Fullmetal Alchemist: Conqueror of Shamballa (part nine)

Omega Gluttony lunges. Even moreso than his previous version, he's much faster than he looks like he should be (both in absolute terms, and in ratio). He also, notably, seems to be fixated on a single victim at a time; he really seems to have his multiple sets of eyes locked on Wrath. Or maybe he just finds other homunculi tastier than humans; if he's actually consuming souls/philostone from the creatures he ingests than that would make sense.

I'm PRETTY sure that philosophers' stone is still made of incarnate human souls in this version. That was revealed at least in part during the lab 5 arc, so it would have been before the point of departure.

Well, anyway, Omega Gluttony lunges, and Wrath is getting knocked around like a ragdoll. Alphonse tries to cast something, but there's a red lightning backlash and his transmutation fails; either some crazy antimagic defences that Omega Gluttony is packing, or something about the ruins themselves is interfering with his spells. It's gonna be a tough battle even if they can lure him into a more favorable environment, and a nigh-unwinnable one if they can't.

Back to Munich. The putsch happens. The Bavarian capital building gets stormed. Hitler does his now-infamous stunt, shooting a pistol into the ceiling to prove that he knows how pistols work or whatever point he thought he was making when he did that. Nazi leaders rant incoherently about how they're going to take Berlin next, through less-than-clear means. And, in their dumb supervillain castle, the Thule Society make their last ditch attempt to provide a means by which Berlin can be taken.

I'm still not sure what the stakes of this are supposed to be, given audience knowledge. We know from real world history that a) the Beer Hall Putsch failed, and b) even its failure didn't mean anything because the nazis ended up winning the elections fair and square even with that hit to their reputation a decade later. It's like a double-whammy of insignificance on the historical side. As for the supernatural side...Ekhart's plan is even more half-baked than Hitler's. Sending a rocket plane to Amestris is going to do jack and shit for the nazi cause (at most, it might advance Amestrian aerospace technology if they recover the wreck, since they don't have planes of their own yet iirc. Actually, that COULD result in some nasty outcomes depending on what sort of regime they have at this point, but even then they aren't outcomes that effect anything we know or care about in any immediate timeframe).

It's not like they have any realistic chances of even finding a nuke (assuming it still exists in the first place), let alone stealing it from the people with an army of literal wizards.

Once again, this plot would make way more sense if the wizards themselves (or even better, the philosophers' stone. You know, the evil power-granting McGuffin that this story used to be about once upon a time?) were the targets of the raid, and the threat this poised to Earth was framed as a longterm issue rather than trying to make November 8th seem important.

The only dramatic questions that really have any weight to them are "can the brothers use Ekhart's portal to bring Edward home?" and, charitably, "Is Noah gonna be okay?" Which is fine! Those are totally sufficient stakes! The movie doesn't have to be about anything more than that. Except, it obviously thinks that it IS about much more than that. And it wants us to think that the historical timeline matters.

Anyway, the Thulites hear an airplane engine and look up. The writers have decided to give Edward a biplane, and he's inbound on their castle.

I'm more surprised that Edward himself knows how to fly, honestly. When the hell would he have had the time to lean that? He was working with the rocket scientist people, but even so, that's a stretch. Or does Amestris have planes in this version, with Edward having gotten practice with one during the events of the series? IDK.

And...wait a minute, which castle even is it?

I feel like Haushofer's castle was a more reasonably-sized villa/manor type place, the last time we saw it. This place looks more like the abandoned castle Envy was hiding in before they captured them and flew them to Haushofer's.

Then again, Haushofer's castle apparently had room for multiple fighter planes to be hidden in/under it, so...maybe they were both stupid huge to begin with, idk. Which is weird. This house was stated to be Haushofer's specifically, rather than Ekhart or Hess', and I don't think Haushofer's family was anything close to this loaded. Rich, but not THIS rich. I'm just going to disregard the assertion that this place is his, and assume that it's actually the fictional Ekhart's, because her family can be as stupid rich as the story requires.

