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Astroblitz
Reviews
Free Guy (2021)
Good idea, but a lame mainstream-execution
I appreciate the background story of this movie, including the love story. Too bad, the movie tries to be a mainstream-movie at all costs.
To create dramatic pictures, there is one plot-hole after another created, while the villains act completely silly. Also, the movie is fishing non-stop for primitive laughs, which turns ridiculous over time. The technical realism of the philosophical idea of this movie is finally dropped, to create a computer game end level scenario, which includes the real world.
Overall, this movie targets more or less the same audience, which the villain in this movie targets.
Fate/kaleid liner Prisma Illya (2013)
This show tries to press more than a dozen characters of the Fate universe into the simplified magical-girl structure.
This show is a so-called magical-girl-Anime. That means the main character is a girl who stumbles into a magical item, mostly a magic wand, with magical powers. That means the girl doesn't change into a magician and has no powers without the magic wand.
This anime is a spin-off of the popular Fate franchise and uses a lot of characters from Fate/night and Fate/zero. I must add that the mentioned animes are not about magical girls. This show tries to press more than a dozen characters of the mentioned shows into the simplified magical-girl structure of this anime and fails to do that in some situations. For example, in the beginning, Tosuka is a magical girl, but she is a magician anyway. Other characters are put into an artificial family set up around the main character Illya, but it doesn't make sense. While Illya had a heartbreaking story in the shows mentioned above, she is the magical girl in this anime and becomes a simple schoolgirl.
Too bad this anime misses creating a justification for itself in the first season. The fighting scenes are good, and the speaking magic wands are funny, but there is no exciting content outside the fate references. The creators only had to fill ten episodes, but they already had to use cliche stuff like characters trying maid costumes, women comparing their bust size, bathing scenes, etc. In opposition to the opinion of the creators, the anime audience is not necessarily into such stuff. The anime got dull moments, which sometimes take up half of the show.
It isn't easy to rate this anime. The viewers of previous Fate animes shall be recruited as viewers. But as such a viewer, I am pretty disappointed about the magical girl stuff and the simplifying of many characters. Also, this anime takes the easy road and misses to tell its own background story while not adding something to the franchise. Therefore people new to this franchise will be a bit confused and won't understand all the references to the Fate universe. Consequently, this is an okayish anime, which you can watch but won't miss anything if you are not doing it.
Fantaghirò: Fantaghirò (1991)
If you are into fairy-tale movies, you can do nothing wrong here.
The main character (Fantaghiro) of this movie is a young woman, which is into male activities (reading, practical cloth, self-determination, weapons) within the given circumstances of this specific fairy-tale world. This motive is not uncommon in the literature. The creators of this movie picked their main character out from the short novel "Fanta-Ghirò, persona bella" with just around 2000 words and extended this character and added many fairy-tale elements to this world. It becomes obvious, that the creators are really into their variation and want you to like her as well.
The creators produced later other movies regarding the main character with new content, but nevertheless, the first movie already got its own unique story. For example, the short novel contains multiple challenges for the main figure Fantaghiro, which are suggested by the opponent king's mother. The movie does not contain this mother and the movie only uses the idea of one challenge, executes it differently and also has a different result. The movie got additional ideas on its own, like the white witch, the opponent king's friends, the general, new challenges, talking to animals, prophesiers, main character's childhood, etc.
In my opinion, the story doesn't need 200 mins to get told, but that is no serious problem. The creators obviously had budget issues, which you can observe a few times on the setup, the cloth or the technical execution, but it is not disturbing. If you are into fairy-tale movies, you can do nothing wrong here. It is comfortable to watch this movie. Most people should find no serious reason to take offense.
Fantaghirò: Fantaghirò 5 (1996)
A movie ahead of its time?
This is the 5th and final (double) movie of the Fantaghiro saga. We have meanwhile a main character (Fantaghiro), which was build up and developed over the four previous movies and who fought different opponents and made many friends. The creators tried something new and put Fantaghiro into another world, which sounds maybe more spectacular than it is. This way she is able to have new adventures and the story gets rid of the rest of the old stuff from the previous part.
I understand the disappointment of some people, if they compare this movie to the first two or three episodes of the Fantaghiro movies. To be fair, this fifth iteration of the Fantaghiro story is not really such a hard cut anymore, if you compare it to the previous movie. In the fourth movie the viewer did not even see her castle, her sisters, her sisters husbands and kids, her father, her adopted daughter, the white witch, Bolt, Lightning etc anymore, beside some workarounds with old footage from the first movies. The story of Barabas was already told to the end in Fantaghiro 4, so it made no more sense to bring him back.
The way the transfer to the new world is executed in Fantaghiro 5, drives away a part of the audience eventually. In the very beginning you see Fantaghiro, but then the movie invests a lot of time (around 30 minutes) to explain this other world without her, before Fantaghiro finally arrives in the new world. This seems strange in the beginning, but the movie profits a lot of this procedure in the later parts, because the audience is directly behind Fantaghiro when arriving to help these people and the story has not to retell from the past of this new world. Also, the movie respects Fantaghiro no more being in her hometown and being homesick.
Fantaghiro is meeting new creatures, humans and new character types, for example Aries and the evil boss are told pretty good. The movie also creates a final opponent for Aries, but this opponent is overall a bit disappointing and doesn't add much to the story. Overall, the storytelling is solid and the behavior of the characters is more traceable than in the previous movies, where the main plot or the direction of the story relied too much on the changing moods of the evil characters.
One could debate, if the travel to other worlds or introducing in this iteration a setting in the style of Pirates of the Carribean (2003) were good for this franchise, if you just pick the main character herself from the previous movies. On the other hand, I have to add, that his movie was already shown in 1996, so eventually the movie was even a bit ahead of its time. But the transfer from fairy-tale into fantasy was maybe not really accepted by the audience, so we could not see other variants of the Fantaghiro character on her own in later movies. While I see no problem in the ending of Fantaghiro 5 on its own, this ending doesn't really fit the overall saga of the five (double) movies. Too bad, the ending of Fantaghiro 4 was using old footage, which also had not been a great way to finish the saga.