The good news is that Knights of the Zodiac, the 2023 live-action adaptation of the manga and anime series Saint Seiya, longtime fans will be instantly familiar. The bad news is that this is because the movie appears to be based primarily on the 2019 Knights of the Zodiac: Saint Seiya CGI series, widely regarded by fans as a low point in Saint Seiya history. To be fair to that series and the 2023 movie, it would take a ton of effort to make a live-action version look as good as the classic anime adaptation of Masami Kurumada’s manga, a TV star. series that left such an impression that the series is getting a live-action Japanese/American adaptation almost four decades later. But it is unclear why director Tomasz Baginski and his writers decided to omit every element that was made Saint Seiya so loved in the first place.
First released in 1986, the Saint Seiya anime takes its time slowly building its world around the reincarnation of the Greek goddess Athena and warriors called saints (or knights, in some translations). Their power comes from harnessing their inner energy, called the cosmos, and their cloths – mystical, ancient armors based on constellations, and handed out to the “worthy” by followers of Athena. The Saints use these tools to protect the Goddess and humanity from threats, including other Greek gods.
Photo: David Lukacs/Stage 6 and Toei Animation
However, nothing in 1980s anime is ever presented to the public through such straightforward, clumsy exposition. Viewers only get to see snippets of the story here and there, some of which don’t come into play until half way through the series. The plot comes together over time into a fascinating whole. Combine that with brutal action and authentic character drama, and you’ve got a show that was nothing short of revolutionary when it first came out, and still holds up nearly 40 years later.
The 2023 Knights of the Zodiac, on the other hand, simply has characters explaining the plot and their motivations out loud. The forced action sequences leave no impact, and what was once a captivating story about Greek myths and fate has been relegated to a clichéd ‘struggle’ between technology and faith/magic.
To quickly summarize: Knights of the Zodiac is about Sean Bean’s Alman Kido who employs Seiya, a young wandering martial artist played by Mackenyu (son of Japanese film legend Sonny Chiba), and trains him to use the mythical Pegasus armor to defeat Kido’s daughter Sienna (Madison Iseman), the reincarnation of Athena, to protect . This is all happening in a world much like ours, with a small one sci-fi dystopian aftertaste to it, in the form of Guraad (Famke Janssen), a leader of a paramilitary organization who used a Saint armor to develop cyborg power suits and wants to kill Sienna because she believes the girl will destroy the world. Almost none of that plot is from the original manga and anime – but it’s almost a note-for-note adaptation of 2019’s little-loved CGI series.
Photo: David Lukacs/Stage 6 and Toei Animation
Saint Seiya ran for 114 episodes until it was canceled in 1989. Later it came back as Saint Seiya: Hades (2002-2008), a show that reminded 21st century anime fans, “Oh yeah, this series was awesome.That incarnation opened the doors to new animated films and shows… that unfortunately included Knights of the Zodiac: Saint Seiya. Whether you go by IMDB Reviews, Rotten tomatoesor your own eyes, it’s hard to argue that the CGI series isn’t the Saint Seiya story at worst.
The 2019 soft reboot retells the original Saint Seiya story, only with dialogue that betrays more plot in one episode than the original anime did in 30. It comes with a sudden, surprising aversion to the gore and violence of the original show, introducing guns, helicopters, and other “evil” technology that belongs to Vander Graad, a paramilitary villain whom the heroes must defeat with inner energy blasts.
At least the creators of the CGI series knew the “Pegasus Fantasy” heavy metal opening (originally performed in Japanese by Make-Up, and covered in English by The Struts as “Pegasus Seiya” in Knights of the Zodiac: Saint Seiya). The live-action movie doesn’t even have the common sense to retain that fan-favorite element, and with everything else working against it, it’s basically dead on arrival.
