In the 2017 movie Thor Ragnarok, Norse god Thor drags his brother Loki from Asgard back to Earth to find their missing father Odin. Upon arriving at the place Loki had hidden him, it turns out that the location has been demolished. Loki then falls down a hole with only a mysterious note of directions in his place. Thor travels to the mentioned address only to meet Benedict Cumberbatch in a cloak. Benedict uses rapid jump cuts and substituted frame tricks to annoy Thor, lets Loki out of the hole and takes them straight to Odin. This plot thread, the big sequel hook from Thor: The Dark World is resolved in around the first fifteen minutes of the movie.
In a vacuum this is terrible film making. Benedict's character is vague. A plot that could be an entire movie is resolved mostly for humour's sake. No Marvel Cinematic Universe movie is ever in isolation though. For nearly a decade these movies have come out almost every quarter. They're all box office smashes and pop cultural icons. What would've been considered even eleven years ago a bold, bizarre choice of scene is instead a neat piece of world building. The audience gets to see Dr. Strange slipping comfortably into his role as Earth's supernatural policeman and border quarantine officer. It makes perfect sense for him to toss Loki, god of mischief into a hole the second he arrives on Earth; Loki's worked against its interests multiple times!
Fate/Stay Night was a visual novel released in 2004 about a fellow named Shirou Emiya who gets caught up in a secret wizard battle to claim ownership of The Holy Grail. It uses both branching paths and hidden unlock flags to tell three individual stories that together become a greater character piece.
In Fate, Shirou is a milquetoast protagonist of a harem anime. A nice guy who cooks, cleans and doesn't want to see people hurt. He talks about how he wants to be basically be Superman but mostly he just flukes his way into victory. The real star is Saber, a woman who through circumstances and her past is single-minded in combat to the point of being self destructive. Shirou's kindness and superhero fixation ultimately work in tandem with her raw power to save the day and let her die in peace.
It's in Unlimited Blade Works that Shirou first really strikes center stage. His fixation on heroics is elaborated on, promoted, torn apart and ultimately so integral to both the narrative and his identity that Shirou Emiya ultimately matters most as an essay on Superman.
In Heaven's Feel these contexts of Shirou as the audience's window into the diegetic world and as an abstraction of heroism help shape our view of the canon events. The story where Shirou is a living, breathing, human being. One who misses details, makes mistakes and has his own passions. A Shirou with ambitions, but also the raging hormones of a teenager.
Fate had a TV series by Studio DEEN in 2006. Unlimited Blade Works had a film again by DEEN in 2010 and a TV series by ufotable in 2015. In the thirteen years since the visual novel's release the world of Fate/Stay Night has become almost inescapable. In both Japanese and Anglo fandoms for anime, there has been a flood of tie-in media, merchandise and internet memes. You may not have seen any particular adaptation, but you probably know that Saber likes to eat. And that she's British mythology icon Arthur Pendragon. That Archer is a bitter Shirou from the future. That Rin is the coolest. That Gilgamesh appears, Kirei Kotomine likes his mapo tofu very spicy , you should j-j-jam it in and Lord knows you're going to see this every day until you like it. When reading the visual novel, Heaven's Feel is inaccessible until you have read the prior routes. ufotable has adapted this idea to film by making a text that's utterly incomprehensible unless you're already familiar with the basics.
If you were to do a completely 1:1 adaptation of Heaven's Feel you would probably need about 15 hours of film and be better off making a TV show. Assuming the audience already knows various details about events and characters leads to some neat time-saving measures.Since the first two brushes with death common to all routes have been seen before, they no longer have any dramatic tension. Thus, they become a brief series of stills in the opening credits. Long-winded expository dialogue can be cut down and framed in ways that are important for framing character arcs. The movie skips over Kirei's explanations of The Grail War, the logistics of Servants, Masters and Command Seals and other such flimflam to focus on his antagonism towards Shirou's late adoptive father. Shirou acknowledges barriers exist but has no need to react more shocked this time. The innumerable sitcom scenes of characters scrounging Shirou's delicious food are distilled into tender moments with Sakura. Shirou's heavy emotion towards the film's end aren't informed by the five lines he's shared with Saber this time. It's banking on the possibly 30 hours of time you've seen them together before.
ufotable is a studio filled with nerds who have an undying love for the source material. Their involvement in the culture around what Fate/Stay Night has become leads to playful handling of this adaptation. Gilgamesh only has to stroll into frame and grin for an audience to cheer. The dark stirrings in Saber's soul don't need to give a big speech. "You already know what I am" declares Saber Alter. Not who. Not a person; an icon. A tag on pixiv.net. A neat cosplay idea. A console-exclusive fighting game character. A Summer event card making jokes about Nitro+'s aesthetics. Even the marketing is in on the joke. The main poster seems like a fairly bland "whoa, look at all these characters in this epic battle!" affair. Then you realise that the lensflare draws your eye towards none other than... Rin's combination of skirt and thigh-high socks that awakened a generation of nerds to a very specific fetish.
Ayako Kawasumi and Tomokazu Seki have fun with their few coy lines but the real star of the movie's voice acting is George Nakata. While almost always a large ham, he takes it to the perfect extremes. He oozes with smug superiority whenever he lectures Shirou. His iconic "Rejoice, boy!" is delivered with such glee that it's clear he's welcoming the viewer as much as a potential victim of the Grail War. "You're in the cinema watching Fate/Stay Night, revel in it!" The mapo tofu scene I linked earlier is a tremendous audiovisual moment. The meal is drawn intricate, each spoonful of pork, chilli and tofu squelching towards Kirei's mouth. Nakata conveys the meal's heat in as erotic a manner as possible. He unbuttons his collar so perfectly that it's hard not to swoon. A scene that in lesser hands and actors could have come off as bland exposition to set up this movie's climax instead encapsulates the relationship between fandom and author that has made this work even possible.
I haven't talked much about the actual mise en scène or animation much. It's what you'd expect from a quality team at this point. The frame is always conveying the right information to the audience. The bouts of new action are spectacular. Little details such as Shirou's training in magecraft are given setup/reminder/payoff structure to make any Hollywood exec happy. It's a fine and undoubtedly visual work but in a year where Kizumonogatari Reiketsu-hen was released pretty much everything else is going to come off as less inspiring.
In 2008, Marvel Pictures released the film Iron Man. It made a huge amount of money, validating the newly formed company's plans for a stable business of above average, upbeat superhero movies. Next year the franchise will begin its decade-long climax in Avengers: Infinity War Part 1. Both the MCU and Fate/Stay Night are franchise juggernauts albeit of different sizes. I doubt Lancer will be dying in Infinity War but I have a feeling this past Saturday I was in a preview screening for it.
Should you watch Fate/Stay Night Heaven's Feel Part 1: Presage Flower? You already knew that answer before reading this.
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