Fullmetal Alchemist: Conqueror of Shamballa (finale)

With Edward and Ekhart's unsatisfying, perfunctory clash of ideas done with, it's now time for their unsatisfying, perfunctory clash of weaponry. They fight in the cockpit. Ekhart is apparently a martial artist and has - in the last fifteen minutes - learned to use alchemy in combat, making her a level-appropriate boss fight for Edward. Naturally.

They fend each other off for a boring little while, before Ekhart hears something outside the hatch leading to the back of the plane, and - with a fiendish grin - pulls it open. Behind it are a squad of armored zombie/soldier/whatevers. Oh no, not those, those things are really dangerous, what will Edward be able to do about those? Ekhart cackles about how "humans will never tolerate difference" as if...

Wait.

IS she admitting that her fear of the other is based on an understanding of her self, now?

We ARE doing the Dark Forest thing with fascist paranoia? Only, we're waiting until after the point where Edward might have to actually engage with it on philosophical terms to bring it up explicitly?

Is that seriously what we're doing?

Maybe she just means "see, these soldiers all agree with me, and they're gonna help me kill you because they know you're not really human too!" That would be less philosophical and more redundant, but also less frustrating at this point in the scene.

But then, the soldiers just ignore her command to attack. Alphonse comes in behind them. Apparently, when he disappeared between cuts a minute ago, he was running off to go mind control a bunch of the mystery mooks who I guess were still aboard the plane for some reason.

This is a really, really, REALLY unsatisfying follow-up to what Ekhart just said and did.

To be clear, if she hadn't said anything at all a moment ago, or if she had just said something like "muahahahaha, me and my soldiers fighting together will crush you now" or whatever, I wouldn't have a problem with this. But, she just made a big declarative pronouncement about the power of intolerance and xenophobia, in a situation where it doesn't really make all that much sense for her to be monologuing about that (or about anything at all, really. It's pretty unsolicited as far as Edward's words and actions in this scene go). That's pretty damned clear authorial framing for "this is the bad idea that the villain represents, and the hero is about to defeat them in a way that proves it wrong."

If the armored goons really are supposed to be living Thule cultists instead of zombies or golems or somesuch, it would make total sense for one of them to turn to Ekhart now and say "You're a lunatic. You dragged us into a suicide mission. This kid says he's going to help us get home again, and we're not bringing you back with us." That would really pop her balloon, wouldn't it? It turns out that nope, most people value their own lives over others' deaths, and only act otherwise if they've been brainwashed and lied to. Even among these esotericist far right militia nuts, negotiation still comes a bit more naturally than suicide. At least for some of them. At least once they've seen for themselves how pointless and how horrifying being mowed down by an army of alien wizards on the streets of a nameless city where your family will never recover your body from or even know what happened to you really is. Especially when those alien wizards prove willing to show you more mercy than your own maniac boss does.

But no. Mind control. The addressed-directly-at-the-audience villain declaration goes unanswered. Either those armored things really aren't sentient after all, or Ekhart was right about the unconquerable power of intolerance and hate, or Ekhart was wrong about it but it doesn't matter because Alphonse didn't bother putting it to the test. In any of those cases, what the hell is the audience supposed to take away from this?

...

Before you say I'm reading too much into this one line, remember that whole early conversation between Edward and Noah. "What do you call yourselves, apart from the disparaging names others invent for you?" "Roma." "Oh, what does that mean?" "Human." "Oh, that's nice, I like that."

There is no way in hell that this scene with Ekhart isn't trying to be the payoff for the threat that one set up. It's really, really blatant about this, all the way down to specific word choices. This is not just me.

...

Alphonse makes the zombified...zombies? Are they people or not? IDK, I'm going to call them double zombies in this scene because its funny. Z2's...he makes the Z2's swarm around Ekhart and press her into the corner. It's been demonstrated over and over again that these things are zero threat to an alchemist even when they've got machine guns in hand, and these ones are unarmed. But for some reason, Ekhart doesn't even TRY to defend herself. Just backs away from them and gets surrounded and buried under the attackers like the slutty cheerleader at the twenty minute mark of a zombie movie. Okay, whatever.

