112 min | PG-13 | May 12, 2023 | Stage 6 Films
A street brawler learns a goddess lives inside a teenage girl and that he is destined to protect her. Tomek Bagiński turns one of anime’s foundational sagas into a generic superhero origin. The armor gleams and the movie is hollow.
Knights of the Zodiac adapts the Saint Seiya manga and anime into a live-action origin story. Seiya is an orphaned street fighter who earns cash in underground cage matches while searching for his missing sister. He discovers that a glowing energy lives inside him and that a teenage girl named Sienna carries the reincarnated soul of the goddess Athena. Powerful people want the girl dead before she comes into her power. The film wants to be a mythic superhero saga. It plays like a pilot for a franchise that never arrives.
Mackenyu plays Seiya with physical commitment and almost no interior life. He throws himself through the fight choreography and delivers every line of exposition at the same flat register. Madison Iseman plays Sienna as a frightened girl who keeps getting told she is a goddess and never convinces us of either state. Famke Janssen plays Guraad, the tech magnate hunting Sienna, and reaches for a menace the script never earns. Sean Bean plays the mentor Alman Kido and brings the only gravity in the cast. Diego Tinoco, Nick Stahl, and Mark Dacascos fill out the ranks as Nero, Cassios, and Mylock with nothing to play.
Tomek Bagiński directs from a script credited to Josh Campbell, Kiel Murray, and Matthew Stuecken. Bagiński comes from visual effects and animation, and the digital armor is the one element with real care behind it. The Pegasus cloth assembles around Seiya in a shower of golden plating that reads as genuine craft. Everything around that effect collapses. The editing chops the fight scenes into incoherent fragments that hide the choreography instead of showcasing it. The dialogue exists to explain the mythology, and the actors recite it standing in flatly lit rooms that look like sets.
Knights of the Zodiac never decides who it is for. The source material carries decades of devotion and an elaborate cosmology, and the film strips all of it down to a single training montage and a closing fight. Newcomers get no reason to care about Athena or her knights. Fans get a sanded-down version of a story they already love. The movie sets up sequels it has not earned and ends on a promise of more. The promise is the problem.