KNIGHTS OF THE ZODIAC (2023)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, sociological*

I don't envy the American writers who tried to translate an extremely complicated manga series from 1985-1990, one probably only remembered by older fans of either the manga ST SEIYA or its dubbed American anime adaptation, KNIGHTS OF THE ZODIAC. I have certainly seen worse, though I'd still have to judge the 2023 ZODIAC as somewhat pedestrian.

I should note that I only have nodding familiarity with the dubbed anime TV show, and that I never became intimately acquainted with the "Seiya" universe. So I'll take it for granted that the basic setup in the movie at least loosely resembles that of the manga.

Though there's only one de facto knight in the film, the use of the term is not abstract: the knights of the zodiac (there are five in the manga) are pledged to defend a monarch-like figure. The movie seems to take place roughly in contemporary times, while the manga depicts a world with a very involved tournament for possession of the magical armor of long vanished gods. Both suggest that one goddess of ancient times, Athena, became incarnate in the body of a young woman, Sienna (Madison Iseman), and she's destined to be protected by the Pegasus Knight.

At movie's start, Seiya (Mackenyu, son of Sonny Chiba) is a street kid who competes in underground fights while seeking his missing sister Patricia. Two rival factions seek Seiya because both suspect he possesses a god-derived power, "Cosmo," power which can transform Seiya into the Pegasus Knight. As in many similar boys' manga, the protagonist is destined to take on the duty of serving a royal figure, and to his dubious fortune, he's first contacted by Alman (Sean Bean), adoptive father of Sienna. This leads to a lengthy segment in which he's given tough martial arts training by a masked woman, Marin (Caitlyn Hutson).

Seiya's motive for going along with this farrago is the suggestion that Alman may help Seiya find his lost sister, though by movie's end this possibility remains up in the air. But he also likes Sienna, and there's some nice "poor boy-rich girl" tension, for all that it's not certain whether the two have any romantic interest in one another. Seiya definitely does not like any of the persons associated with Alman's enemy Guraad (Famke Janssen), who are trying to capture Sienna to tap into her Athena-powers, which are much more dangerous than the "Cosmo" possessed by aspiring knights.

The script most drops the ball by its casual mention of the fact that Guraad is actually Sienna's adoptive mother, and that she lost her arms from one of the Sienna-baby's power-tantrums. Since Guraad has both arms, one assumes they're supposed to be artificial ones, but this too is remarkably underplayed. Guraad's motivations remain unclear from start to finish, as if the writers couldn't quite decide what they wanted to do with her-- or what if anything to use from the source material.

The training sequences, rife with lots of expensive CGI, are the most interesting scenes, more watchable than the predictable pyrotechnics when Seiya finally "knights up" to battle Guraad's minions. Mackenyu and Iseman have some pleasant interactions, but ZODIAC as a whole is just ordinary-- not least because the casual viewer won't get just what the whole "zodiac" thing is about. ZODIAC was a box office bomb and as a result this particular manga series probably won't see further live action iterations.