Outside, the stone spike holding the rocketplane in place finally breaks. Or...actually it crumbles to dust all at once, as if someone just intentionally disintegrated it. Fortunately for everyone still on the plane, it just slowly glides forward in a gentle, gradual descend instead of falling into a spinning nosedive like it should in this situation. On the ground, the Z's have all been dealt with. Or maybe they just shut down when Ekhart died, idk. Edward and Alphonse step out onto the wing of the slowly, gently gliding rocketplane, and talk to Mustang.

Apparently he was just standing there with his thumb in his ass while Edward fought Ekhart and Alphonse 2'd the Z's. I figured he'd probably come in and help them once the guns stopped materializing and he heard the alchemist who'd been creating them being engaged in combat, but nope, I guess he figured he'd put in enough work already and had earned a himself a nice relaxing ass-thumbing session fair and square. Alphonse walks over next to Mustang, and Edward cuts off the wing that the two are standing on, letting it fall away from the plane. In his own words, that should be plenty of material for them to transmute into a safe landing craft for themselves.

Why is Edward sending them away from the plane while he stays on it? Well, you see.

Edward Elric, it appears, graduated with honors from the Katheryn Janeway Academy of Closing Portals.

Seriously, is there any reason they can't just launch a bomb back through the gate at high speed, maybe using one of these rocket engines they now have laying around? Blow up the gate-glyph on the other side, and maybe even bring down Hoshaufer's castle on the heads of any dickheads still inside as an extra cherry on top? There's no reason they'd need to send a PERSON through, is there? They can just send a bomb.

Heck, the "bomb" can simply be removing the armor from the front of one of the rocket-planes, so the fuel tank breaches when it hits a wall on the other side. In an enclosed environment like the ritual room shaft, that should make a decently big boom. If they don't have enough fuel left in the tanks, well, Edward's been learning about rocket science for the last few years. He should be able to transmute some more up out of plain old gasoline and atmospheric oxygen, right?

He *should* be able to do that, yes. But.

As the wing falls away, Alphonse screams out for Edward to not leave him again already. To not leave *Winry* again after she waited for him for years lugging his stupid automail around. Edward pauses for a moment, but then tells Alphonse to thank her for him, and goes back inside the cockpit.

Oh my god this is so fucking stupid I can't even.

...

Hey. Hey, I got a question.

Why do they need to close the gate at all?

The obvious answer is because of the earthquakes...but those seem to have stopped after the opening process was complete. With the portal standing open, there doesn't seem to be any ongoing tremors. I guess there *could* be more environmental consequences down the line, but the characters haven't raised that subject. Nothing about that has been mentioned. If nothing else, you'd think they'd want to take time and study the portal a bit to determine if it's safe now that it's stabilized open, before just deciding that it isn't.

Edward knows that the Thule Society has basically blown its load at this point. There probably aren't any more failrockets full of failzombies coming through to be a total nonthreat in the near future.

Is he just afraid of the possibility of other people coming through at any point in the future? That would fit with how the dialogue in this sequence has been downplaying the earthquake damage and emphasizing the war damage. So, he's just assuming that any future travelers would likewise - inevitably - be invaders?

Are...are we...are we handing the moral victory to the fucking nazi?

I wouldn't mind this so much if we hadn't just turned Ekhart's xenophobia into A Thing. I wouldn't be thinking about this at all, really. But the movie did that. And now it's doing...this.

I think we are giving the nazi the moral victory.

What the actual fuck, movie.

...

Edward ignites the rocket again. Apparently he can fly this plane back down underground, through a narrow crevice, while it's missing a wing. Lol. On the ground, Winry sees the rocket light up, and interprets this to mean that, in her own words, "He won't let me wait anymore." I don't know what Winry means by that, but I think she's about to be very, very, very disappointed.

That relationship not only means nothing to Edward, but also means nothing to the writers. Amazing. I don't know how Edward and Winry's relationship progressed in this version of the series, but...I can't imagine any version of it that this would NOT be an insulting way to end.

On the other side of the gate, Haushofer and Hess are alerted to the coup's failure. Triumphant, happy music plays as Hughes runs up to them and announces the bad news. Germany has been saved from the horror of naziism. Yay.

...

It truly boggles my mind that they chose to hang this plot around the Beer Hall Putzch, of all things. Not only did it end up not relating even slightly to the actual plot of the movie, but also it's a historical event whose outcome truly does not matter. It doesn't matter if it succeeds; the nazis ended up winning control of Germany in OTL anyway. It doesn't matter if it fails: the nazis ended up winning control of Germany in OTL anyway. It's just a difference of whether or not everything happens a few years earlier.

