Fullmetal Alchemist was just what I needed. An adventure series that knew when to be fun and when to be serious without being irrelevant or preachy - a show that delivered the goods and solid, heartfelt messages about brotherhood, sacrifice and retribution.
It was the only show for the last few years, besides Stand Alone Complex, that me and my brothers had deemed actually worthy of purchase. We bought every volume as it came out, and followed the story to the end.
The stupid end.
It was a steady descent, I suppose much like any other show. One major character died, and it was very sad. Then another interesting character died, and I guess it had to happen. Then another went down. And then another immediately after that. Before long, a whole chunk of the cast was gone, and many of those who remained alive began to appear less and less. Some of my favorite characters, those in the state military who had such great chemistry for the first half of the story, are almost totally brushed off as the show approaches the end. The characters who ended up getting the focus ceased to undergo any serious character development, even those who needed it.
I mean, look at Winry. Her parents were doctors during the Ishbal uprising who were killed by the military; and it's revealed that it was Roy Mustang, a major ally to our heroes, who pulled the trigger. This is the kind of shit that turned Bruce Wayne into Batman. Why doesn't it seem to have any effect on Winry? She's smart and resourceful, so why can't she have a greater purpose in the story than being Ed and Al's cheerleader? I guess they didn't want to risk messing with her cutesy image by making her interesting.
Wrath is another character who's development and motive are mostly a mystery. Like the other homunculi, he was created when someone tried to resurrect the person who's likeness he bears (Izumi's stillborn child) through human transmutation. And apparently, homunculi are weakened when they are near the remains of the person they're based upon, but unlike the rest, Wrath was created from the actual body of that person - which raises the question, why didn't every alchemist who attempted human transmutation not just use the body of the person they were trying to resurrect? For this reason, Wrath can use alchemy and transmute his own body. Or maybe that's because he has Ed's arm and leg - something I'll attempt to explain later. However that happened, his partial humanity fueled him with the desire to gain full humanity via the Philosopher Stone, so he joins up with the rest of the homunculi.
| Villains in Fullmetal Alchemist The homunculi start out as scary and mysterious, but as time goes on it's revealed that they're pretty much all out for the same thing, and they plan on getting it by pestering the heroes. They really aren't that different from other semi-shadowy evil groups, like the Gung-Ho Guns or the Anten Seven, or even Team Rocket. On some level, they are more intimidating than other villains in that they actually succeed in overcoming and demoralizing the heroes a number of times. Still, their motive doesn't really get past WE REALLY WANT THE PHILOSOPHER STONE and WE LIKE TO KILL PEOPLE. Zolf Kimblee is a corrupted state alchemist who has the ability to transmute living things into bombs, which seems awesome at first accept that his only motive is I LIKE TO KILL PEOPLE - which makes him only half as developed as any of the homunculi. Most of the people he kills are red shirts, anyway, so his rampant violence doesn't even really have an effect on anything until he attempts to kill Al. In any story involving a military heirarchy, there's always a weasely character who tries to ascend the ladder through false means. Frank Archer is that character, and in his wiliness he actually has more depth than Kimblee. He is definitely one of the more coolheaded villains, until he makes a stupid decision that leaves him with only the right half of his body. And then he's tured into a robot. I really don't know what to think of that, but it strikes me as dumb. Scar and Lust develop quite well compared to the other villains. They have regrets, they evolve as a result, and we learn quite a bit about their pasts. But they die. So, whatever. |
Wrath seems to develop into an enterprising and mature, if somewhat insane fella to get the idea to join with the bad guys, but why, after shunning his "mother" Izumi, does he cling on to Sloth and revert to a blubbery, annoying mess? Moreover, how could he suddenly re-revert long enough to kill Lust? How could he be so smart and she be so STUPID? I was excited to discover the secret to Wrath's origin when he was first introduced, but as time went on, I stopped expecting answers that weren't shrouded in nonsense.
Nonsense is a major problem with the story's second half. This is mostly signified by The Gate, a plot point that was introduced to the story about the same time as Wrath. Apparently, all energy for alchemic transmutations comes from the Gate. The Gate also seems to hold some kind of infinite Truth about alchemy - or maybe that's just in the comics. And the Gate isn't just some metaphysical construct - it's a real thing, that can be reached and opened and everything!