Anyway, they make a low pass overhead, the writers take the cockpit, and Edward enters the ritual room the same way that my squad always enters the EXALT base minus the cloaking.

He hits the floor flat on his stomach, but then gets up just fine. Automail central nervous system, I guess.

Earthphonse looks delighted to see him, and whispers in happy surprise about how he came after all. Lol, what, does Earthphonse think he's here because he cares about HIM? This subplot about Earthphonse wishing he was Edward's real brother is just so undercooked lmao. And it's not like I'm missing part of it from the 03 series, because I know this Germany thing was only (at best) lightly foreshadowed in the show.

Ekhart is satisfied at Edward's appearance; in her words, she hadn't been sure that Noah alone could open the gate, but she's more confident in him. Um...why the fuck was she having her goons try to capture Noah instead of Edward all this time, then? This plot I swear. Maybe I'm meant to infer that the rando nazis in the beer hall were supposed to capture Edward as well as escort Noah away, but if so they really, really, really fucked it up, because they didn't even seem to be trying to attack him until he went chasing after Noah.

Edward ignores Ekhart's nonsensical statement, and tells Noah that she should not open the gate. Did he forget the part where she already assured him that it wouldn't be opened? Meh. Then, she...okay, apparently she was either lying to him when she said that (and he knew it, somehow), or she's making up a pretty convincing story to fool the Thulites and stop Edward from fucking this up.

First, she reminds Edward that the world beyond the gate is his own home; doesn't he want to open it so he can return? When that isn't enough to sway him, she then says that she's just fucking done with Earth. Fuck the Germans, they hate her for being Roma. Fuck the Roma, they sold her to the Germans for cash. If there's another world, a better world, then she'd rather go to that one and stay there. If Ekhart uses resources from that better world to fuck up this one even worse than it already is, well, whatever.

Edward gives them all an earnestly pained expression, and tells them that whatever they're all imagining his homeworld is like, that ain't it. It's not a better place to live than Earth, especially when it comes to how people treat one another. Still, she seems unconvinced.

Okay, Noah *is* just improvising this performance for the Thulites, right? She's been in Edward's mind and seen a lot of details. She can't possibly have not seen what a shitshow Amestris is, or how even the wondrous potential of alchemy gets used to burn souls for fuel and create monsters, or how people like the Ishvallans get fucked just about as hard as people like the Roma, right? She's uniquely positioned to NOT fall for the "grass is greener" effect, in this situation, with the people she's had access to.

...heh. It just occurred to me that Noah might have lied to Edward about not opening the gate, and also be lying right now. Maybe she's come to the same conclusions that I did about how a Thulite invasion of Amestris would go, and just wants a front row seat to watch them all get horribly slaughtered by wizards. That would make a lot of sense, actually. Heck, it's probably what I'd do in her place. Okay, yeah, that's my working theory now.

...

Although, I will say; if Noah is being genuine right now (as stupid as that would be), there is one detail that would make it genuinely touching despite the dumb. In the onscreen events we've seen, Edward is the only person Noah has interacted with who's stood up for her come thick or thin. Gracia Hughes was nice to her, even pushing back against her husband to some degree, but if it came to choosing one of them over the other it's obvious she'd ultimately defer to him even if she'd be unhappy about it. Edward, on the other hand, is willing to push back against Earthphonse to the point of making an outright enemy of him in order to do the right thing. So, with Edward as her solitary example of a "Shamballan," I can see how she might have convinced herself that his world must be better, if it's full of people like him instead of people like everyone else she's had to deal with lately.

Or, it would be, if it weren't for the whole plot revolving around her memory-reading powers. A person who didn't have those powers might make the above mistake, and it would be a sad and poignant thing for the story to do. Unfortunately, she really, really has no reason to not know better, so that kinda ruins it.

