A Brilliant Conflict

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

I don't get the bad reviews, half of what I've read of them aren't even true. The animation, for one. It's excellent. The textures are crisp and the backgrounds/characters are very detailed. I played the game to death and it was kind of cool to see a scene or 2 that made its way into this film from the game...with updated graphics. If whoever had a problem with pixelation, that goes away when you actually watch the real version as opposed to a crap downloaded copy. The story has been changed slightly, with some ...odd revelations. I won't spoil those however. The movie is just a retelling of the game. Unfortunately, they didn't have Andy Serkis for Bohan, but Bohan himself doesn't take up much screen time anyway. They did have Anna Torv (who I adore in any incarnation) Kai (Lydia Baksh) is back & a little more bold than she was in the game. Sadly, they didn't have the originals for Whiptail, Roach or Flying Fox. I hated Thomas Jane's character, who didn't exist in the game and the movie could have done quite well without him. Nariko is and always was, the "Chosen One" and she wields the sword as such, with none of those foul demon henchmen walking away from any confrontations with her.I'm probably a little biased as the game is what made me go out and buy a Playstation 3, I'm amazed the disc still plays after how much time I spent on it lol. But it's the story that fascinates me, this girl, this beautiful girl is what stands between her people and Bohan. And she prevails, but not without an extremely high price. Bottom line, watch it for yourself and make up your own mind...

This movie was a waste of my time and I only watched just over 30 minutes of the film before I couldn't watch anymore. I'd never played the original game until 2016 and when I completed it I found out that there was a movie after looking up the game on IMDb funny enough. When I saw the cast of this movie I thought that it would be great (even though I only knew a few of the actors) but after the 30 minutes that I watched I would call it bait just to get you to watch it. The film has no energy what so ever, the characters (especially Nariko) sound like they're bored and tired and it doesn't fit with their body language. The animation was okay, I'll give them that, but I noticed in one scene that Nariko's top which originally covers the left side of her chest was on the right side of her chest and when it changed scenes, her top was back to normal. The animators basically reflected the scene and couldn't be bothered to fix the animation (A.K.A Laziness). This was only the first 30 minutes of this film and it disgusted me, I'm just really happy that it wasn't the original creators of the game that made this movie, I would have been upset if that was the case. I'm sure that if the original creators and all of the original cast of the game made this movie, it would be a thousand if not a million times better.

"Heavenly Sword" seemed more like something that should have remained in a PlayStation game and not made it to the big screen. Especially because it looked like something from the early 2000's. The animation and textures were not up to par for 2014, not by a long shot. And it totally pales in comparison to the 2001 "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" and the 2005 "Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children".The storyline was adequate and had some good moments, but it seemed like everything was just skipped over lightly and without going into depth with anything much really.A lot of the animation was rigid and wooden, and the outdated textures didn't really help further the movie in any possible way. I must say that I think they could have used more resources and time on the animation here.The characters were adequate, albeit two-dimensional and lacking personalities.Having sat through the entire length of this animated movie, and with being very close to getting up and doing something else twice along the way, but deciding to stick with it to the end, I must admit that I had hoped for something more than it turned out to be.I have never tried the game upon which this movie is based, but truth be told, then it felt like this entire movie should have been used as in-game cut scenes and not as a feature animated movie.One thing I did think about though, was if this animated movie wouldn't actually have been far, far better if they had opted to continue with the cartoonish animation style that they used in the movie to tell some of the backstory. That was actually more interesting to look at and far more stylish and memorable than the outdated CGI that was this movie.

When the Heavenly Sword game came out, it was at the pinnacle of the PlayStation 3's graphics and even the original graphics from 2007 look better than this movie.The animation, the acting, and the dialogue, everything that made the game brilliant is missing in this film. The characters have little to no facial animation when expressing emotions. No effort has been made to try and match the mouth movements to dialogue. Might as well be watching Team America/Thunderbirds puppets in CGI. Only the backdrops look good... from a distance, because as soon as you get close they blur or pixelate... and I am not even going to get started on the physics are represented.The film also borrows the 2D animated miniseries which preceded the game's release. This is chopped up and used to tell an abridged version of the story, but they have also dubbed the original voice which was much better acted than its replacement, so I cant even give them credit for that.And then... there are the continuity mistakes.. even as bad as to switch King Bohan's scarred eye from left to right and more than once in the opening act!? Unforgivably bad.Not having much to fall back on, there is none of the music from the game which was beautiful, and the story follows some real gagworthy plot clichés.Sorry, in a nutshell.. there are no redeeming qualities, so don't waste your time on money on this.You're much better off watching the Full Cutscene version movie of the game on YouTube, or playing the game on PS3.