Strangely, this isn't revealed until halfway through the series, despite how important it apparently is. How'd they get away with that? Moreover, why'd they bother? I was totally ready to believe that alchemy was performed with knowledge, transmutation circles and the right ingredients. That's all I needed! This Gate hocus pocus is just excessive.
So, if this Gate thing is all that, how do you summon it? Well, one way is through human transmutation. Izumi summons the Gate when she attempts to bring her stillborn child back to life, giving up her entire reproductive tract in the process - which would make her badass if her role in the story wasn't mostly superfluous.
This process creates Wrath. Unlike the other homunculi who are "born" to the real world, Wrath just kind of stays in the Gate; by choice or not, I don't know. Years later, Ed and Al attempt to resurrect their mother in a similar fashion. In the process, Ed loses his leg, and then immediately sacrifices his arm to bring Al back. Wrath, who's still in the Gate and is apparently aging all the while, takes Ed's arm and leg as they come through the gate and claims them as his own.
Now let me explain why that doesn't make any sense.
The Gate may have the ultimate Truth or whatever, but how is Wrath supposed to survive in there for nearly a decade without any sustenance? I guess if he swiped Ed's limbs, he could swipe other stuff, too, but how often do alchemists transmute glucose, cornmeal and other things essential for living?
I find alchemic transmutations to be similar to chemical reactions, since they both adhere to a sort of law of equivalent exchange. I'm no scientist, but lets assume that a transmutation can be expressed through a chemical equation. Down here, we have the chemical equation for Ed and Al's attempted resurrection of their mother, with the "reactants" on the left of the arrow, and the products on the right:
Ed's leg + Al's entire body → soulless flesh-pile resembling Mom
Though the result is not desirable, we can assume that the mass of the product approximately matches the mass of the reactants. Next, we have the blood seal bond of Al's soul to the suit of armor, with Ed's arm acting as a catalyst:
Ed's arm + Al's soul + suit of armor → Al's soul attached to a suit of armor
HOWEVER, now we know that Wrath TOOK Ed's arm and leg. If Ed's arm and leg still exist as part of Wrath's body, how could they have been used as reactants in the previous transmutations? I could endeavor to answer that question, but I don't want to give this shit any more dignity by attempting to apply logic to it. Instead, I'll just ask these rhetorical questions:
1) How did Wrath attach Ed's arm and leg to himself?
2) Why the fuck would he want to?
3) Why didn't he just take Al's whole body, then?
The Gate can also be opened by drawing a circle on a baby and throwing it at someone.
Fullmetal Alchemist is not always this cool.
Did you know that the Gate leads to somewhere? It IS a gate after all, and THE Gate must lead to somewhere extra special. So where does the the Gate of Truth lead?
Earth. You know, the real world.
This fact is first revealed when Ed and his father Hohenheim (I feel roughly the same way about Hohenheim as I do about Wrath) are transported there through the Gate after having a baby thrown at them by Dante.
| EXPOSITION CORNER Who the fuck is Dante? Dante is an old bat who evidently taught all she knows about alchemy to Izumi, who in turn teaches Ed and Al. She appears in one episode around the middle of the series to spout some mumbo jumbo about alchemy. She is thought for dead and disappears for the rest of the series until it's revealed that she inserted her soul into Lyra, another character who saw little-to-no screen time. Apparently, Dante has been able to survive for several centuries by using Philosopher Stones to insert her soul into various bodies. Ed and Al's dad, Hohenheim, stays alive using this same process. She is also the de facto boss-nanny of the homunculi. About five episodes before the series ends, Lyra reveals that she is Dante and declares herself the villain of the series. Who the fuck is Lyra? Lyra was an alchemist who acted as bodyguard for the corrupt military lieutenant Yoki. Ed kicks her ass, making her doubt her alchemic abilities. She resurfaced as a student of Dante's, which is presumably when Dante takes over her body. Dante-Lyra then re-resurfaces as Rose's bodyguard, where she likely gets the idea to take over Rose's body. Who the fuck is Rose? Rose first appeared way back in the beginning of the show as a pacified zealot living in Lior. Way later on, the military invades her town and she is raped so hard, she loses her voice and gains a baby. For some reaon, she is deemed Holy Mother of Lior. She has pink bangs. |
Ed and Hohenheim end up in London circa World War I, inhabiting the bodies of people that look just like them, just as the German Luftwaffe is launching devastating bombing runs through the city.
