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Dropping shows is one thing. I get that if someone realizes early on that a show isn't for them, then stopping there saves them time to potentially watch something else. Before watching this movie, I would have said that dropping a movie is psycho behavior but after dropping this about 20 minutes before it ended, I now understand why some people do drop movies before finishing them. Spoilers ahead, not that it matters too much because if you are taking this review seriously you won't watch this trainwreck anyways.

Let's get the one thing that this show gets right out of the way first: the art. ... Simply put, Promare is gorgeous. Trigger once again outdid themselves with this and their animation and art remains second to none. If you watch anime for how pretty it looks and nothing else, then you can get some enjoyment out of this.

I'm going to refer to the characters in this movie not by their names but by my headcanon nicknames since they don't deserve to be called by their actual names and because I don't even remember their names and I don't want to bother looking them up. That segways into my first point quite nicely: the characters suck. All of them are written poorly and not memorable, without exception. We are introduced to a large number of them at the beginning of the movie, yet you only need to care about 3 of them: the main character (blue-mohawk guy), his love interest (UPS girl) and the anti-hero turned ally (revolutionary twink). Blue-mohawk guy is a pretty standard protagonist. He's dumb except when he needs to be smart and he's a nice guy. UPS girl is referred to as such since her only defining character traits are being a love interest and driving blue-mohawk guy around in her transport ship when needed. The revolutionary twink is probably the best of the 3. He actually has interesting motivations but he doesn't get enough screen time to make use of that despite being one of the main characters. Other than those 3, we have the main villain (evil suit man) and the sister of UPS girl (the dumbest character in the movie). Evil suit man is evil for the sake of being evil. His motivations for using people as human experiments doesn't really make sense the more you think about it and he has this nasty habit of being an asshole even when it would be convenient for him to shut up for 2 seconds. Every other character is quite literally useless. No point in talking about them since they literally do nothing throughout the movie, despite supposedly being extremely capable firefighters in their own right.

The story is similarly disjointed and dumb. I'm going to use one specific moment to highlight the issues with this story:
At one point, revolutionary twink and blue mohawk guy are fighting (dont bother asking why, they should have a common enemy at this point and thus be allies but plot convenience takes precedent so whatever) over a lake made of either crystal or ice (I can't remember which) and them fighting JUST HAPPENS to break the lake into pieces, revealing an underground cavern. UPS girl shows up and the 3 of them investigate it and JUST HAPPEN find an AI of a dead guy there. This dead guy JUST happens to be a former colleague of evil suit man who JUST happens to know his evil plan and the unintended consequence on the world it will have and he ALSO just HAPPENS to have a mech that he was building which was JUST finished and JUST so happens to have all of the tools they need to defeat evil suit man. It's deus ex machina on top of deus ex machina. In terms of other dumb story moments that stand out to me, there's a racism allegory that falls totally flat on its face and comes off as preachy. There's also a moment where the sister of UPS girl is shocked that evil suit man wont delay his plan to give her sister time to escape the planet getting destroyed despite him repeatedly demonstrating that he doesn't care about anything except himself and his plan. The story is boring at best and outright stupid at its worst.

The worst part is that I see some potential here. I'm not saying this would've been a masterpiece, but I see a world where this could've been a decent turn your brain off type of show, but it was burdened by rushed writing and forced preachiness. If you like firefighters, just watch fire force. Same concept executed much better. The show gets a 2 instead of a 1 just for the art alone.

2/10