I don’t know if I could find a better example of the problems with both modern Type Moon and the anime industry at large than the Heaven’s Feel trilogy, more specifically the third and final film. While I still love what comes from both, and don’t think we’ve truly met an end point of integrity, it makes those sour spots even more aggressively obvious. I’ve seldom seen such a near-universally positive reaction to something that feels so counterintuitive to the source material, and it quite shocks me that things are this way.
Heaven’s Feel is the answer to all of the remaining questions in Fate/Stay Night, and it goes about them in the most brutal, heart wrenching, and tragic way possible. It is truly every trace of filth that remained hidden along the way in the story up until that point, blasted at you with no remorse as you try to make sense of what’s going on.
It is quite similar to Tsukihime’s latter half in this regard, and just like it, it’s also arguably the peak of the original game. It’s upsetting, graphic, and relentless, but it couldn’t feel possibly more cathartic at the end. It’s a truly unique and inspiring work, arguably among Nasu’s best stories. I love everything about it.
It takes all “logic” you had about power dynamics prior and spins them completely on your head. You thought Gilgamesh was the strongest on the gameboard, surely? The guy who only got taken down through a one-in-a-million effort in the previous routes? Wrong, actually, the seemingly meek younger girl character who was barely involved prior completely wipes the floor with him while injured. Oh, also she makes Saber become fucked up and evil and has a massive enough mana pool to fully support her without issue. This would probably make people believe that the story is bad, or inconsistent, or poorly told, but it’s quite the opposite. F/SN operates on this completely unbalanced system all along. When everyone one the playing field is completely cracked and has some end-all-be-all move… no one is. Everything that happens in Heaven’s Feel works so excellently for the service of the narrative, character development, and themes, while also managing to remain fresh, tense, and exciting.
What I’m getting at is that Heaven’s Feel is a spectacular work that goes far beyond just being exciting. It’s more than just the spectacle. It’s about what happens behind the curtain and wrapping up the remaining threads of several characters. Many people refer to Heaven’s Feel as “Sakura’s route,” but that’s only half the truth. In reality, it’s a balancing act between the characters of Sakura, Illya, and Kirei. This is especially true in regards to Kirei, it massively fleshes out his motivations and how he parallels Shirou. He’s honestly the star of the show in the route, and yet his presence feels far less felt in this movie.
I should go ahead and be blunt- I don’t really think Fate/Stay Night works as an anime, or that an adaptation is even necessary. It should be primarily experienced in its original form. It is very deeply rooted in its style from the visuals, music, structure, and prose. The inner monologue plays into Shirou’s character- without it, he’s functionally very different, and this especially plays into Heaven’s Feel when so much of it comprises long, torturous descriptions of what he’s seeing or feeling. The movies, just like previous adaptations, nearly completely trash all of it, leaving Shirou as a hollow shell of his original self. When lacking the intricate, flowery prose of the original, this is a fundamentally heavily different experience, nowhere near good enough to serve as some sort of “substitute” or “replacement.” Yet, plenty are perfectly fine with abandoning the original in spite of this, because fuck reading and engaging with art, right guys?
And it seems that this trilogy managed to take almost every misstep possible with this adaptation. The slow, meticulous buildup of the novel- now compressed into 3 movies that can’t even manage their time with existing scenes well (why are the Lancer/Assassin and Salter/Berserker fights in the previous movies so long when they were rather quick and to the point in the original?). Priorities seem confused, with the team adding in new scenes regarding Sakura but still not really understanding her character in the long run, as well as cutting various scenes involving Illya and Kirei (massively important btw), and also putting more emphasis on certain fights while making THE LITERAL CLIMAX OF THE TRILOGY feel like an afterthought. We couldn’t have the scene where Shirou finally realizes his motivations at the climax of his duel (and F/SN's narrative as a whole) with Kirei, but we have plenty of time to pad out the Salter/Rider fight, complete with absolute visual vomit! The fans will surely have a hoot making 60fps interpolated edits online to make the animation look worse!
What I’m ultimately confused about is- what did the team even want to do? Everything about this project feels like there was no goal behind it. It’s simply a product, manufactured to appeal to the massive successes of Fate/Zero and Unlimited Blade Works. Not made out of passion, but because it’s simply the most logical next step to make a profit.
Here’s the next in this saga of anime, now brought to you on the big screen, with cool fights and visuals, all squished into an easily digestible product for the masses. So much of that roughness of the original with its easily identifiable atmosphere and feel is gone. It’s replaced with this generic, “pretty” modern look but it just lacks the sauce. Something is missing. The characters start to not even look like themselves, sure they have the same basic features… but the faces, physique… the composition feels like a hollow imitation. Deen/Stay Night is far from perfect, but above all else it understands these characters, how they look and feel, and by comparison, this feels uncanny. Everything I mentioned in the first few paragraphs about the original simply isn’t felt in these movies. Like, they exist, yes, but only on the surface. The high budget visuals and easily consumable nature of the film takes priority rather than truly understanding what it’s imitating.
It feels borderline exploitative, both to the viewers and to the people who worked on the project. I truly feel pity for them, because all of this cash and effort was blown onto something so dull and unoriginal, but manufactured in such a way that made it an easy success. This talent and effort could've been spent on something fresh and new rather than repeated content in a worse form. It’s a brutal disfigurement of one of my favorite stories ever told, and there wasn’t even a reason for it to exist. It's not some deeply unforgivable film that lacks any semblance of quality. Some moments are cool. I didn't hate every single second that passed. But I ultimately felt nothing after finishing it other than sheer disappointment.
It’s simply a waste of time.
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