Fullmetal Alchemist: Conqueror of Shamballa (part one)
This review was comissioned by @AKuz. For some reason.
The 2003 Fullmetal Alchemist "adaptation" was premature to an almost comical degree. By all accounts it did a sterling job of adapting the early manga material, even improving on it in some regards. However, it also caught up to the author and parted ways with her during...the Dublith arc.
As in, literally just one or two issues before Father's first appearance.
Thus, the old series was left with a bunch of clues and puzzle pieces that had nothing connected to them. Right at the point in the story where they needed to start fitting together and pointing to a main plot. The nature of the Sins as personality fragments of a single being? The macroglyph plot? The nature of Hohenheim's existence and him connecting the story's heroes and villains? The 2003 series had NONE of that. Just a bunch of idiosyncratic clues and mysteries that could only be understood to point to those things in retrospect.
You know that thing that JJ Abrams does in every single TV show he's ever had a hand in, where he throws a bunch of tantalizing specks of bullshit at the script and then, five seasons in, tries to retroactively come up with a story that fits them all and fails miserably and disappoints everyone, but the show already got top ratings before that point so they keep giving him new shows and letting him do this again and again and again forever? Well, this instance is much more forgivable, since these writers didn't choose to do things like this, but it's got the same fundamental problem.
FMA03 does have its diehard fans, but virtually everyone I've talked to who has seen it agrees that it kinda started falling apart toward the end, if not the middle. I've heard bits and pieces of it, including such questionable decisions as "Shou Tucker comes back from the dead as a backwards-headed sheep person," "the Sins are all dead people who had their resurrections botched and they all started working for the villain because of raisins or something," and, finally, "in the end Edward steps through the Gates of Truth and finds himself in real world non-fantasy-analogue Nazi Germany."
It is that last plot point, in particular, that makes the movie-length finale "Conqueror of Shamballa" so infamous.
Anyway, @AKuz wanted me to go into this as blind as possible for maximum brain damage. I haven't managed to stay completely spoiler free (and I already knew some tidbits even before receiving this commission), so I'll disclose everything I know about FMA03's divergences and this movie in particular ahead of time.
Sloth is the fucked up body of Trisha Elric that Edward and Alphonse made and discarded. It apparently came back to life or something after they buried it.
Envy was made from the remains of a third Elric brother. Presumably by Hohenheim, though I'm not sure.
The villain is this lady named Dante. I think she used to date Hohenheim back in college or something. Her motive is...immortality, I think? Anyway, she attracts these accidentally-created homunculi to herself somehow, and they work for her for some reason. Not sure if she's the one who decided to name them after sins, or if they somehow came up with those names on their own.
King Bradley is Pride, rather than Wrath. Amusingly, the 03 writers made the same wrong inferences that I did at first (to be fair to both myself and them, this was long before the reveal that the Sins being mismatched to their most obvious namesakes was intentional by the author).
Edward goes through the Gates of Truth and finds himself in real world non-fantasy-analogue Nazi Germany. It bears repeating.
Alright. So. I don't have booze handy, but I have ritalin and caffeine, so hopefully that'll be enough. Time to watch Fullmetal Alchemist: Reverse Isekai Nazi Finale.
We open on an island castle, just off the coast of Southwestern Amestris. Apparently this version of the place does have some coastal access, or else there's just a really, really big lake there. The lower levels of this castle have some big clockwork contraptions working away, and Alphonse is being given a tour by this whacky scientist type dude. Apparently, they've been doing some experimental mining techniques down here, and discovered exotic minerals with intriguing new properties.
Those properties, specifically. Looks like right now is not a very good time to be a Drachman, assuming Drachma exists in this version.