...actually, you know, come to think of it, the 1923 Putzch succeeding might have actually been better in the long run. A fascist regime that took over via coup wouldn't have the appearance of legitimacy and recognition by other countries that the democratically elected one did. It would give Germany a whole decade less of economic misery and national humiliation for nazi ideology to exploit and fuel itself with, so they'll have less support WITHIN the country as well. More likely than not, a 1923 NSDAP government would have self destructed and been overthrown in just a couple of years (if not months), and Hitler and Co would NOT have gotten off with a relative slap on the wrist. And hey, if that happened, the German far right would have taken such a massive L that the country might actually be more likely to go communist than fascist come the 1930's.

So yeah.

Of all the historical events to play for dramatic tension, this was a strong contender for the absolute worst possible choice. ON TOP of it never even having anything to do with the plot. The whole "we need to get to Shamballa thing in time for the coup" didn't make a lick of sense to begin with. It's holistically pointless.

...

As Hess and Haushoffer stare ruefully down at the patch of floor where Noah is cradling Earthphonse's dead body, the gate opens up again and a big chunk of airplane comes out. The movie doesn't show Edward flying it back down underground into the undercity cavern and through the portal, because the creators realized that it would be obvious how fucking stupid that was if they showed it onscreen. Nice try, creators. I pointed out how fucking stupid it was before it even happened. Scrubs.

The ruined rocketplane falls out of the portal and smashes into the hangar floor below the shaft under it. And then, I realized something absolutely fucking hilarious.

Edward has no way of destroying the gate on this side.

He still can't use alchemy on this side. He apparently DIDN'T rig the plane to explode or anything. After coming back through, the plane fell down the shaft into the hangar sublevel far BELOW where all the glyphs and stuff are inscribed, and it hitting the floor doesn't seem to have been enough to collapse the building above. I guess he could try walking up there and disabling it using the same earth-operable magic the Thulites used to create it, but um...how is he going to do that when there are armed Thulites still present, and the castle is about to go straight from their occupation to the German government's?

Edward accomplished nothing. He abandoned his friends, his brother, his world, without even properly saying goodbye, and acomplished absolutely nothing.

A shambling, mutated black mess of flesh, metal, and wog-goop comes staggering out of the wreck. It's Ekhart, horribly fused to a bunch of Z2's. Apparently the rocket speed wasn't enough to protect her this time, though it was enough to protect Edward. For some reason.

Wait, hold on, did they NOT kill her before?

What the hell did Alphonse even have the Z2's do to her, that she was alive and conscious all this time later?

I...none of this...

She babbles about needing to go back through the gate to Shamballa. I guess she thinks the other world is Shamballa again, now. Well, she does have a bunch of gunmetal and carbon ash melted into her brain, so I shouldn't expect her words to make sense even if the story did. She shambles toward Noah, and then gets shot by a frightened Hughes who declares her to be a monster. See, get it? It's like, karma and stuff. She wants to kill people because she thinks they're monsters, but then she got turned into a monster and got killed for it. See? It's all deep or whatever.

After being shot, she un-mutates and turns back into her recognizable self. For some reason.

I'm not even going to try.

...

Thinking back on Ekhart though, it occurs to me that - aside from giving her a nuke - there is a way the movie could have made her a serious threat to Edward's homeworld. What if, instead of deciding that this world was no promised land at all but rather a threat to be destroyed, Ekhart looked at Amestris - with its authoritarian military government (assuming it still has one after the events of the 03 series, I'm not sure if it does or not), its largely blond and blue-eyed politically dominant ethnic group, and its use of magic like the kind she's always craved for purposes like the ones she'd like to use it for - and said "Yes, this is Shamballa."

But then she finds out that the vital spirit of the Shamballan ur-nordic people has begun to sicken and grow feeble, just as it did for the aryans of earth. They're becoming soft, tolerant, and consequently degenerate. Fortunately, she's here to warn them about what could happen if they keep falling down the path of degeneracy, and to help them restore their people's rightful destiny as well as her own. That's right, she's teaching the ethnic Amestrians about racism! I don't think we've ever actually seen that particular ism in Amestris. Massive, murderous nativism and civic nationalism, yes, but not race science shit. If Amestris has been going through a rough patch recently, then she could find a willing audience in the area around Central. An audience that could make zealous converts to the aryanist religion. The next regime in Amestris could be even more brutal than the previous one if she has her way.

