User blog comment:Derax-Pagani/Fairy Tail: Dragon Cry Movie Review/@comment-7418318-20170628081814

Let's try this again: This time I'm prepared Wikia! Your "There's been a problem with your login session" cannot withstand my power of copy/paste!

Finally the movie hit Austrian cinemas too and I was there to see it. "Finally" both because it's one full month after the international release and because it was both the first and the final airing of the movie in my country.

First off I now have first-hand knowledge about what I was already sure of before: The prejudice that only teen boys watch anime is bullshit. There were more male than female viewers in the cinema, but not by much. Also there were no children. The entire audience appeared to be between 17 and 50 years old, which is a pretty good demogaphic for a supposed niche genre if you ask me. And despite the complete and utter lack of any form of advertisment by the cinema company all the theatres that played it were packed almost to capacity. I hope that makes those idiotic geezers in the cinema management wake up and realize that there IS an audience for anime movies and a rather big one to boot. If they advertised anime movies like they did life-action ones and didn't just air them a single them and then never again, they could raise their profits, improve their reputation and help quell piracy all in one go. All the people I know to pirate anime only do it because for them it's the only choice to get the anime they want to see without having to wait for years to get an overpriced version of it.

Anyway, moving on to the movie itself.

The spoiler-free long and short is that while it is flawed (deeply flawed in some regards) I still enjoyed the movie. While I liked Phoenix Priestess a whole lot more, Dragon Cry was still enjoyable. I don't regret paying the ticket price or dodging spoilers for a full month.

Now for all of those that haven't seen the movie yet, but still plan to a SPOILER WARNING!

As I said before, while I overall enjoyed it, this movie has lots of flaws and some quite glaring ones, so let's start with those.

My overall impression was that this used to be a much longer movie, but they had to cut out many scenes to fit it to length and unfortunately they prioritized keeping the fan-service scenes over keeping some relevant scenes. It makes the movie appear rather disjointed at times.

My two biggest issues though are something different. First there's a similar problem as with the "Key to the Starry Sky" arc. When the plot demands for Fairy Tail to lose, they do so not becaue they are caught off-guard, outnumbered, overpowered, lack knowledge of the enemy's abilities, are at the disadvantaged position or some other thing that makes sense, but simply because they fight really stupidly and incompetently: In short, all fights in this movie SUCK, big time.
 * This guy uses dolls to shoot fireballs at me... what should I do? Should I conjure an Ice-Make Shield like I did a thousand times before? Should I dodge? Should I switch opponents with Natsu who could just eat those fore-balls? Should I attack? Nope, I'll just stand here gawking at the enemy and wait to be shot.
 * This chick is fast and her armour can resist attacks by my non-magical sword. Should I switch to the Flight Armour to match her in speed? Should I switch to an armour that enhances my strength, so I can break though her armour? Should I switch to an armour that enhances my defense? Nope, I'll just go with my non-magical armour and sword while I get pushed back more and more and wait to be overwhelmed.
 * The enemy blocked Sand Buster and then Scorpio jumped in front of a shot to save me and is gone now. What should I do? Should I summon another Spirit? Should I put on a Star Dress? Should I try to run away? Nope, I'm just going to sit here and wait if someone's going to save me.

The only times when someone made smart decisions in any battle was when Wendy and Charle during their high-speed chase decide to let the enemy draw near and at the perfect moment to deprive him of a chance to react suddenly spin around to kick the guy in the face, using his own speed and momentum for maximum damage and when Lucy used sun-glasses to block off Zash's eye-powers.

The second main issue for me is the beginning of the movie. The only reason why the movie can happen the way it does is because everyone except Lucy escapes during their prisoner transport because their cells fall apart by themselves, without the FT mages doing anything. Yes you read that right, the cells that were specifically made to transport prisoners by air fall apart by themselves from being used for an airborne prisoner transfer... the very purpose for which they were built in the first place. Well... at least Natsu's cell does, because we don't get to see how the others escaped. Once Natsu is free they just turn up out of nowhere without an explanation. I guess that was another scene that was cut to make room for more fan-service.

Speaking of fan-service... there is a LOT of that and quite jarring at times. I don't even want to count how many close-up shots of female breasts, asses and hips there were. And the way those breasts jiggled and bounced was just overdone to a ridiculous amount. They looked more like water-balloons than actual breats, not to mention that Lucy's breats and hips changed sizes from scene to scene. Consistency is a concept that the production team of this movie seems to be woefully unaware of. And worse still they don't confine those close-ups to pure fanservice scenes like Lucy's bar-dance, but they happen right in the middle of supposedly dramatic scenes too, impacting the serious atmosphere negatively.

