Attack on Titan 2: End of the World begins with a recap of the first movie. It is a surprisingly long prologue for a film that isn't too far removed from the prior installment. One would think that the filmmakers would trust that the audience of this film might be able to remember details of something they saw less than a couple of months ago. And then throughout the film, it continues to pepper the story with little bits of footage from the first movie. Rather than push the story forward, this continuation doesn't stop looking back. And it just doesn't help.
Eren (Haruma Miura) wakes up a captive of the director-general, who intends to kill him for being able to turn into a Titan. He is unexpectedly saved from this predicament when a Titan shows up and takes him away. While his comrades continue to try to find a way to seal up the hole in the wall that has allowed Titan inside their city, Eren is taken to a place where he learns the truth about the Titans. Soon enough, he and his friends are given a chance to choose a future for themselves and the people that live within these walls.
To be completely fair to this film, it does put forward some intriguing ideas. Like the source material, the movie reveals ambitions beyond the staging of battles between humans and Titans. The film sketches out a history that speaks of the ways that humans are being controlled by the powerful elite. But it all feels terribly rushed in the movie. The film just dumps all the history and the political intrigue in long, clunky monologues. The film just isn't equipped to handle the nuances of the setting and its biggest ideas, and it ends up delivering confused speeches that seem to completely disregard character motivation.
This all might have been more effective if the film had spent any time at all sketching out what life inside those walls is like. But in the span of two films, there just isn’t any sense of how the world actually works, how the government really takes control of its populace. The politics are interesting, and actually has some real world significance. But they don’t matter to the story at all. It’s hard to feel for the characters, because the movie doesn’t actually spend any time on the structures that it wants to bring down.
The Titans remain a highlight. This time, with a Titan on the side of the good guys, the movie starts to resemble a kaiju film. Sadly, the Titan battles aren’t nearly as fun as they could be. The film weighs these scenes down with numerous flashbacks, unwilling to let the moment stand alone. The film cuts back to scenes from the first movie so often that it’s a wonder that they split this story into two films at all. And even in the present, a lot of the action is pretty awkwardly staged. There is a sequence, for example, where one of the good guys is trying to bring down a building on some people. His potential victims all just stand there, doing nothing as the very vulnerable hero in this instance stands in front of them, clearly meaning to do them harm.
It’s easy enough to imagine that people are going into Attack on Titan 2: End of the World with some hopes that it would redeem the shaky first part. But it just doesn’t. If anything, it makes things worse. Because it becomes terribly clear that there isn’t actually enough material to justify the production of two entire films. There is so much footage from the first film in this one. This is a movie that refuses to stand on its own two legs. And in every other aspect, this film is just as badly done as the first.
My Rating:
