Fullmetal Alchemist: Conqueror of Shamballa (part eleven)

Alright. Hopefully I can finish this movie today. Because, let me tell you, it really saves the "best" for last with these final twenty minutes.

Winry finishes attaching Edward's new automail, which she's been carrying with her wherever she goes and constantly tinkering to account for his probable growth ever since he vanished apparently. She didn't get his new size *perfectly,* but she still got way closer to it than she should have considering that she was just fucking guessing lmao.

Then, they hear engines roaring again, and more half-melted rocket planes just like the first one start flying out the portal.

...how many of these things did they build?

Did Wogdat make a bunch of copies of it just to be an even bigger dick than usual, or did Earthphonse and his team of like 6-7 other guys somehow build an entire airforce of these bleeding edge rocket-propelled troop planes, just in some rich guy's fucking basement, without the government finding out?

Is Ekhart somehow, interuniversally, related to Hiroshi Sato? Inborn supernatural ability to gestate a nation-sized mechanized army inside of one's own anus that the family shares?

Who's even piloting these other planes?

If the Thule Society has the resources and manpower for this, why the hell do they even need to steal Shamballan bullshit to take over Germany? How could the nazi party NOT see them as its biggest asset even without magic, just on account of their hardware and apparent ability to operate on this scale with impunity?

One of the rocket planes smashes into the cave ceiling, killing everyone and everything aboard it in a fiery explosion. As we've established, any time these guys fly a squad of aircraft, at least one of them will crash into the ground and blow itself up due to sheer incompetence (…okay, thinking about it some more maybe that's why they aren't considered the nazi party's greatest asset :V). However, there are still (SOMEHOW) several other planes, and these ones follow Ekhart's up the earthquake-crevice toward the city above.

Edward goes to chase after them just like Alphonse did earlier. How quickly can a person get to the surface from down here, on foot? By endgame Mangahood they were able to earthbend rising pillars high enough to lift them out of pits like this one, after they disabled Father's catalyst-bottlenecking trick, but I don't know if they can do that in this version. IS there an elevator that goes all the way down here, or something like that?

Back up on the surface, grim, dramatic music plays as the armored things make their shuffling way toward the Amestrian defenders' lines and get blown away like absolute chumps. In the cockpit of her stupid rocketplane, though, Ekhart is grinning. As if she doesn't realize what an absolute failure this operation has already proven itself to be. DID she take brain damage from traveling through the portal? It's really seeming like it. As she circles over the rooftops of Central, she whispers that this appears to be a capital city...and that she's going to wipe it off the map.

WHAT.

That...

But...she...

This whole plot is about...

Even if that IS why she's here, how is she planning to wipe out a large city with a half dozen rocket-planes and a few hundred maybe-golem soldiers armed only with machine guns? You could barely even destroy a medium-sized town with that, let alone a capital city with a defensive garrison.

Brain damage. It's got to be brain damage from going through the portal. There's literally no other explanation.

Then the other rocketplanes join her in the air above Central, and Edward is clutching onto one of their wings.

So, there was a way for him to get up to the surface quickly, apparently. But how did he get up onto the PLANE?

Also, does this mean that Alphonse is still huffing and puffing his way up the stairs?

As soon as the other planes join her, Ekhart somehow notices Edward clutching for dear life onto one of their wings. And, her reaction to this is to clench her teeth and growl "EDWARD ELRIC!!!" as if he's some kind of longterm nemesis of hers who has foiled her plans numerous times in the past or something. Which, um. He isn't. Frankly, aside from temporarily stalling her minions' recruitment of Noah, most of Edward's actions in this story have ended up benefitting Ekhart's plans more than impeding them.

Honestly, I'm surprised that she even remembers his name.

Edward, flexing his alchemy muscles for the first time in years, transmutes the plane he's on - along with anyone inside of it - into this silly armored balloon thing. Gruesome, but probably necessary. Ekhart shoots it down with a maniacal cackle, and Edward grabs some debris and uses it to make a parachute type thing that gets him down onto the street safely. He inspects the earthquake damage to Central; it's very extensive. Ekhart keeps cackling and flying her plane around, transmuting more machine guns out of its underbelly to pepper the buildings with more bullets. Which, um. Puts some little holes in them. And maybe also hits a person here and there, idk. Bullets are not all that good for city-destroying, as it turns out. Also, I just now noticed that the mass of possibly-human-remains caked across Ekhart's chest is shaped like a dorky smiley face.