Ed is amazed at the sight of the German zeppelins, since his homeworld has no aircrafts. Hohenheim, who apparently knows everything ever, explains that this is what their world could have been like if its history followed science instead of alchemy. Ed also learns that the energy for transmutations in his world comes not from the Gate itself but from those that die on Earth.
The reasons why DC Comics never let Superman go over to Europe and beat up the Nazis was to preserve the dignity of our armed forces. It's just too heavy a subject to deal with. So let me ask you this; how do you feel knowing that everyone who died in World War I and II - all your great grandparents and relatives on the frontlines, in the prison camps, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki - would become energy for alchemists on the other side of the Gate so that they can fix a radio? I'm not so much offended by the belittling of human lives as I am by the stupidity of it all.
Ironically, Fullmetal Alchemist is never so irrelevant as when it comes to the real world. What does this trip to Earth reveal? That war is bad, and humanity sucks no matter what reality it inhabits? What the hell is the point of the fantasy genre if you have to rub that fact into the audience's faces? SEE? THERE'S WAR IN THIS WORLD AND ALSO THERE'S WAR IN THE REAL WORLD TOO!!!
The concept of the Gate crosses the line between fantastic and ridiculous. The fact that the Gate leads to Earth crosses the line between unexpected and random - same goes for the revelation that Dante is the antagonist of the series. As time went on, my patience ran thin. The only thing holding the story together for me at this point was Roy and Hawkeye's attempt to oust the fuhrer. It was a great way to develop their relationship and it finally gave Roy a way to prove that he wasn't just a lap dog of the military. Expectedly, it had a few dumb parts - namely the fuhrer's adopted son, who acts as a small, annoying plot device - but it delivered some powerfully decent action.
Despite the quagmire the story got into, the series does manage to end on a poignant note. Ed, returned from the other side of the Gate when his Earth counterpart died under a pile of burning wreckage, is killed by Envy. Al, who has become the Philosopher's Stone himself, sacrifices himself to bring Ed back to life. Almost immediately afterwards, using the knowledge he apparently gained from the Gate and his own body, brings Al back to life, body and soul - Ed doesn't die, but is instead sent back through the Gate to Earth. It's probably the single greatest act of brotherly love depicted in the story.
And the great irony is, even though they have finished their journey and Al has his body back, they cannot be together. Still, their thirst for knowledge is insatiable and their bond is unbreakable, and during the series' closing montage set to a quite triumphant orchestral piece, they both reach out towards the skies of their respective worlds and swear that they will meet again.
I almost could have forgiven the series for ending so.
The final opening sequence for Fullmetal Alchemist, probably the best thing about the final episodes.
Unfortunately, none of the events depicted actually occur.
But you can't produce a popular TV series in Japan without also producing a movie based on it!
So, the movie starts a few years prior to the end of the series, where Ed and Al are sent by the state to approve an invention made by Huskisson, some crazy physicist living on an island. His invention is apparently some kind of fission bomb that looks suspiciously like the steam ball from Steamboy. Unwilling to approve another weapon for war, Ed denies the guy approval, telling him that science should be used for the good of the people and not for evil, just like Eddy tells Lloyd in Steamboy. This enrages Huskisson, prompting him attack Ed and Al, and they fight in a cylindrical engine room which looks like the engine room of the Steam Tower from Steamboy.
Seeing no other option, Huskisson, who admittedly knows next to nothing about alchemy, attempts to bring a huge pile of dead bodies that he's been hoarding back to life via human transmutation to fight the Elrics. He unwittingly summons that Gate and is sucked in, apparently ending up on Earth where he instigates the Manhattan Project. How a know-nothing alchemist could not only summon the Gate but also pass through it, something even few advanced alchemists have ever done, is never explained.
After some uncharacteristic and largely nonsensical comic relief, we jump several years into the future, where Ed is living in Germany with a guy named Alfonse, who is apparently Al's Earthly equivalent. They hitch a ride with some gypsies who sing an annoying song.
Then we get the opening credits, accompanied by a song by L'arc~en~Ciel that isn't READY! STEADY! GO! so I didn't care. The credits are set against the character art that adorns the series' DVD covers, which somehow instilled me with the false hope that the movie may reach the level of well-paced storytelling the the franchise had at its peak.
One of the problems with the movie is that at least half of it is set on Earth. Earth is boring. There is no alchemy on Earth. So for the entire portion of of the movie that Ed is on Earth, he doesn't do anything exciting.
