Heavenly Sword

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.

In fact, it is an absolutely awful movie, with very few obvious redeeming qualities , outside of the somewhat rootable and empathetically voiced protagonist Kai.

Technically, Heavenly Sword ranges from weak to dreadful., constantly looking a movie or video game that came out 20 years too late. The editing is confused, the characters lack emotion and move stiffly, the colours are very flat , there are very obvious continuity errors and the backgrounds while the least bad of the animation are unimaginative and lack detail. The music sounds very random in placement, and stylistically it's either an ill-fit or completely misplaced.

With the writing, Heavenly Sword fares every bit as poorly and even more so. The writing sounds incredibly awkward (almost like gibberish) all the time, very shallow, very on-the-surface and there is a complete disconnect emotionally. The story had some decent, if rather clichéd, ideas, but executes all of them messily, with laborious pacing, unexciting and incoherently edited action , a constantly jumpy feel and a complete lack of depth as a result of not doing anything with the ideas it had.

Outside of Kai, the characters are flat in personality and fail to remotely engage, and voiced with little emotion, some of the voice actors don't even fit their roles. Not even a talented actor like Alfred Molina can save this., one of my biggest bugbears regarding films/movie/television is waste of talent, which this movie manages to do.

All in all, very poorly done. 2/10, and that is only for Kai. Bethany Cox

I stumbled upon the Heavenly Sword blu-ray more by accident at the bargain bin of a local electronics store. Being an ever hopeful viewer of video game movies (despite many previous experiences with the genre), I've looked up some gameplay videos ("that's actually pretty cinematic") then went out and bought the movie. Since I've already committed the error, you may not need to repeat it yourself.

It's bad. And sad. If I understand the closing credits right, this movie was made by a small team (some 20 people?) on a shoestring budget of 6 million, and I generally applaud small independent productions, even if they aim high and end up .. not quite as high. Enthusiasm covers a lot of cinematic sins.

Heavenly Sword however was a wholly different thing, especially compared to the game it originates from. The game has mo-cap actor legend Andy "Gollum" Serkis and the late Terry "Discworld" Pratchett's daughter Rhianna at the helm, and impressive graphics for its time and hardware (2007). It's a mixture of hack-and-slay, sniping, quicktime events and a whole lot of action-adventure tropes rolled into a playstation title.

The movie is significantly less than that. Its storyline is at times disjointed, its animations and environments are just bad compared to the game, and the framing and editing of scenes is a step down from the game's cut-scenes as well. I needed to watch the game footage to get the movie's storyline in order, and noticed that the game manages to elicit more emotional response than the movie.

How a movie that came out in 2014 manages to look worse than the real-time graphics of a game from 2007 (with the assumption that - since it's an official franchise product - the producers must've had access to Sony's graphics and animation data that the game already had 7 years earlier), is completely beyond me.

Lowlights are the three boss fights, with the showdown against the water witch being the absolutely worst, both in terms of action and in terms of graphics. Some more doubtful design decisions are sweeping camera moves during quiet "character moments", and turning the moats of the tyrant's impressive fortress from the game's exaggerated-yet-realistic water into ludicrous lava.

Using the gameplay as a template, shortening and framing the combat scenes cinematically and rendering the cutscenes with more advanced and fine-tuned facial animations and cloth/hair simulation could've made this into an impressive production.

As it is, it was interesting to watch, but definitely not enjoyable. Can not recommend this. 3 / 10, and this includes a pity bonus of +1 point.

This animated adaptation really falls short in a lot of parts, the worst being the animation itself; it tends to become choppier in some moments and appears very stiff in others, it really ends up looking outdated even for its time. The folks that made this seemed to just not care about certain details, seeing as how Bohan's damaged eye seems to switch sides multiple times or how Nariko's sleeve would suddenly be on the opposite side for 1 scene.

It may have been better if this movie was a little bit longer because believe it or not, I truly believe that this movie suffers from too much action and not very good action at that. All the action left barely any room to build up the story or its characters, it really felt like nothing but action scene after action scene. Unfortunately this led to the characters just becoming bland, due to a severe lack of character development, when they were much more interesting in the video game. Bohan felt like an exceedingly bland character compared to his video game counterpart who was quite sarcastic and funny in some moments. Some changes they made to the story actually ended up ruining some very good character development that occurred in the video game, especially changes made around the character named Shen. They also added a new subplot which ultimately went nowhere and changed nothing at all. The majority of the acting performances also felt quite wooden compared to the game's, even Nariko's VA who did a much better job in the game than she did here.

I really think you'd be better off watching the cutscenes of the video game, which should be just about 2 hours.

Loved this Heavenly Sword movie & it has a great storyline to boot that is easy to follow, I totally enjoyed it all the way throughout, Though I do hope that they do make a Heavenly Sword two.