Is that apple guy supposed to be a Levi replacement?Coz I noticed the resemblance in their standing postures..Also,is it just me or did he carry an apple to the battlefield?Not cool.Sloppy eater and sloppily bites his apple.
Anyway, completed the movie a while back and it seems to deviate a lot from the original plot. The storyline seems similar but the way things are carried out are much different and the characters seem to have been modified a lot.
Too bad to see that there was much room for improvement in this movie that wasn't entirely used.They tried hard in making this yes,and from what I recall was an interview of the director of this movie,it was mentioned that Hajime himself suggested many of the changes.Regardless,I feel like many things could have been polished before making the movie,into something more appealing and overall better fitting.Now,am gonna critic mode here,please bear with me,but from what I see they downright butchered most of the thing AoT stood for.
For one,here goes my rant - Mikasa.Mikasa is,in a way,Attack on Titan for me.This movie,picked apart her character bit by bit,and then did this horrible job at putting it back together.For one,why on earth is she wearing Eren's scarf?Moreover why,when she is probably being compromised by this Shikishima guy and has never even been supported by Eren in the first place?She isn't emotionally compromised, gdi, leave that to Reiner!Horrible joke if this was to make up for lack of Reiner's character. Bottom line - I cannot care much about this character of Mikasa. She doesn't have be the exact character from the Anime considering how much the plot was changed in this movie,but I cannot say I see this Mikasa being well written,and neither do I feel it leaving an impact even close to what Mikasa's original character left on I.She doesn't really give off this stoic feeling that Mikasa originally did,but I'm fine with that.Most characters felt compromised anyway.
Secondly.And this is completely absurd.Levi.
The sole reason the left out levi's character was due to his name being 'Levi',as it isn't a name popular in Japan.That was precisely the reason if I recall it right.Sure,many people loved his character with him being downright,the single most popular SnK character out of the pack.Understandable they left out his character due to confusion among the Japanese audience.Not understandable - Shikishima apple vendor.Ffs,this is a guy who seems to be a part time apple biter,and part time pervert.Nothing like Levi's character,which is fine,but furthermore,not really the idealistic 'humanity's strongest' that one would be inspired by.Or at least,not one that I would look forward to.I can still see nightmares of this guy's wonderful tutoring - Dialogues like , 'Fly right into the enemy'
*Eren flies right into the enemy*
*Eren loses a leg*
*Eren crash lands*
Final words from Shikishima - ' Well,Sometimes we are unlucky'.
*Heroically walks away*.
Anyway,I am going to stop here coz I don't feel it's worth typing out a page long post on him.
Thirdly - Dat titan transformation tho.
Yes, that titan transformation was cool. Eren's titan didn't look all that bad.But here's the highlight of the scene. Everyone knows the titan is Eren the moment they see him. For one, no one questions a deviant titan being there. Instead, everyone is overjoyed since they found an ally who they wholeheartedly believe is an ally up until the moment it attacks Mikasa. Except here's a plot twist - He doesn't even punch the place where Mikasa is standing! Absurdly so, when he went all out Annie mode a while back displaying world shattering combat tactics on the titans running around, including those of throwing punches and kicks with pinpoint accuracy to blow titans heads off. Besides those facts - Everyone somehow seems to knows Eren is comfortably residing at the back of the titan's neck and are apparently geniuses at it when it comes to rescuing a shifter from his own body. Goes over the head? Well,not theirs. Judging by their actons, these guys been knowing shifters even before the shifters came into existence themselves. Moreover the way this is carried out is utmost bullshit and requires prefetched knowledge which these guys apparently gained on the spot, right when they saw the shifter. Co-incidence? I'd rather call it poor writing, and the simple fact that they tried to squeeze this scene short to cut down on screening time, went to make this only more absurd than it already was.
Eren dies,Mikasa cries.
Bull-Shit!
Firstly,these two do not share a common home in their childhood. Eren is someone who lost his parents even before the movie started and has been running hopeless, being fired from jobs left and right. Mikasa in contrast is someone who had a rather easy childhood, who holds a big smile on her face, and in joy jumps left and right. Any guesses who turns out to be an emo out of the two? Mikasa.
Following the above, these two were in no way, supported by each other. Mikasa probably never followed Eren in saving Armin from bullies as a child, and Eren in return never housed Mikasa in her childhood. Hell, kid was struggling to keep a roof under his own head all this while! There is apparently no reason for Mikasa to have fallen apart upon hearing of Eren's death from Armin. Moreover, she had zero reasons to cry it out upon hearing of Eren's death as her devotion to Eren in this movie is absolutely, not justified. Unless of course she was crack in the head or there was some teenage romance running between two ten year olds in their childhood.
