Berserk: The Golden Age Arc III - The Advent (2013)

The Berserk manga is my favorite peace of modern literature, i wear a Behelit around my neck every workday and this review is a response to D. Stockard lenghty 1/5 amazon review which you all should look up as his thought encapsulate mine perfectly but i liked a few more scenes: One would be Griffith's trippy transformation and his short fight against the Skull Knight. Thus i give it a slightly better rating but the movie committed the worst sin of all. Being boring, besides being irritating, which is a given at this point. The animation process again wasn't finished, as always. Movie 2 is the worst btw. from a cinematic standpoint as it was just 3 extended scenes with no context but movie 3 straight out vomit over the last parts of the Eclipse as it glorifies rape. I thus would love to know what Miura thought of this adaptation. Who knows what the studio will do with the rest of the manga but they should just stop. The folks at skullknight forums would love that but this project will at least give me a few nice AMVs and maybe a new Susuma song? Well, one can only dream...

Fmovies: After the first two good movies of this trilogy, this last one,"The Advent", is a disappointment.

The story continues after the events that ended the previous one. Guts is back, and he gets back with Casca and the others. Pretty soon there is a rescue mission to get Griffith back and out of the dungeon where he is languishing.

What follows is a mess that lasts for over an hour.

What could have been a cool rescue mission or some nice fight scenes (as in the previous two), here descends into purposeless carnage, with gore, blood and monsters just making their appearance for not particular reason, and characters that had been developed in the previous two movies left as little more than just caricatures of themselves. We are not getting into this kind of action movies for their plot, but at least a little bit of interest in developing it and the characters is expected. And the action does not help in this case, because, as said, it is boring, repetitive and lazy.

Fans may enjoy reuniting with the characters, but there is little else to recommend.

After two awesome movies this one manages to singlehandedly leave me with a sick feeling in my stomach. It's almost as if in this final film the writers decided to completely do away with plot and the art of storytelling, replacing it instead with cheap porno and literally oceans of meaningless blood and carnage. You've been warned.

Berserk: The Golden Age Arc III - The Advent fmovies. Whereas the first two films ranged from merely passable to a downright butchering of the story, Descent finally finds a comfortable groove and is definitely the best one of the films so far.

Descent has many points in its favor before the film even starts; this movie covers the most important and character-focused part of the story without any massive battles or political plotting. The movie is focused solely on the survival of the Band of the Hawk, with the battles being small-scale skirmishes than entire armies clashing and the story moves away from the mundane and medieval aspects to the (personally) more interesting stuff with demons and the supernatural. This allows for a tighter focus and structure.

The pacing is far from perfect, but it's finally at least decent. After the first 20-30 minutes, the film finally takes some time with the characters, and actually manages to establish some emotional attachment to them. It's definitely a positive for the film.

In the first films the blend of hand-drawn animation and CG ranged from looking terrible to at best alright, but here it is finally used rightly. It's not perfect, but it's lightyears ahead of the first two. The studio has cleverly chosen to use CG for the character models, but their faces are animated in 2D. This does a good job of abridging the two different animation styles, and the moments when the two clash are far less numerous than before. The film being more character-focused also gives us more moments where they are animated fully hand-drawn, and it looks great. When the Eclipse begins, the movie really becomes a treat for the eyes: all the various monsters and the surreal landscapes of the demon world look great, and the action scenes are very well directed and animated.

But despite all this, Descent is far from great. The problems are smaller than before, but they're still the same. The biggest one is undoubtedly the pacing; the film still feels like a heavily cut down cliff's notes version of the story. If the film was 30-40 minutes longer, maybe then it could have covered everything that's in the story. The most outrageous examples of this are that a) we never find out what Guts has been doing during his year of absence and b) one scene where Caska seemingly arbitrarily switches between three completely different emotional states in the space of only a few minutes.

Despite the praise I gave the animation, the CG on the humans still looks jarring and is very easily noticed. It's less problematic than before, but still an issue. The score is a mixed bag; at times it's appropriately booming and ominous and at others bizarrely inappropriate. There are moments where mere silence would have suited some scenes better than the music in the film. In fact, the more ambient-styled score of the original series suited the Eclipse's nightmarish events better, and that's quite an odd thing to say, considering the original's fairly weak score.

The odd thing about Descent is that for every thing it does better than the series, it seems to get something else wrong. Here we finally see how Guts escapes the Eclipse, but Rickert's own mini-story has been almost entirely cut out. The animation is far better than the series, but the voice acting is clearly inferior. The film completes this part of the story, but so much that is important to future events has been cut out that continuing from this will be quite hard. The definitive animated version of Berserk might lie somewhere betw

The third installment of 'Berserk: The Golden Age Arc' movie series which was based on the manga series. As expected the movie didn't disappoint me but still first two are the epic compared to it. Yes first two were war genre, fully gore, awesome movies and this third one was slightly turned out fantasy-horror. After where it ended in second part I thought the revenge will commence in its follow-up story but it surprised me and took us on the different path.

This story follows after a year since Guts and Griffith parted. Some of the escaped Hawk bands prepare for the rescue mission in the Casca's stand-in command to bring back their leader. Soon, Guts join them, the rescue team becomes much stronger. Not wasting much time the mission commence and what comes next is the unexpected twist and theme transformation. The dark world unleashes, without a mercy it assault the heroes and leaves the unforgettable scars. The best part of all these three movies were the way the movie ended. It leaves something broad open which makes us to guess what will happen next like a mind twister.

Yeah I know most of the people like Guts and it is my favourite character as well. In this part The Griffith character was weakened but we knew it coming. As he was a mysterious character from the very first movie especially with his 'golden egg' I knew there must be some story behind it. This movie did not explain that portions very well, maybe we can expect that in the next part, I hope so. And Casca was as usual supported very well.

The sex scenes were stronger like in 'The Battle for Doldrey', so the movie is not suitable for everyone. Those who like sword-war theme and Anime especially gore will enjoy it. If you have not seen first two, begin with those, you will love this trilogy for sure. Now I am eagerly waiting for its fourth. Highly recommended for adults.

8/10

Emotionally scarring and very intense. The 2 previous Berserk movies have to be watched before taking this one on.