The industrialist/scientist/whatever who runs this place has already, within just a few years of discovering Uranium, weaponized it into a bomb. That...might not be as unlikely as it sounds, if he has some alchemists on staff who could bypass a lot of the real life technical issues that stood between "oh hey, radiation is a thing that exists" and "Japan unconditionally surrenders." It also fits the Amestrian ethos, that they'd skip Curie and go straight to Oppenheimer if alchemy lets them get away with it. Well, anyway! The person in charge of this place wants Alphonse to go to Central and try to convince the brass that his invention really needs to be taken seriously, because it could seriously be a game changer for the Amestrian military. And, to that end, he hands Alphonse a small, portable nuke and tells him to carry it to Central to show them.
-______-
Well that's not a sneaky attempt at a decapitation strike or anything.
Alphonse refuses the task. Not because he's too smart for it, though. Rather, because he's too dumb for it.
"People will only use this bomb for war."
Yes. Yes, Alphonse, they will. It is a bomb.
Frustrated and enraged at the discovery that his universe's Alphonse is fifty IQ points short of the manga/Brotherhood version, the nuke guy freaks out at him, activates this big torture device contraption that engulfs Alphonse, and starts making accusations.
Really stupid accusations.
Looks like Alphonse isn't the only one playing with less than a full deck in this game. :/
Al tries to reason with the guy, but he's impervious to reason. And also seems to think that attacking a state alchemist is going to improve his chances of getting his invention picked up by Central, rather than the literal exact opposite of that. He uses his extravagant torture device thing to start drilling Al's suit apart, cackling about how he wants to see what the Fullmetal Alchemist really looks like under that ostentatious armor he always stomps around in. Oh, we're doing the thing with the mixup. Heh, in the Brotherhood continuity that was almost exclusively an early series thing, so it surprises me to see an instance of it coming at the end of the FMA03 timeline. Well, he drills the armor open, and is mystified and creeped out to find it empty. Alphonse doesn't move. Playing dead? Probably playing dead. The bad guy releases the clamps of the machine to get a better look at Alphonse's hulk, still trying to figure out what the fuck.
Then Edward transmutes his way in through the ceiling and tells the guy that the jig is up. Alphonse, who of course had just been playing dead ever since he tore the armor open, jumps back to his feet and complains about how they're going to have to weld his suit back together again. Edward corrects the baddie in his usual, irritable style, telling him that he is only NOW meeting the Fullmetal Alchemist. While wearing a helmet like Mysterio's.
Was this a thing in the manga? Edward never wore this thing in Brotherhood, and it's being introduced nonchalantly and without explanation here. I assume it was either somewhere in the manga, or at least introduced early in FMA03. It's pretty silly looking, in any case.
Fight scene ensues. On one hand, you can tell that the animation didn't have Brotherhood's budget to work with. On the other, the animators clearly *know* what they can and can't do within those limitations, and walk that tightrope pretty impressively. It doesn't have the same kinesis or spectacle you'd get from Brotherhood. A lot of the big movements and special effects have their expensive parts hidden by careful "camera" cuts and angles. The art style is very pretty; kind of a mix of technophilic realism, and gothic gloom, and that makes up for the relatively humble animation. It's its own vibe, and it works.
Bad guy does some generic Early FMA Villain ranting and rambling and tries to kill them with mining equipment. Elric brothers do earthbending and metal-warping to mess with his machines, culminating in Edward turning his giant crane-mounted drillhead into a silly cartoon version of Edward's face. All while shouting stuff about how alchemy works for the benefit of the audience. I'm not sure how many people would have ever seen "Conqueror of Shamballa" without first acquainting themselves with at least some previous FMA media, but this movie makes a point of being accessible to such people.
There is a new flavour of villain-of-the-week-who-thinks-they-were-jilted-by-the-state here, though.
Edward lost his Mysterio bubble helmet lol.
There never was a conflict between the naturalistic sciences and alchemy in Brotherhood, at least. The manga may have touched at a theme like this at some point, but if so it couldn't have been a major element. I don't know if this became a running element in FMA03 before this movie or not. Interesting and different, at any rate.
