I LOVE FMA. Love it. I adore the manga, which I reread about once a year, I watched the original anime, and was over the moon when they remade it into FMA Brotherhood, and I was so, so, SO excited when this was announced. I suppose I should have tempered my expectations to Bleach live action level, not Rurouni Kenshin quality levels. I'm going to place some, if not most, of the blame on Netflix because they're known for doing things quick and cheap, and this was no exception.

Now, I've watched this twice, when it first came out, and... a few months (?) ago because, surely, it couldn't be as bad as I remembered. Sadly, it remains terrible. They should've done a live action *series,* not try to squish what is a very intricate, intentional, and tight plot line into this-- mess.

I do appreciate most of the casting (Hughes is a blast, Ed is pretty funny), the costumes are pretty good, but that's about where I stop with the praise.

Now, for the rest...
- I agree with the other reviewer who said the casting for Envy isn't great, and I do love Kanata Hongo but not in this role. The personality feels prosaic, something's missing (maybe overall hating whenever he shows up? Lol), which ties into my next point...
- Characters/relationships: we're not given time to get to know characters, their relationships aren't drawn out or portrayed with any depth so we have no time to grow fond of them and thus want to root for them, which makes it hard for anything to have any emotional impact and so... why bother watching? (I'd say don't, go read the manga or watch Brotherhood instead)
* Related: Sho Tucker's portrayal, meh, I really don't get his craziness, that whole arc doesn't land (especially with the plot changes), which...
- Story/plot: why? T_T Why did you hack it into pieces and rearrange it like this? (Time constraints, blah blah, I know, but NO)
* It really doesn't explain anything to anyone unfamiliar with FMA, so again, why bother with this?
* You can't take Scar out of the Tucker/Nina plot line?? Or take Scar out at all, from this first movie??
* Using too many characters now instead of later (again, glossing over relationships), discombobulating whatever sense could be made from the story resulting in low emotional stakes
* Really?? You're using the immortal army NOW?? What the hell is gonna happen in the sequels!? (More disaster)
* Winry really was in this too much (and I like her!), and it didn't do shit for the plot, which leads me to...
- the Japanese-ification of... everything. To sum up my chat with a few Japanese friends, who don't watch Japanese productions for these and other reasons:
* the sexism is showing - female characters being mostly "useful" as long as it's being a love interest (re: Winry) but losing agency or being, frankly, out of character (see: Hawkeye), which is devastating because the characters in the manga are so much more (I hate losing that for all of them, but especially for the female characters where it's most visible)
* the acting is... Like That. I used to love Japanese productions, truly, but anything I've tried watching lately has felt obviously fake, the acting not credible because you can always predict the script and the characters reactions. Maybe it's stylistic? But I'm rarely surprised so it becomes boring and unimaginative after a while. Maybe I'm just used to Korean quality now and everything else now feels too obviously staged, I don't know
- the amount of (bad) CGI. This isn't just this movie but Netflix, and others, as a whole, but UGH, no! Al looks terrible, the automail looks meh, even the alchemy I'm underwhelmed by, and the "sets" (green screens) are also ehh (some of them are pretty, yes)

Watch it if you want to cringe, or can only watch it 15mn at a time, otherwise honestly don't bother, stick with the manga and anime and go watch the actors in something else.