...

Well. Anyway. To drive Edward's point home, we cut back to the underground ruins, where Omega Gluttony is tearing the architecture asunder in his pursuit of Wrath.

Dang, he's bigger than I realized before. And also surprisingly well animated for a creature with so many moving parts.

Wrath is getting the absolute stuffing knocked out of her, and with his alchemy not working there isn't much Alphonse can do to help her. Fortunately, just as it seems like she's about to lose consciousness, she notices that Omega Gluttony has been bleeding bits of philostone all over the place as he tears his misshappen body through the ruins. So, she does a God of War QTE sequence to dodge his attacks and slide under his appendages, gets to a pile of philostone shards laying at the bottom of a pool formed by an aquifer he just broke open, and shoves them in her mouth.

I guess all homunculi can just do that in this version, rather than it requiring a special ability like Pride's or Father's in the original.

Hmm. Are those still made of souls, in this 'verse? The lack of any reaction to this nonchalant consumption of them from Alphonse, in that case, well...well, it would be in keeping with his characterization in this movie so far lol. Then again, even if they are still made from souls, they might not be alive and semi-conscious in the way they were in Mangahood, in which case the ethics of burning them for fuel once they've already been transformed are at least a little less fraught.

Gluttony manages to swallow Wrath with one of his mouth-tentacle-things that he apparently has in this form, but she's gotten enough of a statboost from those last few souls she shoved down her throat to cut her way free and take the head off along with her.

Heh, I'm not going to say that this was necessarily inspired by the hydra fight from Disney's Hercules, but the parallels are amusing.

She tears off head after head, and even though Giga-Gluttony is visibly full of philostone to the point of leaking it with each step he's not regenerating.

Okay. Did the Sins *all* lose that ability at some point? Some sort of artifice of the Big Bad's that got taken offline? The regeneration was established before FMA03 took off, I'm positive about that, because the last thing that happened before then was the first Greed fight. Or did they just decide that that ability was specific to Greed? If so, then that's kind of a baffling decision on their part, since a) we'd already seen Lust and Gluttony recover from lethal-looking injuries before then even if the hows weren't yet clear, and b) the framing of that scene with Greed was pretty damned clearly a "this is what the Sins are, this is how they work" exposition. But, we've now seen the 03 versions of Wrath, Envy, and Gluttony all fail to regenerate wounds, so...I really don't know.

The turnaround in this battle ends up being for naught, though. Wrath cuts off all but one of Giga-Gluttony's extra heads, and then dashes to the big glyph and...tries to transmute? She's an alchemist? I guess she's an alchemist. Unfortunately, it doesn't work for her any better than it did for Alphonse. She just breaks her automail arm against the stone floor (what the hell was she trying to do, transmute the ground into rubber?), and a moment later she gets grabbed and bitten nearly in half by Gluttony's primary mouth.

It doesn't look like she can wriggle free from this one, and I'm not sure at all if Alphonse can get close enough to feed her some more philostone without getting crushed himself. It's not looking good for the two of them, particularly her.

Then, while being worried around inside Gluttony's maw, she tells Alphonse that this is his chance. He needs to transmute the two homunculi now that they're together atop the central glyph.

Huh?

She says that the gate is ready. It will open to accept these errant souls back into itself, even in what is otherwise an alchemy dead zone. Okay, I guess the ability of homunculi to enable some specific types of alchemy even in places where it's otherwise impossible (are places like that just A Thing here and there?) is an established fact from earlier. The type of alchemy they enable is, specifically, human transmutation-ish-adjacent stuff, to the degree that it's ever really "enabled." Probably because they're made from dead people, so they already have one foot in the Gate. Anyway, she wants Alphonse to open the Gate, send her and Gluttony into it, and then use the portal to go through and...apparently she's confident that the world he ends up in will be the same one his brother is in.

On one hand, this was one of the two sites of the Thule Society's attempted invasion, so it might be linked to that world specifically.