Eventually the brothers corner Dr. Nukington. During the battle, his weaponized mining machine ended up breaking open a wall and answering a question I had been about to ask. Namely, "where the hell are all the workers?" They're in a big pile, hastily tossed together and hidden behind a flash-transmuted bulkhead. Looks like there still are downsides to skipping the Marie Curie stage of radiological research in this world. I'm guessing the workers who didn't all drop of radiation poisoning have just fled, leaving their boss to pitch his hastily-completed bomb prototype to the state in a last ditch attempt to save himself from ignoble destitution (and probably cancer death. I can't imagine he's *healthy,* given how much time he's spent in close-ish proximity to those levels of radioactivity). At any rate, if the brothers had any lingering sympathy left for this guy, it's gone now.
Not having a verbal retort to their accusing glares, Nukington pulls out his handheld device and threatens to just blow all of them up if the brothers don't back off and let him escape. In keeping with the general early-series vibe of this whole scenario, Edward isn't yet animu superspeed enough to knock the bomb out of his hand before he can push the button or the like, and the 2003 series diverged right before Alphonse could become a spontaneous caster himself, so the brothers are forced to comply with Nukington's demands for the moment. However, Nukington squanders his chance to escape. Honestly, I wonder if he already has brain cancer or something specifically; his behavior is about that erratic. Instead of fleeing, he runs over to the pile of irradiated corpses and announces that he's going to transmute them back to life as combat cyborgs and try to win this fight again. Yes, he cackles, he may consider physics to be the superior way of studying the world, but he's also an alchemist as well. It's just too useful to not have, and a genius like himself can easily multiclass these INT based options.
That does explain why his contraptions had such combat flexibility, heh. If he was transmuting them during use. He probably has a set of glyphs inscribed on the control panel or something.
Edward warns him that if he really is such a genius, he should know that there's a good reason why human transmutation is taboo. Nukington laughs dismissively, and says that yes, he does. The reason is that alchemists are insufficiently rational and still cling to primitive religious restrictions with no logic behind them.
Sigh....okay then, uranium dude. Hope you weren't planning to use that spinal cord any time soon.
Somehow convinced that he can transmute dead bodies into living, fully functional, and loyal monsters despite never having done anything like that before, he produces a scroll with a transmutation glyph on it, presses it to the pile of corpses, and sends himself to wog for judgement.
Hmm, no archon squatting in front of the gate. Either they for some reason decided to omit that detail in the 03verse (seems a really bizarre thing to change though), or Dr. Nukerton has a rare congenital defect that causes him to lack a higher soul.
Also, the Gate and the entity behind it are a lot more actively creepy in this version. Less uncaring Outer God, and more actively giggling demon swarm.
The tentacles pull him in, and nothing comes back out. The dumbass tried to do, like, twelve instances of human transmutation all at once, so it's not too surprising that he'd get totally obliterated instead of just dismembered.
We return to the mortal plane, where Edward and Alphonse are having one of their post-battle introspection sessions on a ledge overlooking the sea. Well, "introspection" in this case really amounting to "as-you-know-ing their backstory for new audiences that I still am really not sure this movie needed to work so hard to accommodate."
Basically, this whole introductory sequence is Liore Redux. Overconfident middle aged man authority figure villain advocating a worldview that conflicts with Edward's. Some whacky plot involving a dangerous McGuffin and tensions with Central. Fights the brothers with a big weapon, and then fucks himself up trying to do an alchemy thing at them when that doesn't work. All serving as a basic introduction to who the Elric brothers are and what they do. Even some of the camera angles as they look out over the sea are pretty close to some shots I saw from FMA03's Liore episode, with them standing on the church towers looking down at the city.
Heh, it really, holistically, feels like a very early episode. On one hand, I want to say that "random guy invents nuclear weapons" is a little over-the-top for just a throwaway alternate intro sequence. On the other, it's still not nearly as over-the-top as the throwaway alternate pilot plot that Brotherhood came up with, so I can't really complain heh.