The 2023 Knights of the Zodiac opens promisingly with a colorful fantasy battle, but then morphs into a dimly lit fight club so quickly it’s enough to give the audience tonal lashes. Seiya is introduced on the way to an underground martial arts fight organized by Cassios (Nick Stahl). In both the 1980s anime and CGI series, Cassios is a giant with a white mohawk and Mad Max armor. However, here he is… just a man. An ordinary, normal-sized man, dressed normally (for a movie villain). Viewers should use that character to set their expectations for the movie, because from the intro to Cassios, director Tomasz Baginski cuts down and decolorizes everything from the source material, possibly in an attempt to make this take on Saint Seiya more grounded and realistic – a really bizarre choice for a story about magical knights fighting evil cyborgs.
Even the 2019 show loved the world Saint Seiya colorful. Not the movie. When Seiya finally gets his signature Pegasus armor, it’s dark gray (instead of the iconic white and red) making it hard to see Seiya during his battles with Guraad’s black-clad cyborg ninjas, who are all a blur of dark hues . And it obscures Mackenyu’s face, so according to Face Time’s Hollywood law, he must lose his helmet or all of his armor within five minutes of acquiring it.
Photo: David Lukacs/Stage 6 and Toei Animation
In the original manga and anime, losing or even damaging a Saint armor was a big deal – canonically the cloths can literally only be repaired with blood. In some cases, a character would have to bleed to death to repair a Saint armor. In the live-action movie, though, that kind of damage isn’t a big deal – and it’s just one of many places where the writers seem uninterested in what Saint Seiya especially in the first place. They only care about staging spectacles, largely borrowed from other movies and comics.
Take the fight where Seiya crawls towards a super-powered character who can’t stop emitting destructive energy. It’s actually the end of it X Men 3: The Last Stand, in which Famke Janssen also played. The underground fight club that Seiya introduces looks like it’s been taken out of every live-action Tekken movie ever. Cassios ends up getting a power suit with a protrusion of his head permanently grafted onto him, like a version of The Rhino from The Rhino evading copyright. Spider-Man. And then there’s the cosmos – the energy left over from the big bang that resides within all of us, which the saints of the franchise use to perform superhuman feats. That energy is now found in the blood and can be transfused between people, which is way too close to the idea of midichlorians from the Star Wars precursors.
Knights of the Zodiac is not a completely empty experience. Sean Bean is endearing in his fatherly role, and the audience will have no trouble believing that Kido sees Sienna as his daughter he wants to protect, even though she is a literal goddess. Famke Janssen is also much more complex than Vander Graad from the CGI series – here she’s actually Sean Bean’s ex-wife and Sienna’s adoptive mother, genuinely struggling with her conflicting feelings about saving her child or saving her the world.
Mackenyu only seems to have two modes in the movie: bored and confused. But his fight scenes are excellent. Knights of the ZodiacThe martial arts martial arts style looks very original, with an emphasis on lots of flying kicks and landing in a refreshing middle ground in between The Matrixstyle kung fu and wuxia martial arts. The writers also delve into the habits Seiya developed from living in poverty, including a lesson on how he will never reach his full strength until he overcomes his childhood trauma by dedicating himself to a higher purpose. That new element really suits the character. In places where the writers don’t get Seiya – for example, turning him from a man who never backs down, no matter the odds, to someone who flees his first fight – they absolutely slaughter him. But sometimes they take him in new directions that expand the franchise’s understanding of him.
But that only matters to audiences that are already familiar with and invested in the Saint Seiya series. That leaves just two things for new viewers to enjoy: Bean and Janssen’s sadly brief appearances and short, whimsical bursts of creative action. It seems like the people behind it Knights of the Zodiac started taking the worst part of the franchise and then kept making worse and worse decisions. The movie’s only saving grace is that there was once a live-action American TV pilot from the 90s (only Of these, 19 seconds have been preserved), So Knights of the Zodiac at least it can’t be called the worst piece of it Saint Seiya media ever created.
Knights of the Zodiac will be in US cinemas from May 12.