This will be a quick review
First of all, I've never played FGO. The only thing I knew before is that this singularity happens before Babylonia, which had received a wonderful anime adaptation that I love and adore so much. My knowledge on Type moon comes from watching previous Fate installments, and Kara no Kyoukai and interacting with some fgo and fsn vn players.
Aside from Ufotable aesthetic which has been synonymous to Fate, other studios such as Aniplex owned A-1 pictures and Cloverworks also has done some fate works. Various studio gave different output, not to say the plot had many differences ; but one thing remain unchanged, marvelous character design and excellent fight animation. Be it Zero or UBW or recent Babylonia, Fate franchise never ceased to amaze me with shiny, cool-looking and sexy characters fighting with their all while providing meaningful (or less) dialogue which never stops being exciting.
This movie however is the exact opposite of what I think Fate is, or at least I used to think.
This 90 minutes long movie took place in Arabian desert featuring 3 key locations, the holy city near Jerusalem, sun king's palace and the secret village. All of where fights between servants happened, and I regret to say, all of them sucked. From fight choreography to animation, both hand drawn or digital effect, looked so generic and dull that it might lose to any generic LN adaptation's sword fight. How they made a whole movie from one of the most popular mobile game and struggles in comparison with any typical TV anime?
A simple sword fight between Mordred and Bedivere had minimal dynamism, lack of weight balance, no perspective and basically "swords clash and they flash" type things. All of the new servants had less attractive design due to a lack of details, such as Caster priest. Some focused shots on her cleavage didn’t help the fact that they looked more like a bunch of lines than a proper design. Background art looked dull, sun-king's castle is as gloomy looking as his kingdom, CG debris felt like a slice of cake rather than made of stone, and the subpar effect animation only made me sigh thinking about HF 3rd movie.I'm not a huge fan of Ufotable's overabundant use of digital effects, but I'll happily take that over this dull looking mess. Above all, this movie doesn’t look or sound fancy, might be the most disappointing thing about this movie, but hold on the plot's there.
I've heard praise of Camelot's storyline, of how it's the most philosophically rich singularity. This movie put a question mark on this statement. Aside from the fact that Fate servants always required you to know who they are, this movie went beyond and failed to provide whatever they were trying to do. Not only they failed to bring out the best of the emotions servants are facing, specially Bedivere since he's a main character, it also caused me to feel nothing for his job. Like why he's so sad, acting like a heartbroken prince who just lost his kingdom. I can get behind his sadness but not throughly, it's like mourning for a random person's death. Like every death brings sadness but it becomes something special due to the person involved sharing something meaningful, a deep bond. This movie failed to provide me enough emotional context to his state of mind. It's not only limited to him,all the other characters faced same consequence, as if it lacked any heart.
Poor character introduction, then being stubborn to provide at least some context of why the characters are doing something or what. The movie did a poor job in handling the buildup to the climax, to the point that every supposed big moment felt very underwhelming. Dialogue wasn’t adding much, it's clear that they were skipping huge bulk of contents within this chapter. There should have been at least one exposition scene for a non player like me. Though it's clear they weren’t intending to attract new audience so I guess I was already doomed to begin with
Music wasn’t anything standalone, rather they were disappointing in a sense that they failed to bring out proper emotion to the scene. Like the ending scene where something heroic was happening, but the music they played had a sad tone and I was wondering if I should feel proud for this heroic deed or mourn for his spoiled death? I was confused hence just like rest of the movie played out I was being stoical, something I didn’t expect myself to be from a fate installment.
When this movie came out and every fgo fans were losing their temper I thought like every other movie adaptation they left out a lot of contents. What I didn’t expect that it actually had left out everything good about possibly every fate installments. This doesn’t even look like Fate. Coming from the exciting TV anime adaptation of Babylonia I was expecting at least some decent fight animation, cool looking characters and a whole load of waifu. I can certainly live with all the contents left behind but I can't accept an uncool fate. This first Camelot movie didn’t have one single good character or their moments I could cheer for, it's just like a bunch of unrelated stuff conjoined together having no logic no reason and no thoughts behind. From every angle I can't imagine a single good thing I liked about this.
I'm utterly disappointed and heartbroken, want to erase this from my memory.Though I have a faint hope the next camelot movie will at least be better than this.
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