This movie was a bit strange for me it was like taking two episodes of the drama and squeezing them together. It wasn't bad per say but it's severally lacking in comparison to the drama. One reason might be is the drama had time it gave us 12 episodes to flesh out the cast and become care about them in this medium it can only give us a limited amount of time, I feel that the story of GTO,Gokusen and other stories where the plot is driven by the cast works better as a series because you need the time to care about the cast. The problem with this is also if you've watched any "troubled" school series you know you have one class that has problems and each student contributes to those problems in the the Drama we see Onizuka solving about 10-11 of the class members while the others hand onto the heads of the class the problem with this one is we only see him solve 2 maybe 3 students problems if you really stretch it and because of that you wonder if the class really needed the help, the other members of the class are handled in a speech which makes it feel less personal.
Acting-Sorimachi Takashi brings his all once more but he's really not given anything different so their's not really much to work with and you can't see the variety in the ways he can bond with the student so much of the heart we felt in the drama we have to kinda fill in the blanks.
Story-the story as i stated is like two episodes and I'm not spoiling the end but it feels a bit unoriginal when you see the drama and I felt like they added tension to compensate for the lack of time.
cinematography-the movie didn't seam to have that great production values it might have been the copy i got my hand on but the colors in the movie were very muted, I thought the drama did quite a good job using lighting and color to display the atmosphere but this one seams to be a mess of browns and grays. The shooting is a bit strange It kinda reminded me of Chess games, in the way that it would be in the middle of a sceen and cut to something that is almost irrelevant until it pans out and it really doesn't really work well especially for GTO.
Overall thoughts-It's not horrible it's ok but i've scene their's a lot better stuff out their. If your a fan of the anime or manga and you want to test the waters watch the Drama this probably isn't a good introduction to the live action versions for you. If you've watched the drama you could watch this but you'll find the change in setting,characters and overall mood might be a bit off putting, but it's alright not so bad i wanted to turn the tv off but their's a lot else i could be watching. This movie tried to be for newcomers i because they leave almost no reference in any dialog to the original cast but newcomers will be confused by the pacing and about Onizuka while people who've watched the drama as best might find it an interesting experience but at worst a waste of time that ruins a good end of a Drama.
(you can ignore me from here on out)
What they could have changed-I felt this would have worked better if they made it like a gokusen special where they would use the cast from the drama and write a narrative around it. I would have loved to see a new season of GTO budget constraints and so on but GTO's story and format don't work as a movie, the only way it would work was if you had one person who needed help but since this is a school setting their's a lot of people who you really don't care about now.
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