Substance without Spirit: A Review of GTO (Live Action)

Readers of my reviews may recall that Great Teacher Onizuka, oftentimes known simply as GTO, is one of my favorite manga series (technically my #1 favorite manga series based off that list I made). I had always known that an anime series existed, and was also dimly aware that a live-action adaptation existed, as weird as that sounded. I was finally able to get ahold of both, but having recently re-read the manga series, figured I would go for the version that didn't follow the manga quite as closely: the live-action. It also helped it was technically the shorter of the two, being 12 hour long episodes instead of 43 twenty-minute ones.

I naturally had some misgivings from the start, if only because the thought of transmuting a comic into something live-action sounded weird. However, the show was apparently amazingly well-recieved in Japan, the manga is actually mostly realistic, and the recent string of super-hero movies proves that comics can sometimes transition well to physical actors.
The show started off quite well; the actor they chose for Onizuka did a pretty good job and looked close enough. The story was clearly told with some acceptable changes given the time format, and overall the first episode did a great job of setting everything up.

However, after the first episode, the show began to underwhelm me. A lot of the casting decisions felt a bit poor to me, and a lot of the editing they did to the story felt to me like bad choices. To give a random example, in the manga Onizuka is forced to live on-campus, making his daily living situation different since he's kind of always "on-call" for the students, whereas in the show he has his normal house he can always fall back to for privacy. Similarly, the personality of some of the characters were drastically altered, some becoming more aggressive, some a lot less intelligent, and in many cases characters were added in or combined for no discernible reason.

I think the biggest problem with the show I had, though, was its tone. One of the key characteristics of Onizuka is that whenever he does something, he puts his full force of will and energy into the task, which makes him very extreme in an otherwise realistic world. In the show, he is far more ordinary, and that weakens him so much as a character. Likewise many of the situations become a lot more normal, and probably due to television concerns, some of the scenes that I hit didn't feel quite as dramatic as they otherwise could, especially some of the confrontations Onizuka has with uncooperative students.

Despite not having any real problems, this tonal shift essentially meant what was one of the key reasons I so enjoyed GTO was suddenly gone. I suspect that if I wasn't actively comparing the television show to the source material, the show would be decently enjoyable. However, I didn't pick the series up for just any live-action Japanese show, but rather looking for an adaptation of GTO. While superficially this show fits the bill, I feel like the spirit is not totally there. For that reason I ended up dropping the series after the fifth episode. There's a chance I may later return to it, but it's pretty unlikely given my to-watch list.

There's still the anime adaptation, though, which I hear is (unsurprisingly) much more true to the manga. Although the live-action was a disappointment, I still have high hopes for the anime, but that'll wait for another day.

-HTMC