“Saint Seiya” is merely the latest, though far from the last, victim of these ambitions. In their unmeasured hunger to capitalize on nostalgia and the promise of a built-in audience, studios time and again have refused to consider that what succeeded in one medium doesn’t inherently translate benignly into another. Seemingly cursed from conception, live-action adaptations of stories popularized in animated form, be it a Disney classic or a beloved anime, have almost universally failed to replicate the strengths of their source material with their photorealistic CGI visuals, star-studded casts and often unnecessarily expanded dramatic arcs. But based on a screenplay by a trio of Western writers and directed by Polish filmmaker Tomasz Bagiński, it quickly stumbles into narrative contrivances as it incessantly overworks certain emotional beats. “Knights of the Zodiac,” a 2023 live-action reimagining of Masami Kurumada’s revered manga “Saint Seiya” and an anime series, procures plenty of recognizable elements from the original iterations.
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