[KRWolfblade]

So I watched the live action Fullmetal Alchemist film. It ranged from okay to meh to bad-ish. But like all live-action adaptations, it suffers greatly from having to condense several chapters/episodes into a 1-2 hour film.

The film made several big changes from the manga/anime. Marcoh is killed, Winry takes on a more sidekick role, Tucker lives and is killed by Lust, Lust is killed at Lab 5, Envy takes on Mustang's appearance to kill Hughes (framing the Colonel for his murder instead of Ross), Gluttony's "false gate" form is used to regularly eat people (not when he's incredibly mad), the Mannequin Soldier homunculi are introduced in Lab 5, Mustang's "rival" Halcrow (in the film he's General Hakuro) is responsible for creating the mannequin soldiers and seems to be working against the Homunculi's plans, and more.

One of the main problems of the film is that it couldn't decide who the antagonist/s were. It was just several villains doing bad stuff because plot. Much like the manga and anime, the Homunculi are set up as the antagonists but by the film's conclusion they don't really do much to justify this. They try to make Shou Tucker an antagonist but that falls flat as well. They try to make General Hakuro the final antagonist but it came out of nowhere and he wasn't interesting as a antagonist.

Also, a lot of emotional moments from the series are kind of brushed away quickly or don't hold a huge importance to the characters and their motivations. They set up the Nina/Alexander Chimera but without introducing Scar and the film's condensing of the plot, that moment doesn't play a big part for Edward and Alphonse later on. The same is for Hughes' death . One of the most important moments in the series and it's just brushed over.

And because of the condensed plot, a lot of characters are missing or aren't as interesting as they are in the manga/anime. Mustang is boring. Roy Mustang! One of the best characters in the manga/anime and the film makes him boring.

It was ok/bad/meh but would've been handled better as a tv show (given that this was for Netflix, it could've worked if done well).