Hilarious.

Well, Edward is on the ground. Fortuitously, Edward quickly runs into Alphonse. Alphonse is also inspecting the damage, but with a more horrified, self-recriminating expression.

Alphonse, you KNEW that you were causing another earthquake. You KNEW that the previous one did a lot of damage. You kept the spell going, shielding yourself from the debris for minutes on end as the undercity shook and crumbled all around you, KNOWING that Central was right overhead. Stop making the surprised pikachu face you little shit, you don't get to feign ignorance about this.

A damaged building finishes collapsing, and they hear a little girl scream as she's crushed under it. Perfect positioning; she has her hand sticking out from under the rubble over a little pool of blood, with a pink teddy bear laying photogenically on the ground a few inches away to make it extra tragic. Alphonse rushes over and starts to do a spontaneous transmutation, but Edward stops him, reminding him grimly that the dead cannot be brought back.

Um.

No shit?

Edward. Edward, bro. After everything you two have seen and learned, even if Alphonse's memories of most of it are wiped. After all the experience you know Alphonse has been getting independently while you were shuffling around carrying rocket parts for his Earth counterpart. Do you really think he needs you to tell him this?

Are you sure he wasn't, you know, trying to get the kid free of the rubble in case she's not quite dead yet, so he can heal her?

I thought Alphonse was the one whose character was being assassinated in this movie. I guess we had a last minute change of plans.

So, instead, Alphonse just collapses on the cratered pavement and asks Edward if this is all his fault. Which, um...maybe? Sort of? Ekhart's previous attempt caused destructive earthquakes even without anyone Amestris-side participating, and she was always going to try it again, so...maybe this would have happened anyway? It's not clear if Alphonse made it worse than it otherwise would have been (though he was still horribly reckless for trying it in either case). So, yeah. Maybe? I don't know, and I don't think Edward could know either.

Edward admonishes Alphonse that, just like they did with their mother, just like they've seen other people try and fail to do, he was "just" trying to bring Edward back. Just like Earthphonse just wanted to help him home. Just like Noah just wanted a world where she could find peace and safety. No one wanted this disaster, but they all caused it.

...um. No. Sorry. This is not the same thing. There was absolutely no reason for either of them to think that traveling between parallel earths is a cosmic violation in the same way as bringing back the dead.

And, with the way Noah is being included in this litany...is Edward saying that it's wrong to try to make anything better, or get back anything that's been lost, regardless of circumstances? I'm not sure what else he could be getting at, but this would have to be the most asinine philosophy I've ever heard. "Don't try to help people, you'll destroy the world by accident." That's like if you summarized Fullmetal Alchemist for the dumbest person you know, and then they explained it in their own words to the dumbest person they know, and then it continued on for five or six iterations like that, and then had the last dummy in the chain explain the message of Fullmetal Alchemist to you.

An explosion rips into another nearby building, as a rocket plane flies overhead. Okay, I guess Ekhart has some bombs to drop as well. That makes this attack a little bit more threatening than it initially seemed. Only a little bit, but still, better than "I'll destroy this city by shooting air-to-air machine guns at the buildings and sending some extremely shitty infantry to walk around and try to kill people at random."

Hmm. Okay. This is just getting absurd.

Giving Ekhart's planes some bombs is a good way to make them actually some kind of threat to Central, sure. But now the movie is trying to frame this as if Ekhart's forces are what caused most of the destruction we see all around, and that's straight-up bullshit. We SAW the earthquake ripping buildings apart and tearing streets and malls in half. Ekhart and Friends weren't through the portal yet when that happened. I don't know exactly how many of these planes she's supposed to have had Earthphonse and his team incubate inside of her rectum, but I don't think the movie wants me to believe that it's enough planes to carry enough bombs for the battle damage to even come close to the earthquake damage. At least, I sure fucking hope it doesn't.

Hell, a good amount of the damage is probably left over from Ekhart's first attempt, which Alphonse truly had nothing at all to do with. I guess Edward did, on account of randomly deciding to finish drawing that glyph in the castle, but...okay actually you know what, I'm not going to defend him there, this actually is Edward's fault for doing that stupid thing, I take back my objections.

And...maybe Edward and Alphonse were the ones who sent Hohenheim and Envy through as well, I guess. Maybe that's also part of what Edward means? IDFK.

