[DreamSword]

Gridman Universe

As this franchise has been known to do, this movie is an attempt at having a cake and eating it too.

There's alot of parts at play in an attempt to make fans of both shows that this movie is crossing over happy. Such having multiple versions of pre-existing characters exist at the same time and fuddling with the overall cosmology of the setting even more.

Aspects like that and more make the last chunk of this movie a major letdown. There's all this intriguing build up about the nature of what exactly is going on all throughout the first two acts, only to lead up to less than satisfactory results.

I most certainly wasn't a fan of how the final boss of the story ended up just being some random Kaiju, even if the premise of Gridman himself getting infected is interesting. And even besides that, the action climax of the whole thing, for as many "cool" moments as it tries to cram in, goes on for way too long. And that's ignoring how toyetic it all is.

The resolutions to many of the character arcs left me wanting more too. We still never learn what the promise Yuta made to Rika was, Gauma's' meeting with the princess doesn't amount to much, and alot of the little plot threads dropped both in the voice dramas as well as Dynazenon proper are never followed up on. And don't even get me started on how CrunchyRoll's' subs of the movie are, at best, passable, with many notable inconsistencies in terminology.

But despite all these factors that made fully immersing myself into the film impossible, I was rather enjoying myself for alot of the first two acts. Like the shows before it, the movie is animated beautifully, with the "Dream" sequence actually being a major highlight here rather than a detriment like I how I felt about the related episodes of the two seasons before this. That off model, distorted style being used to emphasize how the world is unraveling was a great move in terms of overall atmosphere.

And while it's arguably both a footnote in terms of the overall plot as well as possibly me reading far too much into things, for awhile it seemed to me that the movie was sort of a thesis statement about how writers bring about the stories they want to tell. Through the constant revision of the script of the school play comes a discussion about writer's' intent, what they need to compromise to get their work approved, as well as trying to fulfill the wants and desires of an intended audience, and how it's all a very fine line between entertainment value and the intended purpose of the story in the first place.

Interesting as that might be to me and only me, in the end, the star of the show is Yuta. There's a not insignificant effort put into the movie toward fleshing out his character now that he's been separated from Gridman, and I felt they did a pretty solid job at keeping true to SSSS.Gridman's' statement about Yuta's' feelings being channeled through Gridman while also showing other aspects to Yuta's' personality. Sho wasn't wrong when he called Yuta "normal" and it's both because of and in spite of that aspect of Yuta that he's a very interesting and likable character to watch. And it's through him we get to see how his friendships with Sho and Rikka have bloomed over time.

Overall, while I did like this finale to the SSSS saga more than SSSS.Dynazenon, the movie never fully emotionally grabbed me in the same way that the first anime did, and infact carried over many of the problems I had with the second show. It's not a bad movie though, and I'm sure it'll make many fans who aren't me rather happy with the way alot of things turn out. But in the end, in terms of my personal enjoyment, I don't think I could give Gridman Universe anything higher than a 3/6. I'd be willing to bump it up another point if the Dynazenon aspects were downplayed a bit less for more Gridman elements, but that's not what ended up happening, so I can't. Atleast Yume and Yomogi didn't take up the entire movie this time.

Also, shout out to the people who were adamant about S4 Dynazenon taking place in the real world. Boy, you sure showed me!