does like your spirit ascend to Heaven and your soul just becomes energy? Does that imply souls aren't any supernatural or spiritual but merely some undetectable energy in the human body? People are nothing more than electricity and flesh and bone?
...Or are souls prevented from entering the afterlife because of their use of alchemy? Which answer is worse?????????
But whatever looking that very OBVIOUS AND GIANT MORAL ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM Al and Ed once again decide to play God (aka what got them into this damn situation in the first place) and conclude on their own without any advice or consent from any other individual from either world, that neither world's humanity should be able to communicate with each other and so destroy the Gates that lead from each parallel world to the other, trapping themselves on our world, alone, with no way to ever contact or reunite with all their friends again. Yeah that's right, Winry, Pinako, Rose, Roy, Hawkeye, Armstrong and all the rest will never see them again. The boys shed no tears, say no goodbyes, and accept their fate with a smile because at least they're
T O G E T H E R F O R E V ER
And yes, I know that crazy Thule chick invaded their world and tried to destroy it, but one psycho shouldn't be a reason to destroy a huge and important revelation like parallel worlds. That's like saying we should stop practicing medicine because Mengele did such terrible things in the name of it.
I'm not saying science or advancement is worth human life or anything but also I don't think fear of horrible possible outcomes should stop people from doing things either. People shouldn't be afraid to fall in love or get married because they might get divorced, or not have children because those children might die.
And remember, they do it without asking anyone else if they're okay with it or want it, they just decide the fate of both world's on their own. An 18 and 17 year old.
Ye...ah....
It answers none of the questions that were risen in the series and resolves any loose ends by simply killing half of the characters and shutting off contact with the others. The rest of the show is no better, full of padding that it cannot maintain any emotion or compelling aspect for long and instead bores and exhausts you with how long it takes the plot to plod from one story-line or character arc to the other. I felt that it was all building up to some cataclysmic and mind-blowing climax but instead was given a convoluted collapse of tangled unrelated and ill-conceived concepts that just left me still confused and unsatisfied.
So in confusion, don't waste your time with this arduous and frustrating mess and instead go watch Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. You won't regret it.
Well, dodged a bullet with that one.
The only good episode in my opinion:
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I'm a sucker for a comedy. After that? That's where the rest can suck it.
Also if y'all want the crap taste from this adaption out of your mouth, try this on Netflix.
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Hunter x Hunter (2011) is complete by 148 episodes. Although they have up to 100 on Netflix, the rest can be seen online. Cons: slow start early on in the first arc and hearing the same opening song can get a little annoying. Pros: You'll be shown an adventure story with very good depth, memorable characters and neat action.
I'm not sure how to express my gratitude for this review without sounding creepy, so I'll have to just leave it at Thank you.
And The Truth said: "Let There Be Brotherhood"
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2719648 I've actually been intending to check that show out, thanks for the confirmation!
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(Honestly I'm just glad some people agreed with me, I know this still has quite a following but I think a lot of it might be nostalgia factor and most haven't gone back to re-watch it. It's just so dark and bitter and hopeless that I can't really understand the appeal.)
2719581 Me too. Glad I didn't see that.
2720385 Well let me tell ya, there is no nostalgia in that show. Brotherhood, excluding the first episode, actually followed the story from the manga perfectly. The manga came before either anime. That is the original. That is something to be nostalgic about.