They resolve that since they bear responsibility for this situation, they need to help resolve it. Okay, I guess sometimes it isn't bad to try to make things better, that's good to know. They can't act as if the world is no concern of theirs, Edward also says, which I guess connects back to a theme of the main series or something. Then, we cut back to Mustang and Armstrong, who have managed to scrounge up the materials to transmute a balloon together. Mustang doesn't think he can bring more than one person's worth of weight without having to spend too much of his attention keeping the balloon hot to be any help shooting down the baddies, so he's going up alone.

They could really only manage one balloon? And even that one requires a pyromancer to get it off the ground instead of having a normal burner? We've seen Armstrong make buildings in this very movie, could he really not make a gas stove or three to put in balloons? Surprising. Oh well.

Meanwhile, Edward and Alphonse get into the air themselves by...oh for fuck's sake are you shitting me right now?

They can do this trick now, but NOT any of the previous times when it would have been the obvious solution?

Fucking...why the hell didn't Armstrong do THIS instead of the balloon bullshit? Even if Mustang can't do the earthbending trick at short notice due to his specialty, Armstrong can!

And...actually, screw short notice! Would drawing an earthbending glyph have actually taken less time then sending someone to grab balloon-making materials?

Actually, wait, why didn't Edward do this the instant he was on the street? Why did he meander around until he found Alphonse before doing this? Wasn't HE the one going on about how he has a responsibility to do something, here? Why the fuck did he wait?

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF.

So. They and Mustang catch each others' eyes and coordinate their attack. Ekhart is too stupid to just move her plane further away from the obviously dangerous enemy magicians, so Mustang is able to distract her by making her evade his flares while Edward and Alphonse shoot another, thinner earth-pillar out of the side of the thick earth-pillar that they're standing on to catch and impale her plane. If you think this might look any less stupid than I'm making it sound, I've got bad news for you.

Even ignoring all the myriad problems with conservation of momentum, the structural integrity of a stone spike that long and that thin, etc, it just looks fucking stupid.

Now, why does the movie need to have the rocketplane stay in the air with just this impossibly thin, diagonal little rock toothpick for support, when having the spike damage the plane and send it spinning down into a crash landing would have made more sense and been just as much of a winning move on the good guys' part? Well, I GUESS you could say that Mustang and the Elric brothers don't want to endanger more civilians by letting the plane crash in the middle of the city (hard though that is to believe in Alphonse's case, at this point). So, absurdity of the solution aside, in-universe they might have prevented the plane from crashing in order to avoid further collateral damage. Maybe.

But, I suspect the real reason they did this is so that Edward could have a face to face wizard duel with Ekhart. You can't have a dramatic duel with the villain if they've died in a plane crash now, can you?

So. Mustang joins the brothers on their pillar, slagging Ekhart's new gunports as fast as she can shape them. With him handling the suppression, Edward and Alphonse climb up the stupid stone spike and gain entrance to the rocket plane. Then, in between shots, Alphonse vanishes so that Edward can confront Ekhart alone in a dramatic duel.

No, seriously. One second, Alphonse is right behind Edward as the two of them enter the plane. The next, Edward is confronting Ekhart in the cockpit, and Alphonse is nowhere to be seen.

I hope it turns out that Edward is having him climb across the top of the plane so he can drop down into the cockpit behind Ekhart and punch her in the back of the head while Edward distracts. That would be in character for the Elric brothers. Otherwise, this is just literal fucking RWBY tier fight direction.

When she hears Edward enter the cockpit, Ekhart for some reason starts monologuing about how this is a new and alien world, completely unlike her own. And Edward for some reason monologues back at her about how that's not true, the two are really similar and have really similar people in them. Because that's what people would say in this situation. She turns around and starts transmuting some of the black shit at him. He parries. Then, he finally asks her what the fuck she even thinks she's trying to do with this operation. THANK YOU, Edward.

As for the answer she gives...I'm going to very, very generously assume that she did in fact suffer brain damage during transit, because oh boy.

She doesn't want to steal the knowledge and technology of this world, as it turns out. She wants to *destroy* this world.

Using a handful of planes and a few hundred zombie soldiers.

Why does she want to destroy this world? Well, because she fears it, obviously. From her first look through the portal, she knew that the world they'd mistakingly thought was "Shamballa" contained powers greater than their own. A foreign world that's stronger than Earth? Such a thing cannot be allowed to exist. So, she came here to destroy it and lay its threat to rest.