She's not a military threat, but she could have been an ideological threat. That would have given this some better stakes.

...eh, thinking about it more I still like the nuke better. Yeah, never mind.

...

Next, Edward comes out, completely unharmed. Nobody shoots at him, for some reason. He's happy to see Noah (for some reason) and unhappy to see Earthphonse's corpse (eh, I'll let him have this one, sure). She asks him why he came back. Alphonse answers, from inside a dead Z2, that he needs to close the gate from both sides. Looks like Alphonse is doing his remote control thing again...or wait, no he's actually physically inside the suit.

Edward asks him how the fuck he got back onto the plane. Alphonse asks him how HE got onto the plane himself, back when he mysteriously got onto one's wing from the undercity. Edward realizes that nothing ever made sense to begin with, and the universe explodes.

Not really, but that would have been more satisfying at this point.

Rather, Alphonse explains that he..."snuck on at the last moment." Erm...how? WHICH last moment? We saw Mustang holding onto him as the wing fell away from the plane and Edward turned the rocket back on...oh who fucking cares nothing means anything it's just colors and shapes. Mustang said he'll destroy the gate on the Amestrian side, and he and Edward will handle the one over here.

They're talking about all of this right in front of a bunch of Thule guys. Who have guns on them. Nothing happens, though.

Edward asks him why. Alphonse says that he wanted to be with him. Being with his brother is more important than being with everyone and everything else he knows. Being with his brother who he's been apart from for five years is more important to him than all the relationships he's built with other people in those five years.

It's a very touching display of brotherly love. Thanks. I hate it.

Also, apparently Alphonse has recovered his memories from when he was a golem. For some reason. It's not dwelt on, just acknowledged in about as many words as I just spent on it and then we move on.

Edward and Alphonse resolve to start new, magic-less lives in Germany. In 1923. I'm sure they'll have a great time over the next couple of decades.

We see a montage of conspirators being arrested. Cool. Everyone watching this who's learned even the very basics of twentieth century history knows how little this matters. The writers make another in-person appearance to say some self-important nonsense that thinks it relates to the themes of the movie, but doesn't actually.

Oh just get the fuck off my screen.​

Hughes returns to his wife with an awkward smile and a nervous, tiptoeing gait. She accepts him back, and he loosens up. Charming. I'm sure he's learned his lesson from the failed coup and his killing of the mutant Ekhart, and will renounce fascism henceforthaaahahahahahahaha give me a fucking break this guy is going to be turning the gas valves at Auschwitz while his wife sighs and tut-tuts in mild disapproval.

There's a funeral for Earthphonse. Edward and Alphonse, who inexplicably got out of that castle without being shot full of holes, are in attendance. So is Hughes and his wife, the former looking as awkward as you'd expect. Noah is doing a dance performance for the event. I don't think dancing is a traditional German funeral tradition, but it might be a traditional Romani one, idk. After the funeral, Edward and Alphonse see Noah back to her clan. You know, the people who sold her for cash to the nazis a month ago.

Happy reunion. Yay.

...you know, if this was being framed as the tragi-horror downer ending for her character that it is, I wouldn't mind it. But it seems like we're supposed to be happy about this. Somehow.

The Elrics wave goodbye as Noah and her people drive off. I'm sure they're ALSO going to have a great time in the next couple of decades. Oh man, they might even get to meet Noah's old friend Hughes again at the end!

The final scene has Edward and Alphonse driving away through the countryside, deciding what to do next. Apparently they've decided they want to go hunting for that uranium bomb that was apparently brought to Earth. ...don't think we ever established that it actually ended up HERE, I thought they just learned aboutI it via interdimensional travelers/scrying/whatever, but um, okay.

...is the movie trying to imply that anyone and anything that gets pulled into the Gates of Truth ends up on Earth? Like, Dr. Nukenstein and his bomb just appeared in some random spot in Europe? Was Alphonse's body laying comatose in a field in Switzerland somewhere during the events of the series? Are Edward's arm and leg at the bottom of the English Channel next to Izumi's uterus? Fucking lol.

Anyway, the nuke has been on Earth for years, and the brothers decide something needs to be done about it. Because um. I don't know. You'd think the damage would be done by now in terms of the locals studying the bomb and beginning down the path toward replicating it, what with however many years its been since the Dr. Nukington incident, but that's what they decided they're going to do.

