sutorobu eeji
So i just watch the live action of Strobe Edge. It was terrible.
It wasn't just how many changes they've made, because to be honest a lot of the scenes were straight from the book. The problems I had were that most of the time things were without context and some of the scenes were out of order. If I were to watch this without knowing the manga I would be confused, and even when I did read the manga I was still confused! It's like they just took the important scenes but didn't show context or emotion; I kept questioning what the characters were doing and what were their motivations. They had no impact, no heart. I had no idea what I was looking at.
There is always the problem of having to cram manga stories into a movie, so of course there were cuts made (the whole first volume was turned into a montage, which is terrible because that introduced our characters!). Sub plots were cut, I understood, and they also cut the baito parts, with only Ren doing it. Some plot points came up earlier than in the book, which was ridiculous, especially since I didn't feel like we even got to see Ren fall in love with Ninako (it basically happened out of no where!). The only scene that I was happy they cut was when Ando was beat up near the end because that was totally unnecessary.
One of the other things I had problems with was Ando. I didn't really like him in the manga, but the guy who acted as him was just terrible! First thing, they cut all his 'playaaa' parts, but for some reason he had to show that he erased all the numbers in his phone - who's numbers??? I also just really didn't like how he was portrayed by the actor because it was just all wrong! I can't really describe it, but it just looked wrong.
Another thing, character development. There was barely any. Ren had to realize that he needed to do things for himself and Ando had to give up his play boy ways. There was barely any indication that Ren even liked Ninako, it was basically told to us, like it was expected, other than that - nothing. There was no chemistry between the two leads. Like, why should I care about this couple, I didn't root for them because there was nothing to root for - everything was expected, laid out like a silver platter, and then eaten in front of us (we didn't get to enjoy the meal, because they had to show us how to eat it). It was just sad and frustrating because I really liked how Io Sakisaka handles her characters and even her sub characters. Such a shame. I couldn't even fully watch the live action of Ao Haru Ride, because I knew it was going to be bad. But I held out for this mainly because they got an actor who actually looks like Ren at least (the guy who plays as Kou in the live action was terrible, and sounded terrible as well).