On the other, that's still a ridiculously huge fucking assumption to potentially sacrifice her life over. Granted, it's not likely he'd be able to save her life at this point regardless, but still.

He refuses, saying he's not going to sacrifice her for his brother. She asks him if he really just wants to sacrifice HIMSELF, again, just like he always does? She doesn't even want to live anymore; she misses her mother, and wants to be reunited with her in death. With that prompting, Alphonse finally complies. Also, Gluttony has pretty much finished chewing her in half and she's about to die anyway, so.

Alphonse transmutes. It works. The glyph underneath them lights up, and the duelling Sins fall through. We don't see what happens to Giga-Gluttony in his own Antechamber of Truth, but we do see what happens to Wrath. She stands before the gate. It opens. Behind it is not the usual eye-and-tentacle-studded darkness, but a heavenly golden light. And, waiting for her within that light, is Wrath's mother Izumi.

So um. Apparently the miscarried fetus or newborn baby or whatever stage it was at that Izumi tried to restore to life is what became Wrath.

And...it grew? To whatever physical age Wrath is? For some reason?

And it...still knows who it is and who its parents are? It has a sense of attachment to them?

...okay. How are homunculi NOT just the dead people who they were made from, in that case? Why is everyone calling this girl "Wrath" instead of the name Sig and Izumi gave her?

How does a homunculus even decide what its sin is? Or is the naming scheme just something the villain decided on that doesn't have anything to do with their actual natures at all?

Did Izumi not NOTICE that the baby she failed to revive was turning into something and/or someone else and that the someone in question was alive even if they weren't exactly the same person as before? Or, like...does the homunculus just materialize randomly somewhere a few kilometers away when you try to revive someone?

I know I'm missing the explanations for all this stuff due to not having actually seen FMA03. But, I also have a feeling that the explanations for it probably wouldn't satisfy me very much. I could be wrong, but this whole thing just has too many really, really weird question marks in places where fictional characters - even weird magical ones - don't typically have them.

If nothing else, I guess this explains why she was at Izumi's house being depressed about Izumi's death. Although...um, what about Sig? No attachment to him at all? Not even a little? What the fuck.

Whatever. Back to the Bavarian castle.

The glyph starts glowing. I guess it was just a really, really fortuitous coincidence that Ekhart and Alphonse just haaaaappened to be doing their things at precisely the same time lol. The nazis and Noah grit their teeth and cover their eyes from the brilliant light. Across the shaft, Edward pulls out that pistol he still has and aims it at...Envy? I think? Apparently he thinks this handgun can kill them and ruin the spell even when none of the other, much bigger, weapons they've shot at the snek did that. Well, regardless, Ekhart apparently thinks there's some risk here, and so she smugly tells Edward that he'd better not shoot. If he does, there's a good chance he'll hit "him." She then throws the switch that's designed to dramatically pull the tarp off of Envy's face for dramatic reveal purposes, and we see that Envy has someone in their mouth.

Okay, I guess he was physically present here after all. They've had Hohenheim in captivity for...a while? Longer than the timeframe of this movie, it seems.

...apparently his memories weren't enough for them to work with? Maybe he just has the ability to shield his mind even from people like Noah, idk.

Except...oh for fucking...okay, Hohenheim starts talking, both alluding to (presumably) things from the series, and commenting on his current predicament and how it came about. And...fucking. Okay. This MIGHT not be as illogical as it seems, what with the sheer amount of context I'm missing, but some details really challenge my imagination when it comes to imagining how they ever COULD make sense.

Okay, well, start with the most sensible I guess.

It looks like Hohenheim actually was the bad guy in the 03verse. Or, if not THE bad guy, then at least A bad guy. He tells Edward that he deserves everything that's happening to him right now, up to and including spending days or weeks being chewed on by a giant snake. He did, after all, work so much evil in his unnaturally long life. Creating monsters in his failed attempts to resurrect his firstborn son, and then discarding them when they disappointed him. Sacrificing human victims to prolong his own life with philosopher's stone, time after time, in order to continue his human transmutation research.