...I looked up the development of nuclear technology in the early-to-mid twentieth century to see if there was a sudden breakthrough that the movie could be intending to attribute to the Amestrian artifact's discovery. Nothing jumped out at me. Whatever.

The movie ends with Edward and Alphonse acknowledging that another war will be coming to this world, sooner or later. And, what Edward has learned from all of this is apparently that he can't just stand by and let it happen. I guess.

Wait, did they ever actually destroy the portal?​

Edward had that whole thing at the beginning of the movie, about how he wasn't sure if Earth was real or not. I guess his transformation from that to this is supposed to be his arc for the film. The thing is, while he did wonder if this world was real and if it actually mattered, his ACTIONS were never effected by that. The first five minutes of the film had him risking his life to rescue Noah, you know? He always cared. He always acted as if the people here mattered, even if he wasn't completely sure. There is no actual arc here.

Maaaaaaybe it's a continuation of a theme from the series? I guess? Maybe? I can't imagine that it's a very satisfying continuation of it even if so, though.

The last shot is Winry, at home, with pictures of the brothers from throughout their childhoods and teenaged adventurer era mounted on the wall behind her. Poor her I guess. End of movie. End of, no doubt infuriatingly, FMA03.

I think they might have been trying to do a thing here about like, how the real world is more important than made up fictional ones? Maybe? Telling the audience to stop wasting time watching fantasy media and do real world activism instead?

Well, no. That contradicts what the writers told us in person in their own last face-to-face appearance, about the importance of imagining impossible worlds and stuff. So yeah. I don't know.

I guess more generally just "don't try to save what's already been lost, work with what's around you instead?" Except...no, that flies in the face of the brothers abandoning their goddamned homeworld and leaving everyone who loves and cares about them behind with nary a word.

It wants to say something. I don't think it knows what it wants to say.

I haven't seen FMA03, but there's no way in hell that this movie could NOT be massively fucking insulting as a capstone to it. "None of the relationships between the characters you've seen develop throughout the series matter." "Major characters with unresolved arcs? They get killed as a minor part of a plot by some fucking random nazi lady from Earth who you've never heard about and who had nothing to do with anything until now."

Earlier on, I made the criticism that it's hard to care about Kung Fu Homunculus Hitler as much when he's in the same story as Actual Hitler. This is sort of the same problem, but in reverse. Nothing in Fullmetal Alchemist matters in the face of this historical crossover that came out of nowhere in the end, and you're not supposed to think that it ever did. Like, the story is agreeing "yeah, nothing in FMA matters compared to this." To which I, in turn, would reply "THEN WHY ARE YOU EVEN BOTHERING TO MAKE AN FMA MOVIE?"

...

The beginning, with the (apparently very authentic) Romani music and the story centering on Noah, made me think that perhaps Conqueror of Shamballa would at least be an interesting dive into the world of the early twentieth century Roma, even if it's a poor fit for FMA. The faithful historical detail was definitely the best part of the film, for as long as it remained a major part of it. I don't know much about Romani culture, modern or historical. I don't think very many non-Roma do. There's probably more misinformation out about them than any other ethnic group in the world. I could have enjoyed a movie that was about Noah's struggle for safety and survival, even if it had Edward Elric randomly shoehorned into it. Sadly, after the first twenty-some minutes I'm not even sure why Noah was in this movie at all.

Those first twenty-some minutes, though...

This movie came out in 2005. The xenophobic outbursts, the aggrieved war veterans, and the dickhead cop could have just as easily been inspired by smartphone vids uploaded to YouTube in Trump-Biden era America. If I told you Conqueror of Shamballa came out in 2020, you'd probably be sure that those scenes had to be inspired by modern Amerofascism, and the beer hall scene in particular was taking cues from the leadup to Jan 6 2021. But they weren't. It's a really chilling demonstration of where the Anglosphere is right now, and also a testament to how good a job the creators did researching what it was actually like to live through the nascency of nazism.

If it had kept being about that, it would have been great. Even if it suffered from also trying to be a conclusion to FMA2003.

There are so many directions this movie could have gone, at so many points throughout the plot, that would have made it better. Oh well.

It's possible that I'd be less disappointed in Conqueror of Shamballa if I'd seen FMA03, but I think it's likelier that I'd be more disappointed. I guess people who have seen it can chime in here. But anyway, that's all I have to say.