King of Thorn

Somehow, I got it into my head that I hadn't seen this before, and that may still be true, but I have definitely seen the twist ending before.

The twist ending is really the main reason I wanted to see this because it left such a big impression on me.

The basic plot is as such: There is a "Medusa Virus" devastating the globe which invariably turns victims to stone. A corporation shows up to provide lottery access to a new cryogenic technology with the idea being that patients can sleep until a cure is found. Main Girl Shizuku, and her identical sister Kasumi arrive at the remote castle complex which houses the sleeper pods, but only Shizuku won the lottery. Shizuku goes under and upon waking up finds the entire facility covered in thorny vines and overrun by dinosaur-like monsters.

The first big twist is finding out that almost no time has passed at all, it's not the distant post-apocalyptic future it seems, so whatever happened happened very suddenly.

The second big twist and ending to the movie is the reveal that Shizuku, with a past of self-harm, refused to go alone into the sleeper pods and wished to die together with her sister, and after accidentally throwing Kasumi off a cliff she cracks and becomes an avatar of the Medusa Virus, eventually creating a false Kasumi and placing her in a sleeper pod under the pretense that she is Shizuku.

I love that moment in the manga:

Now, I'm pleased to say that this moment is done justice in this movie adaptation, however I already knew that apparently. I've seen the clip before, but I guess I just hadn't seen the movie?

Well, now that I've seen the movie I gotta say... it's pretty disappointing.

Firstly, Yuji Iwahara's distinctive art style is NOT intact, and that is what drew my attention to this series in the first place.

Secondly, the cool dinosaur-like monsters have been entirely redesigned to be uniform and ugly. I really dislike the new designs and the uniformity takes away from the original presentation where the monsters where a mish-mash of hybridized forms, so when the survivors are attacked, it's just a cluster**** of different unfathomable creatures.

Thirdly, and by far the worst, is that the otherwise acceptable "normal" anime artwork they substitute in place of Iwahara's style is frequently interrupted of AWFUL 3D animation and most of the monsters are presented this way.

It looks atrocious, the framerate visibly dips every time they switch over to 3D, and because it's an entirely different approach to animation, characters move in peculiar ways you wouldn't expect if it were conventionally animated by hand.

It's like when they turn on the mo-cap in Star Ocean: Till the End of Time, it's incredibly jarring. And it's so obvious when the budget dips that you can effortlessly spot the 3D in screenshots.

I hate that they did this. It's so distracting, it looks ugly, and it's several steps down from the artwork we started with.

I appreciate that this movie had to, and probably should have, skimmed the plot a bit since it's 6 books fit into movie length, but they changed a lot and I'm not entirely pleased. The whole facility run by an AI called Alice was supposed to lead up to a reveal that Alice is just a little girl on life support being forced to operate the facility and it all came with an Alice in Wonderland motif, but this was entirely ditched and instead the characters mumble some bullshit analog to Sleeping Beauty the whole movie instead.

It's not subtle, it's not cute, and most of the time the story doesn't match up with the narrative of King of Thorn at all, so it feels forced.

The only substance we get relating to Alice involves the corporation CEO finding some artwork of a monster in the ruins where they killed one and instantly conclude that she can manufacture them from her dreams. It's terrible logic since she could have easily drawn them after the fact, but it's the only thing substantiating the other supernatural phenomenon in the movie.

There's also some weird shit like how the characters carry around molotov cocktails as torches. That seems incredibly dangerous.

When the Corporation CEO gestures to a hidden passage in a fireplace, the Marco character immediately starts shooting the wall. Is that the most practical use of ammo? You think this dude came here unarmed with the intention of shooting through a brick wall to escape?

I don't remember the manga very well, but I'm pretty confident they shuffled around the order in which the characters die of Medusa, which is another point against this movie because it frequently seems to forget that the characters are infected and that the entire plot of the movie is also intended to be a race against time with each of the survivor's bracelets increasingly indicating how close to death they are.

They barely come into play at all. In fact Fake Kasumi and The Kid are shown to throw away their bracelets at the very end of the movie as though the plague has ended, yet I don't think we ever got any dialog suggesting that.

This was a really half-assed adaptation. Someone else needs to give it a try.