First of all I have seen the anime and it's definitely one of my favorites. This movie is a complete and utter disgrace to the franchise and does not have any positive quality that gave the franchise the popularity it earned nor does it have any qualities that make up for how bad it is.
The story in this version is for some reason changed severely from the original, which I would not even mind if it were just as good or even remotely decent, but no, it is very, very far from that. The story has A LOT of holes in its plot and logic. They removed the things that made the story beautiful, dramatic, and powerful and replaced them with their own amateurish, illogical, juvenile, excuse for writing. I cannot even fathom why or how the creator allowed this to happen.
Like the story, the characters are so heavily altered, they don't even have the same personalities as the original. Eren is now some kind of personification of "cool" from some nine year old's mind and Mikasa is now your average dumb, doting, beta girl. The dialogue is so completely stupid that I could not stop cringing the entire time. Despite the fact that they only needed 90 minutes for this movie, there are still a lot of awkward, unnecessary scenes and pauses that make the cringing feeling really set in.
The acting is also terrible, it's more of something you would expect from kids in a school play rather than from professionals in a big screen movie for a huge franchise. The CGI would have been impressive twenty years ago, like everything else they seemed to have settled on something mediocre at best yet they still add a lot of unnecessary CGI scenes that just help pronounce how bad it is.
I have no idea how much their budget was but they can't expect to release this movie without expecting massive negative criticisms not just from fans but even from your average consumers of today's media. Yes if you showed this movie to a caveman who's never seen any recent entertainment media, he might be impressed but the standards have been set and this garbage cannot even pass as "decent" for today's standards. Even more so because this movie belongs to a huge, successful, popular franchise and this movie has had so much hype leading up to its release.
