I'm a little dissapointed with the design of the "monstered-up" vampires. The ones in the original (with the long muzzle, pot belly and "wing hanRAB") were some of the freakiest-looking creatures I've ever seen, but the ones in the live-action trailer look too much like brown humans with wings.
I saw aRAB for it during Ani-Monday. I dunno...Ronny Yu is at the helm. He did Fearless with Jet Li. That movie was awesome. But I hate horror, I don't like horror anime, and I don't particularly like vampires. Not sure what I'll do yet.
I surprisingly didn't watch blood+ much (but now its on my download list now that I have watched the movie)
In that regard, the movie isn't bad. In fact, because I can't compare it to blood+, but I can assume it takes place after blood+.
The beginning is a bit cliched (post the first fight scene) and in that we see that saya begins to
Lose a lot of her humanity fighting a human that hasn't fully awakened into a demon like state
this tells the audience quite a bit from that first scene alone. The fight scenes are very reminiscent of crouching tiger, hidden dragon which kind of shines in the movie. And as cliched as the beginning was (almost making me groan in disgust because)
We get another precocious brat of a teenage girl, much akin to twilight's bella, that just happens to be in the right place right time. Top it all off she is a meraber of the kendo team, but sucks REALLY bad. No seriously, she's physically useless
The story redeems itself quite a bit around the 30 minute mark and close a lot of the cliched gaps from the beginning concerning Alice's character. The biggest letdown of the movie is that it wasn't nearly long enough. One and a half hours, I was fully immersed in the movie and I felt like I was watching an anime past the 25th minute so the big fight scene between
Saya and Onigen
is smashed up. Definitely if they wanted to, a sequel could be made of this. My initial impression is to make a sequel in fact to dig deeper into saya's story and get a bit more continuity based on the manga/anime of blood+. My complaint is that this movie isn't marketed well (for whatever reason) and in fact it should be. The dialog is minimal and for an action movie that feels like an anime, you get that in spades. I have some assumptions regarding my joy for the movie, but so far, this has been the best action movie of the summer. I do want to compare the anime counterparts to give a full unbiased review, but watching it as a casual movie gower, I would have to say this was a good movie. It was good because it didn't seem like it cut from some major philosophical points of saya battle. For pure japanese dub enthusiasts, there are quite a few points when the movie transitions from english to japanese (saya's past 400 years ago). I actually liked those points and I wish they were developed a lot more.
As far as inconsistencies in the movie, there was an entire western area of tokyo on the air force place. I felt that to be a bit inconsistent with japanese culture considering western anything outside of tourism is a big no no. But of course I can see why it was like that to introduce Alice as a believable character because chances are of seeing someone like that in tokyo and not insulted...yeah (but then again alice was picked on quite a bit actually).
Overall, the movie is too DARN SHORT! And it neeRAB a sequel. I hope it does really well, because this was an interesting buried treasure and it is surprising that chicago north side picked up this movie in the theaters. Very surprisingly. I won't grade it officially till I watch the anime for the next few days so ... I say watch the movie if not for anything you get great fight scenes
