[Review] Naruto Shippuuden Movie 3: Inheritors of the Will of Fire

This is the 7th movie instalment of the Naruto series and the directors are still somewhat able to come up with new ways to endanger the ninja world. The movie ranks just as poor as the other ones and is pretty much near being the worst Naruto movie out of the 7.

Quick Synopsis

Our antagonist, Hiruko, is up to his final stage in creating the “perfect” ninja through his chimera technique; a body which contains 5 bloodline limits. The last one that needed to be obtained was the Sharingan from Hatake Kakashi. He activates a curse he placed on Kakashi long ago that “zombifies” him and makes him walk from the Leaf Village to his lair. Naruto and friends give chase, stop Kakashi and defeat Hiruko.

What? Did you expect more? Of course not.

Commentary/Spoilers

Let’s take a look at Hiruko first. I’m still getting confused at whether our main antagonist is male or female, once again. He stays mummified for the entire film but you do get to see his ugly face at the very end before he dies. Essentially he’s the same character as Orochimaru, did forbidden experiments and eventually got booted out of the village. His motive for trying to become perfect stems from nothing more than mere envy; being laughed at for being weak by the Legendary Sannin. And on top of that, he  wants to start a 4th ninja war; not the most creative thing to do with power, but it sure beats taking over the world (again) any day. Hiruko starts of having already stolen 4 bloodline limits. They’re all simply made up, so don’t think it has anything to do with the eyes: Byakugan, Rinengan. But it does beg the question why the Sharingan was involved. Hiruko’s 4 abilities that stem from the bloodline limits are:

• Storm element: some large area of effect lightning burst
• Darkness element: a “Kazaana” type ability that absorbs chakara through the palm of his hands; can nullify all ninja techniques and can be used as a weapon in return. Pretty much the most hacked ability out there
• Steel element: pretty straight-forward. He can turn into steel to negate physical attacks
• Swiftness element: Hiruko can flash step

Anything that deals with technical details of the anime will be placed in a quote box and in red.

How does the Sharingan make a ninja perfect? It’s not like Hiruko could use the Sharingan as well as Madara anyhow. And on that note it’s funny to see that Hiruko miserably aims for the weakest Sharigan user around, and there aren’t many to choose from anymore. This was probably a sad excuse to make Kakashi a central character in this movie.

Apart from Hiruko, there are three more bad guys, making a total of 4 bad guys in this movie. What’s worse is that the other three don’t even get named; one of them uses snakes, another is a beast specialist (like Kiba) and the last one uses a weird bird that can drop a lot of explosive feathers (like explosive tags).

The fight scenes are really disappointing, the first proper one doesn’t even come in until halfway through the anime. Meanwhile all we see is a zombified Kakashi advancing very slowly towards Hiruko. Prior to being controlled, he requests to Tsunade not to be followed and that he be made a ticking time bomb to blow up Hiruko when he tries to absorb the Sharingan. The rest of the anime just drags on with Naruto and Sakura trying to follow Kakashi while everyone else is trying to stop them on account of Tsunade’s orders; one sacrifice is enough.

Naruto remains the naive obnoxious character that he’s always been, insisting that they stop Kakashi because they can’t just sacrifice someone to save everyone else. He relates back to the first couple of episodes in the anime with the bell training (the same bells appear as a recurring motif in this movie) where Kakashi tells them its better to break rules than to let your friends down. But of course Naruto doesn’t think with his head about the matter and that’s how we actually get a movie going on.

Shikamaru takes on a larger role than the other characters; apart from being told exactly what Kakashi and Tsunade want to happen, it’s up to him to reason with Naruto and try to stop him. In the pursuit of Naruto, he is the last one to finally let him have his own way, reflecting back on Asuma and what he says about protecting the village and all.

It’s strange how it takes the entire village to stop Naruto and Sakura. All the regular characters make a fair appearance in the movie (by that I mean they get a fair amount of air time and action). Funny how you don’t see any other random ninjas, just the main characters. Anyway they all chase Naruto and Sakura up to Hiruko’s lair where they get confronted with the three nameless bad guys. It was a 9 on 3 fight (10 if you count Akamaru) which makes things just as unfair as the Bleach movies, where the protagonist to antagonist ratio is just unreasonable. Again like I said none of the fights were spectacular, which is fair since all the characters need some air time, so each character only gets enough time to do a simple technique and then leave the scene.