The dialogue hadn't been impressing me too much up until this point, but now, after they finish the exposition about their background and their quest for bodily restoration, the Elric brothers have a beautifully in-character exchange that makes up for a lot of it:
Edward: "Come on now. This castle is going to explode."
Alphonse: "Why?"
Edward: (grinning fiendishly) "Because I don't like it."
Castle:
Alphonse: (desperately outrunning the explosion and collapsing architecture) "Why do you always do that?"
Edward: (running alongside him) "Oh be quiet, what's done is done."
Yeah, this is Fullmetal Alchemist alright. It might be a bit off-kilter, but it's definitely still Fullmetal Alchemist.
The sequence ends with them desperately paddling toward shore on a piece of broken steam engine that they reshaped into something boatlike. And, while I get that this bit is just here for comedy purposes, I feel like it's selling the brothers a little too short.
Reshaping metal is possibly even more basic than the earth-pillar trick, for Edward. Him not using alchemy to plug the leaks and turn some extra bits of sheeting into oars just for the sake of a throwaway gag feels kinda lazy on the part of the gag-maker.
From there, we cut to Edward and Alphonse driving down a country road. Edward appears to have all of his limbs. Alphonse is completely organic. Um...did they get their bodies back sometime in the series, before the movie? In which case, The Sinister Isle of Dr. Atomwaffen was a flashback to some years prior? Anyway, Alphonse is laughing at a joke or story that Edward just told him. He coughs mid-laugh, so it seems like his body is still having some health issues after its divine internment, but all in all he looks and sounds pretty good considering. And, after laughing, he tells Edward that he loves these whacky fantasy stories he makes up about these self-insert versions of themselves as cyborg wizard police in service of a hoary magitech empire, but he's taking this whole alchemy thing a liiiittle too seriously at this point.
Erm...I think there might be some translation issues in play here. The phrasing in those subtitles suggest a really, really weird perspective that I'd be surprised if this movie was actually taking.
Although, that kind of pales in comparison to the much more obvious weirdness of alternate universe Elric brothers just...being on Earth. And their Edward somehow having prophetic dreams or whatever connecting him to his Amestrian counterpart. At least, I *think* that's what this is getting at? Maybe? And...I guess Earth!Alphonse's health problems might be sympathetically linked to the Amestrian version's critical existence failure? Maybe?
...or wait. Edward is saying that he DIDN'T make this story up. As in, he actually believes that these exploits of he and his brother's cyborg wizard alter egos. And, when Alphonse presses the disagreement, Edward explicitly asserts that there are other worlds besides this one.
So, this is actually Amestrian Edward, after having replaced his Earth self without Earth Alphonse noticing?
Does this mean that Earth Edward is stumbling around in Amestris in the company of a confused (still metal-bodied? or has he fixed himself by now?) Amestrian Alphonse? This Edward seems to have all this limbs, but it could still be the Amestrian version who just got himself restored before swapping with his Earth version.
...
This is really reminding me a lot of the infamous Battlestar Galactica ending. The one that the writer actually admitted came from him succumbing to last minute panic when the show was about to be cancelled and writing about the main characters waking up in their modern NYC bedrooms without having any idea of where he was going with it.
I haven't watched the 03 series, and barely know anything about where the plot went toward the end, but like...what could have happened in it that would leave the writers in a place where THIS seemed like a good idea?
...
Edward snaps at Alphonse energetically enough to take his eyes off the wheel, resulting in him crashing their car into a tree. Nice going Ed. He and Alphonse get out and stand by the road waiting for help, which eventually comes in the form of a flatbed truck with room for a couple more passengers. They're offered a ride, and we get a date and location caption.
The caption for the previous sequence in Amestris gave the date as 1914, local time. Amestris' 1914 could be simultaneous with Earth's 1923, or the two calendars could be perfectly aligned and the incident with Dr. Nukington was nine years ago.
