Les Chevaliers du Zodiaque : La Légende du Sanctuaire

After watching this movie I am disappointed. A recommendation for different kind of watchers:

• If you are a Saint Seiya anime fan, please spare yourself from a painful time watching this movie.

• If you are not a fan, you might just survive the experience. The movie will just throw random stuff at you consistently during the 93 minutes it lasts.

• If you like cool CG and animation, by all means watch it. Kudos to all the CG and technical staff that participated in the making, their work is simply impressive. If there would have been a script on par with the technical work, this could have been a really good movie.

The producers should be totally ashamed. All beauty and values from the original saga has totally disappeared.

The story is not good but I understand it's hard to concentrate all the Sanctuary story into one movie... But what about those stupid clothes ? WTF !!! All saints are looking so stupid, I couldn't believe what I have seen.

I don't understand how they could buy the Saint Seiya license and how somebody could accept this.

I advise to all fans to don't go to see it and above all to not waste their money for this stupid movie.

I'm not the first Saint Seiya fan to review this, but i thought i'd give a different opinion on those i've seen.

-----Designs------ So let's start with designs. I applaud them for trying new designs for everything. The Cloths(armor) that the Saints wear have been upgraded to be more functional with a helmet that can fold down and up at will. It is a very interesting function, and i do like it. Although some of Kurumada's interesting details on the cloths are gone. Cloth boxes are now transported magically via a dog-tag that the Saints wear, which was a strange leap from the theme of "Only proper training and guts will make you strong" that was persistent in the original series. The movies tries to cater to the current younger Japanese generation, with a different kind of humor. Hence small trinkets and such are shown for some seconds in order to promote the film's merchandise.

I loved that they changed Milo into a woman however, as it did give the Goldies more variation, and Milo was a good candidate since he didn't have much personality except being stoic even in the original series.

However, several designs are designed in a very stereotypical way, such as Saga's dual colored Gemini cloth. Aldebaran, the Taurus Saint has a nose ring, etc. etc.

Environment wise it's decent until we get to the Sanctuary which has been transformed into a Chinese MMORPG setting, with stone buildings flying in the air here and there. That was just bad design in my honest opinion, and was very out of place from the ancient Greek inspired setting of the original series.

The big bad Saga transforming into a Final Fantasy boss in the end did not help things.

I love the animation however.

----Plot and characters---- So adapting something that took around 40 episodes into 90 minutes wasn't the smartest idea to begin with, hence there would be hick-ups in the plot. A smarter thing would have been to do the Galaxian Wars plot first, and then move on to the Sanctuary in a second film.

Saori's story was a nice idea, but didn't work quite properly as in the manga she already knew she was Athena before the beginning of the story.

Many, and i mean many character's stories were left out, or only had a tidbit to make a newcomer confused. It is a hard job to balance the five Bronzies, but it would have been better to focus on Athena, Saga and Seiya. The movie doesn't deliver on any of them quite well. Saga has basically no backstory to why he is evil, while in the manga his reason are elaborated much further.

----Music----- The score has it's peaks and bring a nice feeling to most of the scenes. They aren't however memorable.

The Movie's theme song "Hero" by Yoshiki is a nice tune, but contains some horrific lyrics about a person cutting their wrist in order for their hero to come. I'm surprised such a song actually went so far in production....

I can't tell you how much I love the visual quality of this film, the armor is beautiful and well detailed, the characters have well-developed and lovingly detailed visual characteristics, fabulous CGI.

One point that leaves a lot to be desired is the script, it is really weak and disjointed, it has many unnecessary scenes that could have been relevant moments and made better sense, for example the stance of the Knight of Cancer, it took all the refinement of cruelty of his real nature for a comedian. The final battle was extremely fast-paced and lacked detail. If they had left all the flaws in the script and invested in the quality of the final battle and its complexity, the end result would certainly not have been negative. It's important to note that the film is not a replica of the manga, it's a new experiment and shouldn't be taken as a faithful adaptation, but even so it could have been better developed, as there were a lot of holes in the script that didn't narrate much but rather confused.

In short, it's a good movie for those looking for great visual effects, but for those expecting a well-written script or a faithful adaptation of the original work, it's a bad product, and 90 minutes isn't enough to bring out the complexity of the Sanctuary Saga.

So i read some of the other reviews above and people saying this was rush or either saying the movie had no explanation at all is really annoying sometimes. For example if you are not a Saint Seiya fans then the new viewers don't know whats happening, i can see where that is coming from. You have to also compare it to Final Fantasy 7 advent children also. That movie doesn't explain what was also happening much in the story unless you already play the game from PS1. I never owned a PS1 so i never played FF7. Also matter to me was that the movie in FF7 AC was Kadaji saying, "mother". WHO THE HELL IS THIS MOTHER! I'm new to Final fantasy as people are new to Saint Seiya. This is a must watch movie for Saint Seiya fans!