Interesting side notes: We get three flash backs that are worth considering. The first is of Naruto, Sakura and Sasuke’s bell training in the opening episodes of the anime; it was probably good of them to highlight a previous notion they raised there when Sakura and Sasuke tried to feed Naruto despite Kakashi’s orders. Second is of Shikamaru reminiscing on Asuma and the last words he left. Third is of Kakashi back in the third ninja war, where Obito dies and gives Kakashi the Sharingan; you don’t see that particular scene, which sucks, but it sort of adds to context I suppose. The second note is that the summoning technique does what we would’ve thought it does: it teleports the summoned object from one place to where the caster is. The three bad guys can summon each other, and Hiruko can summon all three of them as well. It was funny to see them get smashed individually and then have them teleported from their individual torture (reminds me of Syllabear, and teleporting the bear to save it, like that).

Perhaps the most pathetic thing in the movie was the final scene; skip all the intermediate fighting because it just isn’t worth mentioning. Who defeats Hiruko? Of course it’s Naruto. Nope, not even Kakashi is important enough to get the honours of doing so; he does spend half the movie possessed. How does Naruto beat Hiruko? With shame, that’s how. Remember my theory from many Naruto movies back that the rasengans in each final attack get bigger and bigger as each movie  goes by? Well, the theory still stands after 7 movies. The final attack sort of followed a Dragon Ball Z: Goku’s Final Spirit Bomb against Frieza. Naruto’s clones and Kakashi cause a distraction, and Naruto comes from above and launches that humungous rasen shuriken. Minus the 5 episode delay, it was a pretty lame climax.

Note 1: Out of some misfortune, Hiruko could not absorb the spirit bomb rasengan, which is stupid and a lame excuse to die. It would’ve been more reasonable if it was the Nine-Tail’s chakara; a blood-red rasengan would’ve been kind of cool. But then again that’s impossible since nobody was in danger to trigger Naruto’s rage.

Note 2: Naruto probably summons more shadow clones in the movie alone than in the all anime episodes put together. On top of that, he makes them all conjure up rasengans, twice! It’s difficult to believe that Naruto would still have had enough chakara to summon the spirit bomb at the end; you know it doesn’t make sense.

Oh, and Gaara makes an appearance, and fights Naruto at some point before the final battle. Didn’t really make sense why they gave him such a role, even the other characters are like: “Why are you here?” He just didn’t belong in this movie. The movie closes with Naruto returning the bells (that he fixed) to Kakashi, who replies with: “You remind me of him (Obito).” Kakashi gives a weird smile, not that you could even see it under his mask, and all the other characters call him gay. Naruto runs away thinking Kakashi is gay, and Kakashi chases after him. Cut to credits.

No, I’m serious, that is how the movie ends. Stupid right? I think so too.

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[Vlog] #01 – Saturday Night Mayhem

 

YouTubers These Days…

Upon reflecting on my emotional post recently, I actually continued to see how people responded to that red-haired, whose video I linked to in my last post. Not many people were entirely supportive of him. They understood his views and tried to sympathize with him, good; but many of them reckoned that he should calm down and not release his frustration over the Internet in such a way. And that makes sense, as much as you are letting people now just how badly something is affecting you, you’re actually not making much sense or logical arguments if you’re just shouting and saying “how bad it hurts”. And as such, I think I blogged about this before, maybe, that emotion does cloud logical thinking (or was that my Facebook quiz?)

 

Anyway, this is why with maturity comes the ability to compose yourself and that is why we see politicians try (more successfully than us) to argue their opinions with a clear calm voice and not rise up in a ball of fire saying how much they dislike the other party’s ideas. Today’s subject who is suitable as an example is ItsKingsleyBitch. This guy is our age and has only just started up releasing a series of videos just last month, or so. The content of his videos is simply about him expressing his hate towards things that annoy him in his daily life. That’s not too bad, a lot of things annoy us daily; what isn’t so cool is that he has to let the whole world know about what he hates (apart from just a few of his friends); that is to say, he’s overreacting about just how annoying some things are; and then of course his manner of flaming them is not respectable either.