I'll summarize a scene here. Ed and Noah the mind-reading gypsy girl pass by disgruntled Germans loitering on steps with nothing else to do but complain and condemn the Jews and the gypsies. They get on a bread line, then walk over to a wall, where they eat soup. For at least eight seconds, they eat soup without saying a word.
FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST!
I was ready to flip a table into the TV. Why am I watching this? Is this why I put on Fullmetal Alchemist: Conqueror of Shamballa? To watch a neutered Ed and some girl I don't have a reason to care about eat soup meticulously?
Anyway, things do eventually happen, arguably. It turns out the Nazis want to open the Gate and get through it to what they believe is the mystical land of Shamballa. Most of the movie is a set up for the Gate's opening, and the process is boring, convoluted and expectedly nonsensical. After they enter through the Gate with rocket-powered war machines, Ed, Al and the gang defend their world from the invasion.
All the while, the Nazis enact the Beer Hall Putsch, which was slightly more interesting to me than the main plot since I had never formally learned about it in history class. Hitler even makes a brief appearance.
A great thing about a movie based on an established franchise is the time that's saved on exposition. There's no need to introduce the major players, because anyone who's watched the series knows all that needs to be known about them, which saves more time for introducing the new characters.
Unfortunately, the movie continues the trend set by the end of the series. My favorite characters still spend most of the time on the sidelines, and the new characters are retardedly flat and underdeveloped.
Noah is a gypsy girl who can somehow see peoples' dreams as they sleep. The Nazis use her to look into Edward's dreams to find out about the other side of the Gate, or something. Noah seeks refuge from persecution, and hopes that the world of the other side of the Gate may be safer for her. You almost feel bad for her, but she's totally left in the dust and ignored even before the movie ends. How could they give her so much screen time and then not see it through to the end?
Still, her arc had more to it than that of the new antagonist, Eckhart, a Nazi occultist who doesn't have any depth beyond a lust for power. She acts relatively composed when she is introduced, and spends most of the movie telling people to do things for her. Then she leads the attack through the Gate. The Gate, apparently knowing that Eckhart is the villain, endows her with power to control demonic tar babies which drive her mad with power. She puts up a fight, but is beaten up by Ed and Al without much of a fuss. Then she's subdued by a bunch of unarmed, slow-moving, undead automatons. And then she's shot.
Probably the greatest travesty in the movie is the wasted budget. The best thing about animated movies is that they have better animation than animated TV series, so the action sequences are far more dazzling. Conqueror of Shamballa does, in fact, contain a stellarly animated action sequence - a fight scene between Wrath and Gluttony. In this scene, which I consider the centerpeice of the movie, Gluttony becomes a sprawlingly enormous and ferocious monstrosity, whipping his weight and snapping jaws every which way to dispatch Wrath, a good guy now for some reason, who performs fantastic feats of acrobatics to elude Gluttony's attacks.
Unfortunately, I don't give a shit about Wrath and Gluttony. They don't serve any purpose in the story until the scene in which they fight, and they're both dead by the end of it, anyway. A fight scene is only worthwhile when you can care about at least one of the combatants involved, yet the movie gives us no reason to. So instead of a fight scene with Ed, Al, Roy or any of the other major, marginally more important characters, we get a passionless scuffle with two pricks who wore out their welcome before the movie even began.
Shockingly enough, in all of this, I did find something that I sort of liked: the Earthly counterpart of the original human form of Fuhrer King Bradley, A.K.A. the homunculus Pride, who turns out to be actual filmmaker Fritz Lang. As ridiculous as that sounds, he turns out to be the most level-headed and interesting character in the movie.
In the end, the Elric Brothers and company smash the Nazi threat, and the putsch in Munich fails. In an attempt to close the Gate for good, Ed and Al both end up on Earth, and presumably spend their days going on less exciting adventures.
I do not hate Fullmetal Alchemist. I just hate the end of Fullmetal Alchemist. I like to believe that the sins of the final episodes do not reflect upon the earlier episodes. Maybe I can still watch those episodes and just ignore what becomes of the story later, especially since it apparently deviates from the source material, the manga by Hiromu Arakawa.
I encourage everyone to watch the series. But after Scar dies, don't bother watching the rest of it. Instead, watch this. Despite its Dora the Explorer style frame, it's way more entertaining than Conqueror of Shamballa.
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