Jean's character. Okay,now this is going to be a short one. Lets just say they picked up another one of the best characters in Aot, and instead of picking it apart, fed it to an obese kid. This obese kid inherited Jean's character as a result and now walks around as Jean bullying any child be it named Armin or Eren. There was one part of Jean's character they did get right though and that was his cockiness. Though he clearly wasn't a classroom bully and rather, had a sole rivalry with Eren. In this movie though, he seems to pick a fight with pretty much everyone who opposes him and it's just that Eren has opposed him twice so far.
There were many dumb things in the movie. Some of them so impractical that they wouldn't in fact be used in an Anime either. First of them being plot power.
Instance of plot power - Swords slice through titan, the way a knife slides thorough butter. Then comes this titan who neither Swords can slice through nor arrows or axes. Why? Coz plot power. Abnormal or not,this was the titan that consumed Eren before he became a shifter, the sole reason they couldn't kill it off as they had to display Eren transforming out of the titan first. The way they went about it - they made it impenetrable to any means of attack from humans, upto the point Eren spout from within.
Instance of idiocy. Sasha using bow an arrows as primary weapon to attack titans. Ironically right after a flashback where Hange mentions guns being an impractical means of weaponry what with the nape of titan's necks being an area hard to be aimed on by projectiles.
Instance of thief. Dat thief..
Instance of Hange being the rookie she never was. Come on already, you guys wanna make Shikishima OP? Fine. Mikasa OP? Fine. Hanje worthless? Hell no. For one we got to see Hanje being the crazy scientist, albeit poorly pulled off, fine. But not a single kill? Being paired together with the hopeless bunch, being given the position of a squad leader ffs, and not a single kill. Now I don't really expect her to go out there and get all the day's kills coz I just don't see that as her character, but yes. I did expect them to make a squad leader more worthwhile than this in combat for once that we saw her. This was one of the most disappointing moments in the movie for I as I was eagerly waiting for her to do something worthwhile, and as that never happened. It was saddening to see her being paired with the rest of the pack, what with the position of a squad leader yet remaining a sitting duck the entire time. I don't even know what to make of her character at this point. It's not like she displayed any instances of extraordinary intelligence either.
I really didn't hope for any of the characters to have been their Anime counterparts here. The plot had been changed to a great instance to fit the movie and such, so were the characters. What pains after all that though, now , is that even though the characters weren't their Anime counterparts, they weren't well written either. In all reality if there is one legit good character that I can recall from the movie, then it is Armin. Armin was a legit character who actually seemed to be realistic, ideal, and one who displayed his skill - Namely intelligence - in a non exaggerative manner. Amazing characters are what make a huge percentage of what Shingeki no Kyojin is, and is one of the reasons people follow this series. One of the reasons I follow this series. There's not a single character I can call being legitimately poorly written, and that is the beauty of Attack on Titan. Every character has been put a lot of effort in it and Isayama really know how to get his characters right. This movie was something that downright crushed that aspect of AoT.
The movie wasn't entirely bad however. There were a few good parts as well, the titans being the first of them. The Titans were amazingly displayed in the movie. They seemed hunger driven, gave about this feeling of despair, and bought along just the disaster one would expect them to. Just the way it needs to be. This was something that could not have been done better.
Apart from the that, there were a few other things worth mentioning that I feel the movie pulled of really well. Sasha's character during her first appearance. Lol,this was hands down one of the best part of the movie! That intimidating Sasha was incredibly funny and totally unexpected XD. They went a bit overboard with her hunger issues in the later parts of the movie though, and that placed her back into the boring character section sooner than expected.
Another one of the aspects that I was really satisfied with was the amount of censoring they put in. The version I watched (Was the one on Kissasian.com iirc), had zero censoring to it and displayed blood just the way the producers expected it to. There wasn't much to censor in the steamy scenes as the characters hands did it more often than needed lol, but it was anyway a really satisfying experience to watch a show with so much of realistic gore and not having censorship spoil the fun of it.
Honestly, these are a few good scenes of the movie that I can recall. I don't feel like I am missing out on anything thus far as there probably weren't anymore.
Bottom line, the show was mostly bad with a few exceptional good. The exceptional good isn't worth considering though as the mostly bad almost completely overshadows it. But go ahead and watch it anyway as this review may have already piqued your curiosity onto how bad this show sucks. So bad in fact that you'd have to watch it for yourself.