Heavenly Sword (2014)

Best movie ever!

Admirable film.

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

I'm not a Playstation fan. But I bought one to play the game that this movie is based on. So seeing this movie was a must for me since Heavenly Sword was so amazing, especially the characters. After preparing a meal, speakers turned up, lights low I started this movie. After a small intro the action started. 10 seconds later I wanted to stop watching because the movie felt REALLY terrible. The editing was such a mess that the movie feels all over the place and confusing. Its like if someone took all the cut scenes out of a game and made a movie out of them. Half the time I was like "Wait, what happened to the end of the last scene?" or "Now whats happenings?!?". The story is barley coherent. The animations aren't all that great and the game itself sadly looks way better then this movie does. It felt like you were watching some low budget movie made on someones computer at home. And the voice overs were terrible too. The original voice actors from the games take up their roles again but everything feels really off when people speak. Sometimes things are not perfectly lined up to match the mouth. Other times it feels like the voice isn't coming from who you are watching, but more of a narrators voice. Only reason I gave this two stars is because I like Nariko and Kai. And their voices. Other then that I really wished I had given up on this movie early on instead of sitting to the end. Many MANY times I found myself wanting to end it. Assuming you watch it and make it to the end.... prepare yourself as the story makes even less sense and leaves you wondering what your doing with your life watching such a terrible movie. I feel bad about this review because I had high hopes for this that it would extend the Heavenly Sword series to new people. All it did was scare off people.

"Heavenly Sword" seemed more like something that should have remained in a PlayStation game and not made it to the big screen. Especially because it looked like something from the early 2000's. The animation and textures were not up to par for 2014, not by a long shot. And it totally pales in comparison to the 2001 "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" and the 2005 "Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children".The storyline was adequate and had some good moments, but it seemed like everything was just skipped over lightly and without going into depth with anything much really.A lot of the animation was rigid and wooden, and the outdated textures didn't really help further the movie in any possible way. I must say that I think they could have used more resources and time on the animation here.The characters were adequate, albeit two-dimensional and lacking personalities.Having sat through the entire length of this animated movie, and with being very close to getting up and doing something else twice along the way, but deciding to stick with it to the end, I must admit that I had hoped for something more than it turned out to be.I have never tried the game upon which this movie is based, but truth be told, then it felt like this entire movie should have been used as in-game cut scenes and not as a feature animated movie.One thing I did think about though, was if this animated movie wouldn't actually have been far, far better if they had opted to continue with the cartoonish animation style that they used in the movie to tell some of the backstory. That was actually more interesting to look at and far more stylish and memorable than the outdated CGI that was this movie.

I came to this film because of the games, which I think are good. But this film has only that, a name. When I watch an animation film I expect, nowadays, the graphics will be good, the animations will be smooth, and the faces will show at least some emotion. I have not found any of these in this film. Graphics are very cheap, even pixelated sometimes. Animation seems to come from 10 or 15 years ago. Characters faces are empty of any kind of emotion. So, the technical issue is really bad. I suppose producers thought that with a famous name would be enough, so they decided to spend ass less money as possible here. When we talk about the story or the character development things are only slightly better, but just because it cannot be worse than animation or graphics. Plain characters, no development, plot full of tropes, absolutely predictable. This film is not worth your time.

Graphics was so and so. Close up animation of characters had sharp edges, scenery was beautiful, but the overall feeling was really been letting down by the bad character graphics.Storyline was OK, predictable at many points. Plot was heavely on the difficulty of being of female gender in ancient time. which was surely mention a lot of times. Last, the sword, even though it had huge significance in the story, could have been more awesome.So overall rating of 4 is a combination of: - 1/10 for character animation - 7/10 for scenery - 6/10 for storyline - 3/10 for character voices and identity - 3/10 for the swords awesomeness (or lack of).If you can live with bad animation and have nothing else to watch, this can be recommended.