Honestly, the Nukington thing felt so much like a mash-up of the Cornello thing and the original Yoki thing that it might just be a garbled fusion of two different visions that made it into Earth Edward's dreams or something.
Anyway. The truck driver asks them if they're going to the carnival, and they happily say that they are. And get in without expressing any concern about their wrecked car. They, uh, aren't going to ask him to just let them off at the nearest place with a phone so they can try to do something about their vehicle? No? Well, okay then. The boys climb onto the flatbed, which turns out to be full of sexy Roma ladies.
Hmm. This is the same autumn as the Beer Hall Putsch. According to some quick internet research I just did, persecution of Romani in 20th century Germany didn't escalate along quite the same pattern that, eg, antisemitism did, with the dramatic dips and peaks leading up to the nazi zenith. It was more of a slow, steady escalation starting from the early 1900's, but things did speed up faster starting from the mid 1920's or so. So, basically, starting now. I suspect we're about to witness an incident.
As they ride along, the boys ask their fellow passengers what they're planning to hawk at the festival. Some are dancers, some are fortune tellers, and quite a few of them smile and bat their eyes at the boys in an over-the-top way that suggests they might be in the tiddy rental business as well. Edward makes fun of Alphonse for being all superstitious and unscientific when he asks a girl to tell him his fortune. Right in front of the girl in question. I guess this version of Edward never grew past the obnoxious /r/atheism phase that he showed with Rose, heh, oh well.
Also, it seems like Alphonse should probably be pushing back pretty hard at Edward, since he was literally just talking up alchemy a few minutes ago. From the perspective of an Earth person, neither of those things are any more superstitious or backward than the other lol. Even Alphonse should get his feathers ruffled at this (from his view) rank hypocrisy, heh.
Fortunately, the girls don't get annoyed at Edward, or if they do they don't show it. One of them, who even the other fortune tellers think is slightly creepy because of how accurate her readings are, puts her hand on Edward's shoulder and has some kind of psychic...thing...happen.
Actually, that lady looks a LOT like Rose, from Liore. I thought of her because of Edward's similarly irritating attitudes in the two scenes, but looking at it now...yeah, she REALLY looks like Rose. I guess it could be coincidence, but if we already have alternate universe Alphonse in this story then there could be other parallel versions of characters in weird places.
I'm just going to repeat my question of "why would you ever want to do this with Fullmetal Alchemist of all things?" for now and leave it at that.
Anyway, Rosemani got a flash of dimensional something or other from Edward, and she sort of coils her arms protectively around herself and looks spooked. Edward looks spooked at how spooked she looks. But, the odd moment passes, and as the truck drives along the atmosphere warms up again. And, as the country fair grounds loom into view ahead of them, the women start singing a perfect harmony with ethereal Flemenco background.
The words didn't sound like Japanese, so I thought this might actually be a legitimate Romani folk song or something and looked it up. Turns out that it isn't, it was created for this movie, but the lyrics are authentic Sinti and the style is faithful enough that real life Romani audiences were apparently really pleasantly surprised by it. And, like. It's a bop. Totally aside from cultural and linguistic authenticity, it's a great song, and the VA's do a great job with it. It feels effortful on pretty much every level.
The title drops as they sing their way to the fairgrounds. We just briefly see Edward's face morph back into his Amestrian counterpart(?)'s before the sequence ends and "Let's Dance" gives way to a comparatively forgettable anime intro song.
This movie is something alright. Not a bad something, I don't think, exactly, but. Something.
I sort of suspect that my conclusion at the end will be that this was a great historical fantasy movie that suffered from a shoehorned connection to FMA. It's sort of giving me premonitions of that. But, maybe it'll manage to tie things together better than that. Anyway, its an hour and forty-five minute movie, so there will be plenty of posts yet to come.