Something else that is annoying to no end for me is Natsu's transformation. Namely there is none. Despite his partial Dragonification being on all the posters and promo art, there is none in the movie. It was just a visual representation of the dread that Animus felt from Natsu's powers. Now that in itself is not something I would mind, if it hadn't been on EVERY FREAKIN' POSTER! He doesn't even go into Dragon Force or LFDM or King mode. He just keeps pummeling that Dragon with his regular, basic Fire Dragon Slayer magic... though on the plus side he does earn his title of Dragon Slayer in the end. Funny how he insists on possessing his powers not to slay Dragons only to follow up that statement by slaying the Dragon. ^^

As a Lucy fan I also had some issues with Lucy's role in the movie. All in all she barely did anything and her "battle record" is just ridiculous. Everyone of the main cast get's at least one fight in which they can show off (somewhat... as I said the fights all suck), except for Lucy. In the first fight she calls Scorpio, who fails to even scratch the enemy with a sand-buster and then is sent back by a single shot from a magical pistol, after which Lucy is rescued by Natsu. Later against the same enemy she summons Capricorn, who kicks the enemy in the face and that's the end of the fight. No, the enemy isn't defeated or scared away, he just has somethig more important to do than fight Lucy and thus just leaves (and his reason why he can't affort the time to fight against Lucy is legitimate, he really need to be somewhere else for his "master plan" to work). And finally Lucy uses Star-Shot against a generic small-fry army... or rather we see her shoot it, but the scene switches away before we even get to see the arrows impact their targets... wow THE EXCITEMENT! But in turn she needs to be rescued by Natsu not just once, but twice. -_- Where's the bad-ass Lucy that held her own against three Demons at once?

There's of course the issue I already mentioned at the beginning: The movie seems to be missing pieces. We don't get to see how anyone other than Natsu escapes. When Lucy is freed, she just has her keys and clothing back a scene later without any explanation. They had to flee though a secret tunnel, so they shouldn't have come by the room where prisoner's possessions are kept, so how did she get her stuff back? One scene ends with Lucy in Capricorn Star Dress and the next scene she is suddenly in the Virgo Star Dress. Why exactly? Did she dig a tunnel for the women she freed? Was it just to pander to maid fans? Your guess is as good as mine, because the movie sure as hell neither shows nor tells. And so on and so forth...

Juvia... god she's so annoying. Apparently she now has a Gray-sama sensor (btw, that's not a term I made up, "Gray sama-sensor" is what Juvia herself called it) that can accurately locate him once he's within 20 or so kilometers. We've already see her feel when Gray was in danger, but this is a new hight of bullshit. At least some of the jokes at her expanse were funny, but if they had left her out of the movie and used her screentime for other scenes, the movie would have only been better for it.

Oh my GOD! Charle's sailor-moon-style magical girl transformation... what the hell were those guys drinking, smoking or injecting? I really have no words to discribe this... I'm glad this review blog forewarned me about it. If that scene had taken me by surprise I think I'd have done some severe cursing at the top of my lungs...

The antagonists... well... I think generic describes them best. I would have to read up somewhere to know their names. I don't even remember whether their names were mentioned in the movie or not, but their utter lack of personality didn't make them stick if they were. There is this one bunny-girl that is fast and kicks... she seems to be vain because she likes to pose and calls her kicks beautiful. Then there's a guy who uses two dolls to attack while posing. And a fast guy on a metal ball that can transform into a surf-board like shape. Did you expect me to say "That's all you need to know"... well it is, but it is also all we GET to know about them in the movie. Compared to them even the Garou Knights and the Spriggan 12 are complex and well flashed-out characters.

Of Animus, the "main villain" of the story we barely know anything other than him being a Dragon and seemingly of the anti-Human faction, because he was together with two other Dragons that wanted to eat a girl before Acno offed them. Was his personality changed from being inside Sophy? Why was he a good King to Humans all this time and only reverted to hating them once he learned where Dragon Cry was?

Oh and they totally glossed over how Sophy can be alive after more than 400 years. Did she slip though the Eclipse without Anna, Zeref or anyone else noticing? If not, why didn't she age and die just because a Dragon hid in her, when the actual DS with Dragons in them aged normally? How could a dying Dragon entering a dying girl's body actually save both their lives? The DS didn't having Dragons inside of them certainly didn't give them any miraculous self-healing powers...

Wow... listing all the negatives really makes the movie sound like the next "Dragonball Evolution" ^^, but it really isn't. While it has it's flawed or outright cringeworthy moments, I still enjoyed the movie as a whole... though I can't explain why.

Except for that one plot-contrivance with the prison cells and those seemingly missing scenes, the plot is actually quite solid. If this had been handled by WIT or Ufotable and made two hours long instead of 1 hour 20 minutes or so, I'm sure this would have been a terrific movie. Too bad that it was A1, who could only turn it into something relatively good.

One thing that was without a doubt superb was the music. It was a nice mix of old tracks, remixed tracks and new ones in the usual Yasuharu Takanashi quality. I'm not sure yet whether I'll buy the Blue Ray of the movie, but I sure as hell will buy the OST CDs once they are out.

Kudos also to A1 pictures in regards of the music. Whatever issues they might have with their productions (like animation, pacing, plot, art, fanservice to story ratio and many more), they certainly know how to use a good piece of music in the right place to enhance a scene.