Attack on Titan colon The Manga colon The Anime colon The (Live Action) Movie colon Part 2 colon The Legend of Zoë’s Gold colon Electric Boogaloo a.k.a 2Attack 2Titan was sent to me like a premonition in a horrible nightmare, violently shoving me into the waking world. The first one was bad enough; we didn’t fucking need two of these. I can not stress that enough; we needed part 2 of this like we need the M. Night Shyamalan directed The Last Airbender sequel that no one wants, but we’re probably going to get anyway. Unfortunately for us, both parts of Attack on Titan were filmed at the same time. There is hope, however, that M. Night Shyamalan will get eaten by a polar bear or something.
It’s a good thing this part is Titan Baby free, because that was stupid. Unfortunately, so is everything else about this movie. Literally all of the problems (and scant handful of good things) with the first part apply here. The only character that really feels right is whatever they named their version of Hange Zoë.
Honest to God, I mentally checked out several times. It doesn’t help that, while the previous movie was very gray, this one is mostly beige. Sure, it’s brighter, but it’s still like staring into a bowl of Rice Krispies, defiantly floating when you really wish they’d sink. Just a little bit more color would’ve brought the movie into the butter zone, in my opinion. It’s so bad, I didn’t realize Jean died until Eren mentions avenging him. I can’t quite pinpoint when that might have happened, but I’m guessing it happened between 50 and 70 minutes in. Which is bad, because it meant that I wasted around that amount of time watching this movie that I will never get back. Thankfully, this shitshow is a full 10 minutes shorter than the previous one. You can’t possibly imagine how happy I was to see that.
The best way I can explain both of these movies is that they are as if they were interpreted by someone who had never read/seen Attack on Titan and had the story relayed to them by a schizophrenic on drugs. Because, holy shit does it go all over the place. And for shiggles (shits+giggles, natch) they decided to throw in every drawn out post-apocalyptic cliche they possibly could. I really don’t like post-apocalyptic things, specifically when it’s implied to be our Earth rather than some fantasy world or alien planet. I just prefer to believe that things won’t actually get that shitty, but I know there are plenty of people that wish it would. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be shows about people that horde Spam and build elaborate contraptions to purify their own urine. And while the series is clearly a post apocalyptic story, it’s implied that they didn’t regress to the point of using single shot guns.
The worst things are the ass pulls you see coming from a mile away, though. You can guess that Shikishima is the Armored Titan before he even shows up, sure. You don’t, however, expect the commander to be the Colossal Titan, though. I guess they just realized that they’d adapted out so many characters that they really needed to wrap up all two of the other titan shifters. The best part of that bullshit is that he was crushed to death by rubble right at the beginning of the movie, and then he shows up again right at the end, wrapped in a big red flag like he’s fucking Tetsuo or something. And then Sasha fills his neck with arrows, which was a welcome sight. The fact that this does not kill him is a shame.
There’s also this one scene right after Commander What’s-his-face is presumed dead, where Eren wakes up in a totally white room with big square cutouts on the walls. There’s a surprisingly well kept Wurlitzer jukebox playing a song I didn’t feel like looking up, but did anyway because I have no life (It’s Skeeter Davis-The End of the World. Subtle, movie.). Shikishima brought him there to show him newsreels and shit from before the titans showed up. I couldn’t help expressing what I felt about this scene verbally; I’ll spare you the details. But this room represents something that’s been really played out in recent years, what with your Hunger Games, Divergents, and Maze Runners (all of which I hate, by the way). And it actually gets worse, because as a final fuck you, the movie briefly shows this room again in the post-credits stinger, with some bullshit about Eren and Mikasa being the “first test subjects to accomplish” some nebulous goal that the person talking mentions. No, movie. Bad. In a just world, you won’t get a sequel.
I really hate being like this, but I have to mention that my screener copy of Attack on Titan: Part 2 decided that the timer should go right over the top row of subtitles. I’m not sure if this was actually an improvement, or if it was to the movie’s detriment. But it was still an annoyance I didn’t need, since I was already stuck watching this movie for an hour and a half. And while none of the actors did anything like a bad job (Not like I can really assess that, considering I don’t speak Japanese), they weren’t the part of this equation that was the problem. And neither were the effects.
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