Not my favorite movie. The special effects were pretty good, though it was sometimes pretty obvious when there was blue/green screen. It was fairly enjoyable on the surface, but with my focus on my stories and characters, I over-analyze everything I see or read. So, I didn’t like this one a whole lot.

For starters, the pacing felt weird for much of it. It was jumpy. It bounced between times and characters rather suddenly. And some of the events just seemed to happen out of the blue with no build-up and then the story jumped again. That can work when it creates shock, but I never really felt shocked or surprised, just confused.

And the whole movie was trying too hard. It worked hard to push a message with blatant images and statements. The cinematography also tried too hard. There were some cool shots, but also quite a few that didn’t make sense and were distracting. Too much slow motion. At one point the camera focused on a character’s hand for too long and it didn’t really make sense why, the scene would have been exactly the same, but flowed better had that shot not been in there. Similarly, it tried to foreshadow. A lot. In obvious ways. A whole shot of a guy walking by just to settle on a gun on a table. Setting a sword down and lingering on it for too long. There were so many blatant foreshadowing shots. There were some points that tried too hard. Two in particular come to mind. Two moments of huge heroism that looked fake and/or came out of nowhere and served to purpose.

My biggest complaint has to be the characters. Only one character seemed to come off naturally and that’s because he was supposed to be strange and awkward. There were too many characters and not much time spent on any of them. They had a few moments where they tried to force-feed who the character was to us in the most obvious way. Basically the closest showing can come to telling. In distracting ways. Their interactions and dialogue were awkward and unnatural. Their relationships seemed to come out of nowhere and grew with no real sense of what went into it or even what it was. I felt no attachment to any of them and got no real sense of who they were. Aside from the traits forced down my throat, I got nothing from them. There were some great actors in the film, but I felt like most of them didn’t really get into it.

Overall, I wasn’t thrilled with it. Others thought it was pretty good, so I can’t say you won’t like it. Again, I’m into over-analyzing stories right now, so you could disagree and not see anything I did or not care. There’re my thoughts, but, as always, make your own.