Knights of The Zodiac Review – The Hollywood Live Action Anime Curse Has Not Been Broken

Live-action anime adaptations, especially those made in Hollywood don’t have the best reputation. I’d love to tell you that Knights of The Zodiac is the movie that crushes that trend the way Mario and The Last of Us have done for video games but unfortunately, that isn’t the case.

Knights of The Zodiac, an adaptation of the popular Shounen anime/manga Saint Seiya, just isn’t very good. In many ways, it even gave me flashbacks to the mess that was The Last Airbender adaption. Granted it’s not as bad as the Shyamalan movie but it has the same air of poor writing and overall messy storytelling. It has some bright spots like the action and costume design but overall it comes across as a sloppy abridged series.

Becoming A Knight

Seiya is a young man making his living as an MMA fighter until he is suddenly recruited by Alman Kiddo (Sean Bean) to become a “knight”, an ancient warrior that must protect the goddess Athena who has been reincarnated as his daughter Sienna (Madison Iseman). To do this he must train with Marin The Eagle Knight (Caitlin Hutson) and stop the forces of Guraad (Famke Janssen), Kiddo’s wife who want to harness Athena’s power for her own means.

I should start by saying that as someone who’s never lived in Latin America or mainland Europe, I haven’t watched any Saint Seiya so I don’t know how accurate the movie is to the original series. The costumes and characters look relatively on point however I have to question the lack of Knights in Knights of The Zodiac.

From what I’ve been told, a big appeal of Saint Seiya is that the main character is part of a team of heroes that fight together. In this movie, they speak of there being many knights but we only see Seiya and one evil knight named Nero Pheonix (Diego Tinoco). You could argue that this is to ease in newcomers who aren’t familiar with the source material but it seems like an odd omission when it’s a key part of the franchise.

A Tangled Zodiac

That being said, the movie has a number of problems beyond its faithfulness. The biggest of these is the pacing and editing. For the first two-thirds, the movie is all over the place in terms of storytelling. Scenes that feel like they should be important like Seiya and Sienna’s first meeting feel too short meaning the character development is undercooked. Several plot points likewise feel contrived, come out of nowhere, or are just dropped. At the beginning of the movie, Seiya is chastised for having a “dancing” fighting style where he mostly dodges attacks before counter-attacking. It sounds like it could lead to something interesting during later battles but I don’t think they ever bring it up again.

Meanwhile, there’s an unnecessary amount of exposition about the backstory behind the knights and especially how the “cosmos” powers work. These just make the movie drag on, especially during the second act where Seiya is training with Marin. There are a number of dull montages and generic pseudo-philosophical jargon about how the superpowers work, not to mention this mellow dramatic flashback of Seiya training with his sister that they keep using in front of every battle scene. It all amounts to very little and grinds the story to a halt.

Overall the plot feels very disjointed and was hard to get invested in, none of which is helped by the character writing.

Wooden Armor

I first want to say that I don’t think any of the cast are bad actors but they are let down by the script and direction. Sean Bean for example gives a pretty solid performance but he has almost nothing to work with outside of spouting exposition.

All of the characters in general have rather school play-esque dialogue and lack chemistry with one other which in turn breaks your immersion out of the fantasy. The movie seems to be going for a more serious and grounded tone but there’s so little energy in the line delivery that it comes across as downright goofy. Madison Iseman’s Sienna is supposed to be terrified at not being able to control her god-like power yet talks about “Pegasus Knights” and being “the reincarnation of Athena” like she has a bad cold. There are a lot of conversations like these and they just sound awkward.

This further applies to our main man Seiya. His lines primarily consist of asking “What the hell is going on” and “You must all be crazy to believe this stuff” so that others can feed him even more exposition making him very bland as a protagonist. Once again, I know Mackenyu is a good actor. He played a bunch of great roles in Japanese anime adaptions like Rurouni Kenshin and excels in the action scenes but the writing is just too flat to allow him to spread his wings.

The Fight Scenes

I know I’ve been pretty harsh on the movie however there is actually something quite liked about it and that’s the fight scenes…sometimes. By the third act of the movie, the story goes into full-on action with faster pacing and far less dialogue, focusing solely on the dynamic combat which is fairly well choreographed.

The film takes a lot of inspiration from modern tokusatsu with very practical costumes and hand-to-hand brawls enhanced by decent CGI. It looks good and really embraces the more fantastical elements of the series with characters jumping 10 feet into the air or kicking the putty patrol mooks through buildings. Mackenyu’s experience in things like Kamen Rider really shows here, it’s really where he’s at his best.

That being said, the action still has its problems. There are times were it still felt a bit over-edited with too many cuts and even times were the character seemed to become blurred, like the camera wasn’t focusing on them properly. The latter was only an issue in the first few fights and seemed to be improved as the movie went on but it was still far too noticeable.

The Knights of The Zodiac

Knights of The Zodiac had a lot of potential but overall wasn’t well executed. The action is mostly good with some solid choreography but it just can’t make up for the greater issues in the writing.

I really meant it when I said it reminded me of The Last Airbender. Like with that movie, Knights of The Zodiac seems to be trying to cram as many plot points from source materials as it can into its under two-hour run time. In practice, however, it’s rushing through these plot points and choosing the wrong parts to prioritize, focusing on barebones world-building and terminology over the characters and their development. The end result feels more like a bad summary of Saint Seiya as opposed to a true introduction.

I honestly want to believe that Hollywood live-action anime can work. There have been some great movies based on anime and some series that would work extremely well in a live-action setting. Knight of The Zodiac however falls into a lot of the trappings of bad adaptations. The action scenes save it from being a complete Dragon Ball Evolution disaster but it shows that the genre still has a very long way to go.

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