Using a handful of planes and a few hundred zombie soldiers.

When she knows, and is aware enough of to admit in as many words, that the reason this other world is scary is because its people are militarily stronger than hers.

...

You know, if this story had to have a subplot involving a nuclear bomb in it, you'd think HERE would be the place to bring that to its head.

Obviously, a nuclear bomb (or even a few nuclear bombs) still wouldn't be enough to actually destroy the entire Amestrian civilization, let alone all the other countries that its world contains. But, there are a couple of things it would do:

1. Give Ekhart's plans some actual stakes. If she has the bomb, and most of the cast are currently in Central, she could very plausibly kill all the characters from the series who we theoretically care about. On top of hundreds of thousands of civilians, rather than the mere few-hundred-at-best that she can threaten with a small fleet's worth of guns and blackpowder bombs.

2. Give Ekhart a reason to think she COULD destroy the alien world that she fears, even if she actually can't. She's a delusional fascist. The atomic bomb is a futuristic weapon of great, but not yet properly tested, destructive capabilities. It's plausible that someone like Ekhart might think that they can destroy a militarily superior world if they had the bomb. It is NOT plausible that she'd think she can do so using conventional military forces, no matter how much nazi moon logic she's running on.

It would still be stupid, obviously, but it would be significantly less stupid.

...

Edward tries to convince Ekhart that the people of this world have no intent to attack Earth, she's being paranoid. Heh, if I were him I think I'd have taken the tac of "how do you think you're going to defeat our superior powers with just a shitty little militia and a single inexperienced alchemist, dumbass?" but he's not me. In response, she...oh for the

Movie. Movie, you could have done an actual thing here.

The above screenshot is Ekhart's response to Edward telling her that the people of this world are just humans like herself. Which...urrrgh. It would have been both a much better cap on Fullmetal Alchemist as a story, AND a better engagement with the pseudo-intellectual underpinings of naziism, if Ekhart had responded with something like "Yes, I know you're humans just like us. That's the entire problem."

Like, think about all the different notes that would be able to hit.

While ideologies like naziism are of course all about otherizing and dehumanizing, the fundamental justification running through all of it is "us versus them." Only the strong survive. We will survive because we are the strongest, and we are the strongest because we survive. There's a kind of lunatic pessimism to it, almost like the Dark Forest Hypothesis but applied to (arbitrarily essentialized) groups of humans.

And frankly? I've had this exact conversation with multiple fascist chuds. And they all, invariably, at some point, said that the savages and untermenschen understand - as they do - that life is struggle and societies are in a zero sum game, and that if "we" stop being brutal than "they" will just brutalize us instead. The more self aware ones will even admit that the racist pseudoscience that doesn't stand up to scrutiny is just to assuage their own consciences and help make this Darwinian necessity easier to go through with (though they'll also forget that they said it until forced to admit it again in a later conversation).

Edward just gave this whole dumb speech about accountability. He was, in the not-too-distant past, a soldier for an expansionist, genocidal regime. The first people from Amestris to come through to Germany were Hohenheim (in this version, a cynical monster who spent centuries sacrificing other people for his own longevity before eventually feeling some remorse) and Envy (no elaboration required). Amestris is clearly full of people LIKE Ekhart. She knows that there are people like her here. She might even know that those people were powerful enough to do the same thing to the Ishvallans that she would like to do to the Jews and Roma. She knows what they'll do if they discover Earth, because they are like her and she knows herself. That's why she needs to strike first. In the fascist worldview, this is an inviolable law of nature.

If she said that, then Edward would have to answer it.

Wouldn't THAT be a fitting ending for Fullmetal Alchemist?

With all the depravity and abuse that Edward has seen in his world, all the thirst for power and use of it for destruction and victimization, all the deception and doublethink and myopia, what argument would he be able to come up with? It almost turns this into a divine judgement scene. Ekhart as the Accusing Angel, pointing down from the clouds at humanity and showing why it belongs in hell with the likes of her. Edward as an Abraham, a Job, having seen it all and endured it all, now having to climb up from that humanity as its representative and explain why he still doesn't see it that way.

But no. Instead of that, we get the absolute most elementary, dumbed-down version of "racism is bad."

I'll finish this tomorrow. We still have a LOT more to talk about. It gets worse.