Well, at the point of departure it sure seemed like the story was building up to a Hohenheim villain reveal (I know that the manga structured this stuff differently than Brotherhood did, but I'm sure it sent the same general vibes across wrt Hohenheim's future role in the story). So, the FMA03 writers did the logical thing with the information they had, as far as that goes.

As for why he's in Envy's mouth...apparently Envy doesn't struggle as much when they have someone to chew on. Maybe specifically Hohenheim, maybe anyone would have done, but Hohenheim (whatever he is in this version) is harder to kill than most people so he's a more efficient chewtoy even aside from Envy's sense of taste. Erm. Okay.

Hohenheim goes on to say that Haushofer brought him over. Somehow. He doesn't go into any details about how. Maybe the final episodes of the series dealt with this, maybe they didn't. When Edward says he's going to rescue him, Hohenheim tells him not to; he's right where he wants to be, even aside from him deserving the chewtoy treatment for his many transgressions. The Thule Society are trying to build a gate back to the world they call Shamballa, and Hohenheim is willingly assisting them because he wants them to send Edward home so he can return to his life and his brother.

-_____-

What.

If Hohenheim was willingly assisting them, why did they have him locked in a cell before they tossed him to Envy?

If they had Hohenheim's cooperation, why the fuck did they need Noah to extract Edward's alchemical knowledge to cast this spell? Does Edward know more about this kind of magic than Hohenheim, despite Hohenheim having apparently helped Haushofer bring him over successfully before now?

Did he have any way of making sure Edward would even be here when they opened the gate?

...that would actually have made sense as an inciting incident for the movie. The Thule Society looking for Edward so that Hohenheim will give his knowledge and his life to open the portal for them. Too bad that that's almost the complete opposite of what actually happened.

Hohenheim also says that they're transmuting Envy to open the gate, but that this is happening "in exchange for" his own life. Erm. Who is charging Hohenheim's life for this? Does the Gate need one human as well as one (or more? how necessary is the stuff going on at Alphonse's end?) homunculus? Do the nazis have some kind of grudge against Hohenheim, that he can bribe them with the end of his own life? Does Envy need to be willing in order for it to work, much as Wrath (but NOT Gluttony...) was willing on the other side, and Envy was only willing if they could kill Hohenheim too?

Before Edward can ask too many more annoying questions, Hohenheim reaches out and squeezes Envy's jaws shut harder on himself, popping his own body like a grape. Sad music. Seemingly a final death for Hohenheim. What a silly one lmao.

Then, the instant that Hohenheim is dead, Ekhart shoots Edward while he's distracted. He tumbles down the shaft and falls to the rocket plane hangar.

Why wouldn't she? Edward has a gun and isn't happy about any of the stuff that's going on, it's not like she could just tell him to sit tight and wait while she finishes the ritual. Even if she wasn't a nazi and therefore murderous by default, this would only make sense.

Noah asks Ekhart why she did that. That's a really stupid question, Noah. Like, REALLY stupid. Need I remind you that Edward has a gun himself, and was almost certainly about to point it right at Ekhart's head as soon as he got over his shock or grief or whatever at Hohenheim's death? I guess I do need remind you. You're dumb, Noah.

Ekhart is planning to take the rocket plane through the portal herself, it appears. Erm...I hope you enjoy giving the Amestrians some target practice, I guess?

Fade to black. Then, Edward regains consciousness down in the hangar level under the shaft. Earthphonse is standing over him. He's lucky, Earthphonse tells him; the bullet only grazed his arm. Which, of course, is why Edward collapsed and slumped forward into the shaft when she shot him. That's what people do when their arms get grazed.

This movie is ass.

Hopefully only one more.