Eden of the East: Paradise Lost - 1 Double Facepalm, 4 sad shakes of the head, and 1 "WHY?!!"/10. Damnit, sometimes I hate it when I turn out to be right. So, this is the glorious ending to your epic 12-episode TV series + 2 movies is it, Production I.G.? Ugh...
Alright, let's get this over with. This movie is...not terrible, but as I've come to expect over the years it is a terrible ending to the story begun with the TV series. The hook of the TV series was this massive mystery based around a deadly game between these "chosen" Japanese citizens known as Selicao. They're each handed 10 billion yen, and then told to "save Japan"...or die. The most interesting charm of it was that each Selicao had what amounted to a magic cellphone that could do practically anything assuming they had the funds to pay for it. As the main character slowly built his own plan to win, the audience is gradually shown the plans of some of the other Selicao, occasionally even leading to entertaining celllphone "battles" where each would try to outwit the other. Even the first movie followed through on this idea with interesting personalities constantly in variable states of conflict, and sometimes characters would be removed from the game to build intrigue.
So given that build-up, you'd ASSUME that the finale movie would finally bring a great-deal of payoff, action, and drama to send this story off with a bang. YOU'D BE DEAD WRONG. Instead of focusing on the strengths of the series (the mystery, the phones, the eccentric personalities), we have a movie that spends almost its entire 1.5 hour running time answering a question no one asked in previous movies: "Is Takizawa the Prime Minister's bastard son?" It then spends 5 minutes closing the game with one of the most B.S. endings I've ever seen: EVERYONE wins! That's right, Mr. Outside declares EVERYONE a winner and just stops the game! And pretty much every character in the end is right where they were when the series began, with only minor changes happening in the show's world, making this entire story almost completely pointless! ARGH!
When I finished the TV series, I wrote that I was giving the ending a pass conditional upon the 2 follow-up movies delivering a satisfactory ending. Well, you can kiss that goodbye. What's really annoying, though, is that a lot of these issues might have been ironed out if the TV series was just 26 episodes instead of a 12-episode series and 2 movies. There's a lot of sloppy to terrible writing in the movies due to their abbreviated nature. I lost count of the number of plot points that occur off-screen that had to be told later in sloppy exposition, when they could have been told in real-time in a TV series. And because this is a direct continuation of the TV series, it casts a bad light on what was generally a good series.
Overall, the animation is good, the dubbing is good, the writing is abysmal. If you're looking for closure to the TV series, I guess you get it but it's handled very badly. It's like the writers forgot what made their story fun to begin with and just made things up as they went along towards the end.
Topic: Rate the last movie you've seen (Read 1553205 times)
