Score: B

Definitely a random one for me. This is a movie that came out in 2016 after the show aired in 2006. It was certainly interesting going into something “new” for Zegapain. I’d rewatched the main series a few times, but for whatever reason I just missed out on the movies entirely. Anime movies are the bane of my existence since they never appear as reliably as ongoing tv series so often I’ll find out about them years after they came out…like in this case. The downside that this one wasn’t quite new content as much as it was filling in backstories of the cast.

Things just sort of happened

There’s almost not much to say about the ADP movie. I do see the idea behind and the value of showing the events before the start of the series and how/why Kyo broke down in that timeline. But in a sense there’s also not much to actually say about it either. Most of the events are things we saw or at least were implied by the show itself. Whether it’s Kyo’s steady breakdown at the repeated loops or even just seeing characters like Sachiko as pilots. It’s kind of nice, but it’s also a bit empty at the same time.

We don’t really get to know any of these people any more than we did before the movie. They only appear in a few scenes and fights before they are just gone. The movie is somewhat trapped between needing to stay locked in on Kyo to fully tell his story, but that means the opportunity to flesh out other characters is lost. In a lot of ways I think this would have worked better as a 13 episode prequel series.

Plenty of potential

Maybe part of it was going into the first movie thinking there would be more forward progression in the story. Which admittedly isn’t fair since I’m sure the summary said it was a prequel. But it still felt a lot like “yep, I knew this already.” Which can certainly be a problem for prequels since they have to eventually line up with the main events of the story. But in some ways I think pacing also kind of hurt the movie. It basically had to condense Kyo’s entire original career into 2 hours. So a lot of times it was “oh hey, I remember that person being mentioned” and then they were gone since there was no time to actually develop anyone.

That might be my biggest problem with this movie. In a sense it’s the time when Kyo and Shizuno fall for each other and so much is established. But I swear they got better focus in that respect purely from the Zegapain flashbacks in the show. In the movie there’s just no time for that! We get there’s a general friendly rivalry with Lu-Shen, but again there’s just no time to develop it. Prequels naturally end up in the same place, but that doesn’t mean they can’t hit hard. There’s a tragedy in knowing what’s going to happen. But not sure this movie did enough with that.

It was fine for what it was

In a lot of ways I left the movie going “where did the time even go?” It was good though to see the development of the Zegas and the ups and downs of that early point in the war. Even establishing how utterly screwed the main cast were at the start of the show. They’d lost so many of their forces and the servers due to that EMP attack. Makes one think about the future of the world in that scenario. They’ll be able to get the resurrection system up and running, but it’s going to be hell. People are going to be smacked in the face with the reality of the apocalypse and how few humans are even left.

If nothing else it was nice to see the story of Kyo and hitting home how brutal existence for the Celebrants were. Of course many of them would either start going insane or just stop interacting with the people of the servers after a while. It’s not the fault of the people looping, but dealing with them would be horrific. While the movie didn’t blow me away, it was certainly solid enough.