Digimon Adventure 02: The Beginning (original) (raw)

My score and general thoughts aside, please take note of this important TRIGGER WARNING! This movie contains depictions of Extreme Child Abuse. If you are sensitive to seeing rather graphic depictions of small children being severly abused, DO NOT watch this movie! It has some incredibly harrowing and disturbing scenes, and is much darker than any previous entries in this line. It also goes pretty hard on the eldritch horror. For more details on the abuse see the end of the review. (Slightly spoilery, hence I put it at the end.)

Also, if you were looking to see the events of Kizuna be addressed/resolved, you’ll be... disappointed. For all that it’s marked as a sequel it certainly doesn’t feel like it. No mention of anything that happened, in fact certain lines seem to indicate it didn’t happen at all.
Now that aside, I found this movie incredibly disappointing in many ways. If they'd made this a standalone movie unconnected to any of the series (except perhaps Ghost Game) and focused properly on just Rui and Ukkomon, and their story; maybe this could have been good. As it is, they didn't do justice to either the new (original) story or characters, nor to the existing Digimon Adventure/02 story.
Everything was rushed, and no one involved had the finesse to properly tie together the old and the new, even if they’d had more time.

Both the new and old characters were done a disservice. The resolution to Rui’s story was rather ham-fisted, and the message was muddled, and slightly problematic.
Absolutely zero thought was put into the Zero Two gang beyond surface level aesthetics. They are copy pasted from their younger selves to the point that Miyako still calls Ken by his last name despite them having been comrades and friends for over ten years at this point. Their dialogue and interactions are pretty much unchanged and while we see them at their jobs, none of their dialogue reflects this. Aside from Daisuke cooking ramen, and a few remarks and jokes about it, no dialogue reflects anything new going on in their lives except a throwaway line about Taichi being too busy to talk to his family. (That depressing tidbit is the only verbal glimpse we get into their lives.) No talk about bosses or coworkers, or anecdotes about the kids Hikari works with; plans for the future? Well Daisuke’s making ramen, possibly for a boss we never see. Hmm you wanted to know about Ken or Takeru? Too bad. Is Iori really working at a law firm already? How is that going? Who knows? (For all my gripes with Kizuna at least the characters felt and acted like they were actually older.)
Aside from a couple of cute comments and lines here and there, nothing is added, the status quo is kept. Except you know, the giant bomb blown into the lore part way through the movie. Metaphorically speaking.

Thus we reach the part that annoyed me the most (aside from Miyako calling Ken by his last name, seriously wtf?), about how the Adventure/Zero Two part was handled. It’s clear no one cared about either of the series that came before, not the characters and certainly not the lore. Adventure put a lot of thought into its lore, building it up over several hours’ worth of episodes; and Zero Two had a few interesting tidbits too. The writers of this movie arrogantly decided that their rushed little narrative was more important than respecting any of that. This is one of the largest retcons in the series, and it is poorly thought out, badly executed and just overall offensive to anyone who cared about the story and lore of the original. It’s lazy and disgusting and to top it all off, it can’t even resolve things without creating at least one plot whole within its own narrative.
The fights were boring, the horror was out of place, and there was zero breathing room in between events, overall a mess of a movie. This would have made more sense as a sequel to Digimon 2020 if they absolutely had to tie it to the Adventure line.
In a happier timeline we got a slice of life ova instead.

TLDR:
Rushed in every way.
Zero respect for the characters.
Zero respect for the existing story and lore.
Poorly handles the mature themes it chose to tackle.
Overall a hollow movie, which cannot live up to what came before.
The opening scenes where you get to see the characters living their lives are worth checking out though.

(This movie is still leagues better than Tri at its worst, but at least Tri had some interesting lore at its best. Overall I don’t hate this quite as much as Tri, and Rui is much more interesting than Meiko, but it’s still awful for the majority of its runtime.)

The music was good to average, the animation was decent, the art was a mixed bag, the voice acting was solid. Subs were slightly off at times, but fine overall.

God I wish I never watched this movie beyond the first few moments.

Under the stars is a more detailed but slightly SPOILERY trigger warning:

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More detailed TRIGGER WARNING:

If you are sensitive to seeing rather graphic depictions of small children being starved, beaten, and left to slowly freeze to death, DO NOT watch this movie!
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