Heavenly Sword

Heavenly Sword (2014) is a movie I recently watched for the first time in a long time on Tubi. The storyline follows a prophesy where the son of a king picks up the heavenly sword and saves the world from tyranny when an evil emerges. When the King is murdered the princess picks up the sword and seeks out her lost long brother in hopes of giving him the sword to fulfill the legend.

This movie is directed by Gun Ho Jang in his directorial debut and contains the voices of Thomas Jane (The Mist), Andy Serkis (Lord of the Rings), Anna Torv (Mindhunter), Ashleigh Ball (My Little Pony), Nolan North (Star Trek into the Darkness) and Renae Geerlings (Halloween II).

The storyline for this picture is entertaining and had potential. Unfortunately the animation was very mediocre and felt like video game cut scenes and wasn't always fluid and natural. The action scenes were uneven with some scenes better than others. As the movie progresses the fight scenes do get better.

Overall this is a below average addition to the genre that's not as good as it could have been. I would score this a 3.5/10 and recommend finding something better to watch.

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.

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.

Must watch in Blueray. Amazing action sequence. Great Visual. Great Story.