Knights of the Zodiac

What do you get when you take the ambitions of a Japanese manga made up of over 28 volumes and over 100 episodes of anime and try to turn it into the next big IP franchise? Apparently an overstuffed plot and a lot of attempted panache that ultimately falls flat. Knights of the Zodiac, a live-action film adaptation of the series Saint Seiya by Masami Kurumada, knows how to have fun sometimes, but ultimately struggles to strike a balance between irreverence and self-seriousness.

Seiya (Mackenyu), an orphan who’s made his own way through life on the streets, leads a seemingly straightforward life. He thinks often of the sister who was taken from him at a young age and how to find her again. Seiya also is a skilled fighter, competing in bouts at a local street fighting ring at night. His simple life changes after a fight in which hidden powers come to light, and he is recruited by enigmatic Alman Kido (Bean). Kido reveals that Seiya is destined to become part of the titular Knights of the Zodiac, an elite group sworn to protect Sienna (Iseman), a reincarnation of the goddess Athena. Kido’s ex-wife, Guraad (Janssen), is on Seiya’s trail, determined to hunt down Sienna. To meet his destiny, Seiya has to face his past, control his powers, and lose the chip on his shoulder.

Knights of the Zodiac starts with a premise that any middle schooler just learning about the pantheon of Greek gods and that loves fantasy would eat up immediately. It has the potential to have fun, and sometimes it does (for one, the way the movie worked in magical boy/girl transformations was silly but great to see on a big scale). Mostly, however, Knights gets lost in its own sauce, drowning out engaging fight choreography with a criminal overuse of slow-motion and badly rendered CGI effects. This style-over-substance approach takes away from what could have been something engaging, or at the very least consistently fun.

Even the pretty decent performances from everyone in the cast can’t help the movie get past its main issues: tone, pacing, and too much story. The movie stuffs every minute of its nearly two-hour run time with either action scenes or endless exposition. You would think this means Knights takes its time letting us sit with characters so we care about them, but there’s so much story to set up that every character feels surface-level at best. No matter what stakes the movie thinks it’s setting, they never feel important because we can’t be invested in these characters any more than we can be invested in a cipher or symbol. Archetypes can help with economic storytelling: But here they fall flat and keep the movie from branching out into something worth getting invested in.

Knights of the Zodiac has the potential of being fun, but falls short by taking itself too seriously and looking bad all the while.