Heavenly Sword (2014) Reviews

• Great and seductive,dramatic and amazing

  makomomo982014-10-04

  The movie is great and graphics are really amazing.See it in FULL HD blu-ray on the best TV led are very impressive.I don't know how others saw this movie and saw bad graphics...the texture and expression or modeling was amazing,stunning.Only one thing was bad...the physics of the animation,speed-movement of characters was fast with bad accomplished but...still, it's a movie made it after a game, so what? I never play it Heavenly Sword and now i really want to play this game.The story are strong and dramatic and memorable prime character, Nariko.Of course, Kay are second and maybe forthcoming heroine... I strongly recommend this movie, without great expectations but with some powerful pleasures... Goodbye Nariko, peace be with with you!

• Awful

  sergio-arauzo2014-09-05

  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.

• Another missed opportunity, of course

  seecheck2014-09-04

  As if copy-pasting the original (and much better) narrative were more difficult than coming up with this insanely offensive crap. The trailers didn't exactly make me expect wonders, but this film is one hell of a blasphemy. Where the game excelled (acting performances, pacing, direction of photography,...), the film falls flat on its face. And where the original had a bit of a room for improvement, but still was quite good (plot, characters, dialogue), the movie seems as though it sabotaged everything just to fall in the line of all those film adaptations that present video game stories as even more idiotic than an average Mr. Bay spectacle. And man, even the usually great Anna Torv and Alfred Molina seem to try their best to make this thing painful/surprisingly amusing to watch. *sigh* Seriously, this is an infinitely better cinematic experience: http://youtu.be/YS7sFIWDvIc (*and* it has a lot of Andy Serkis and an *engaging* Anna Torv in it!)

• This wasn't overly great...

  paul_haakonsen2014-09-09

  "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.

• Epic Story, Abysmal Graphics, Continuity Mistakes (possible spoiler if you haven't played the game)

  DaRangedTC2014-09-06

  When the Heavenly Sword game came out, it was at the pinnacle of the PlayStation 3's graphics and even the original graphics from 2007 look better than this movie. The animation, the acting, and the dialogue, everything that made the game brilliant is missing in this film. The characters have little to no facial animation when expressing emotions. No effort has been made to try and match the mouth movements to dialogue. Might as well be watching Team America/Thunderbirds puppets in CGI. Only the backdrops look good... from a distance, because as soon as you get close they blur or pixelate... and I am not even going to get started on the physics are represented. The film also borrows the 2D animated miniseries which preceded the game's release. This is chopped up and used to tell an abridged version of the story, but they have also dubbed the original voice which was much better acted than its replacement, so I cant even give them credit for that. And then... there are the continuity mistakes.. even as bad as to switch King Bohan's scarred eye from left to right and more than once in the opening act!? Unforgivably bad. Not having much to fall back on, there is none of the music from the game which was beautiful, and the story follows some real gagworthy plot clichés. Sorry, in a nutshell.. there are no redeeming qualities, so don't waste your time on money on this. You're much better off watching the Full Cutscene version movie of the game on YouTube, or playing the game on PS3.