 

He’s not big at the moment but then of course he only just started up. Here’s a video from about a week or so ago at the time of writing:

 

 

Rule number one, and by far the most important rule of all: Don’t swear

 

It is quite stupid to say something derogative about the person/people you are annoyed at, and of course by that stage it’s not just annoyance anymore; it becomes you hating the other party. Swearing is by far one of the lowest forms of communication because it shows you have a small vocabulary that is unable to comprehend what it is that’s exactly annoying you. And in the end, one can expect that you get annoyed only because you “feel” annoyed, but don’t know exactly why you are. It just goes to show then that you’re not thinking about why you’re feeling that way towards something and you’re simply letting your emotions and instinct guide you, rather than your head.

 

I find it quite hypocritical of this guy when he responds back to derogative statements addressed to him by saying that they don’t make sense; and yet he himself will direct his own swearing at the things that annoy him. He understands just how little a point is made when people swear at him and call him derogative things, but he can’t seem to make the link that he’s doing exactly the same thing towards other people? That is what I call “stupid”, and no I’m not “flaming” him in the way that he does to others, I’ve backed up my statements with reasons of why he’s stupid; it’s a justified claim that I’m making.

 

On that note, one cannot really express hate in such a way unless they’ve justified themselves first; he also agrees on this point. But in the above video, for example, all he does is rat upon the mistakes that one person makes. I think over all the videos he’s made so far, he hopefully would have worked out by now that everyone in this world makes mistakes, on a frequent daily basis. And yes, one person’s mistakes leads to the inconvenience of others, it’s something that wrong (definitely) but it’s something that should be accepted and understood because everyone does make mistakes. Again in the same way I’m surprised he never justified his position before he ratted on the mistakes of other people. I can guarantee with certainty that he is just as err able as the “McDonald’s Midget” that he uncaringly slandered. I wonder if he, or anyone, would have the guts to make a video about themselves and how many mistakes they make? You would definitely have much content to talk about as a result.

 

There is no need to swear and no need to stress just how badly someone has affected you, especially when you yourself have done exactly the same types of things. You’re not being fair in that case if you only hate others for their mistakes but not your own. The more fair attitude would just to not hate at all, if you can put up with yourself for making silly errors day in and day out then you be able to do so with everyone else; that is what tolerance is. Being so emotional about it like him reflects how immature you are; if you aren’t able to cope with someone giving you the wrong item at McDonald’s, how are you going to deal with something more serious such as getting into a car accident, having to go to hospital, and then the doctor makes a mistake in the surgery, messing up your leg as a result? If you aren’t ready for something as simple as miscommunication then you are not ready for all the troubles that life has to offer.

 

Of course, about YouTube in general, none of us are forced to watch people’s videos if we don’t like them. We have the option to click away if we don’t like what we see or hear (otherwise YouTube would be very unpopular if it forced us to watch certain things). So, yes, we don’t have to watch him babble on his immaturity; but in regards to the people who watch, who don’t like it, and subsequently post “hateful” comments in response, it’s quite naive of him to expect only positive feedback from people who watch. People who don’t like the video still have the option to watch it. There’s a thumbs down button on the page for a reason; people have the choice to say that they don’t like it. And of course, when it comes to feedback, logically argued reasons for why the video was bad should be given, rather than the same mindless slander that he exerts. Negative comments that contain constructive feedback are probably better than positive comments that go: “THAT WAS TEH FUNNY” In the same way, if his videos annoy anyone, and they have the option to not watch it, then he has the same freedom as us to avoid the things that annoy him. So if he doesn’t like what’s on the radio then the most obvious thing he can do is simply not listen to it; I’m somewhat surprised he didn’t think of that. You’re not forced to put up with things that annoy you and so it’s wiser to avoid those things in the first place, rather than try and be a hero and put up with it and then babble later on about how bad it was. That’s just common sense.

 

This is my two cents on the matter, in hope that people don’t actually give in to stupidity and follow someone’s meaningless rambling; and understand where “respect” truly comes from.