Tentacle-Free Anime: “Attack on Titan, Part 1” (2015) Review

- by Kazekun, 14 September 2015

Generally I would have something to talk about here that would usually relate to the anime that I'm about to review, but this time is different. This time I would just like to jump into things. Spice things up, rustle some jimmies, and talk about the first live-action Attack on Titan film. Body temperatures are about to rise, just like Eren's does when he goes full on Titan mode!

Attack on Titan: Live-Action – Part 1 (2015)

Episodes: 1 (Movie);
Director: Shinji Higuchi;
Studio: Toho Company;
Rating: PG-13

Summary: Eren Jaeger lives in city surrounded by monolithic walls. Outside dwell human murdering Titans. For decades members of the Scouting Legion have been the only humans who dared to leave the safety of the walls and gather information on the Titans. Every time they return, many of them are dead. Freedom loving Eren has no greater wish than to join them. [AnimeNewsNetwork.com]

“Do Titans have nipples?” - Eren Jaeger

No Eren, they don't. In fact, Titans don't have any reproductive organs, so there shouldn't be any human-based way that these creatures can reproduce. In fact, let's hope that they never reproduce, and, while we're on the subject, you know what also shouldn't reproduce? This film.

What a weird way to start off a review, don't you think?

Attack on Titan the movie poster.

This movie, however, is very weird in more ways than you could imagine. Live-action adaptations for popular franchise's is nothing new, MANY beloved series have gotten them. And when a studio decides to put forth the money and effort into making a beloved franchise a live-action endeavor, fans can only claim one hope: that the movie is at least “alright.” Very rarely are they any good, and more often than not they're not very good at all. But Attack on Titan is strange one.

It had a lot to live up to, being based on one of the modern juggernaut classics of our time. How were the Titans going to look? Are they going to use European actors to accurately portray the characters from the series? How will they be able to film the fast-paced 3-D maneuvering gear?

Having just watched the first of TWO live-action Attack on Titan films, I can tell you right now that these were rushed productions to ride quickly on the coattails of this series' popularity, and not much thought was actually given to those three questions above, nor many other questions many of us never thought to ask. Because how could they get so much wrong?

Attack on Titan isn't a hard concept to bring onto the screen when you look at it from a storytelling perspective. In fact, it's very progressive in its portrayal of real human interaction and human emotion when stuck in a scenario where you could die. And there is very little focus on romance between these characters that live in a world where having romance is really kind of pointless. Yet this entire movie is bogged down by Eren and Mikasa's budding relationship and their will they/won't they attitude to dating.

Titan baby anyone?

It's very strange, because there's virtually no romantic tension between these two characters in the original series, and yet the writers of this film felt the need to regress the story and put the focus more on romance than on survival. It ends up hurting the characters and, in the end, the story, because just by that plot point alone these characters are automatically acting out of character and thus takes the viewer out of the story they know so well.

Going back to the first three questions I discussed above: The Titans look really bad when you're watching them on screen. There are two actual highlights of the film I have and, funny enough, they both include the Titans. When they're entering the hole in the wall for the first time, looking very eerie and otherworldly, and also a late jump scare in the movie when all we see at first is a single Titan eye. But other than that, straight out of the gate starting with the play-doh monster-- I mean the Colossal Titan, these creatures look terrible. You can painfully tell they're just normal humans who were green screened into the movie and their physical features re-edited later on. It just doesn't work.

A mysterious figure comes to quell the storm

 There's an obvious disconnect between the Titans being in the film and our actors being in the film. One looks like they should be there and the other looks like a college student filmed him and his friends wrecking toy stand-ups. Then we get to the actors, which I can understand not spending thousands of dollars to cast European actors to portray your characters, so all the characters were portrayed by Japanese actors. However, a big part of the world these characters live in in the original series is that Asians are very rare.

In fact, Mikasa and Levi both are basically the only two characters in the entirety of Attack on Titan anime who are Asian, so it was very surreal to see all these characters being portrayed by Japanese actors. It also didn't help that several characters' names were changed from the original series so I had to relearn names as I went along.

The 3-D maneuvering gear didn't look too bad actually. It felt tiny in the grand scheme of things, but overall seeing the characters wiz around in the air wasn't as bad as it could've been. The biggest issue with the gear scenes were two-fold: In the introduction of the gears, and how they're used to kill the Titans, there is a flashback rolling along the scene here where Hanji (named Hans in this film, ugh) is explaining how to kill a Titan and it really overshadows the actual reveal of the maneuvering gears thus rendering the scene meek and subpar. What could've been an epic scene, was quite frankly ruined.

 The other involved the effects team and their obvious lack of a budget. How to kill a Titan 101: Take a sharp thing and slice it across the nape of the Titan's neck really hard. This will allow for the deep cut to sever whatever is keeping the beast alive, and thus allowing it to die without regenerating. How to kill a Titan 101, but in live-action: Take a really sharp thing, and slice it across the nape of the Titan's neck really hard so that the entire head will explode in an unrealistic, over-the-top, and b-movie gory manner. It's just not right, I tells ya.

The Titans cometh!

I've been ragging on this movie for awhile now, but it couldn't really have been that bad, right? Well here's the thing, if it weren't an adaptation of a series we all already know very well, then it wouldn't have been terrible. Heavily tropey and something you'd watch on the SyFy channel, but not outright terrible. But it is an adaptation, so it has a lot more to live up to as we fans already know exactly what we're expecting. When it doesn't live up to that, unfortunately that makes it a bad adaptation. The writers and the director did NOT have any reason what-so-ever to change as much as they did for these movies. And there's still so much more I didn't get to mention in this review.

The majority of what they changed were made so that the story could focus more tightly on a romance subplot between Eren and Mikasa, a very boring romance subplot at that, and a subplot that altogether was not very apparent and hardly existed at all in the original series. It's a very strange change and I can't understand why the creatives behind this film decided this was the way to go. It doesn't enhance anything and it doesn't create suspense or feelings of fancy. This entire film is filled with strange decisions like this and all I can do is sit here and think to myself: “Do Titans have nipples?”

Final Score: 2 Green Screened Titans out of 5


Have you seen the live-action "Attack on Titan" movie? Let us know what you thought! 

Tagged: Tentacle-Free Anime, movies & TV.

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