Watched the US release on September 18, 2024!
Will preface this review by saying I am a big Hololive fan, and the fact that my Kamioshi Hoshimachi Suisei sang the intro with Sakuma put me onto this film. Well, that, and I generally enjoy watching and supporting anime screenings in my local theatre.
That being said, I have to admit that my high point of the film was the intro song, as I got to witness my idol perform on a new stage being a movie theatre, and as a film major I felt my worlds colliding.
I genuinely think that this film had great potential to tell a really interesting story. I was invested enough to want to see where it would go once the tension hit its peak simultaneously showing the girls achieving their "dream" at the time but also exposing the "dark side of the idol industry" (a cliche done very many times). However, it loses all its momentum it had built in the last two acts to hand off the plot to one of the main girls to conveniently exposition her way into the film's resolution.
In the end, after one of the main girls who didn't have much presence conveniently gives up all hope of developing her character and magically convinces Azuma to continue chasing her dream, we are met with a dreaded time skip of doom. I won't speak on how it resolves, but it just felt like suddenly we see a "good end" (if you would like to call it that) without any of the context of the struggle how they got there so many years later. We're left to piece together the past without any show for it, and then it ends showing the word "Trapezium". I had no idea what that meant. It's not fair that we suddenly see an ending where things have at least worked out, but we spent the entire film watching them struggle as girls chasing their youth and their childish ambitions, only to suddenly be adults where everything is working out fine?
I feel like the film would have been better if we got an extra 10 minutes of a montage powerpoint sequence at the end, even, to showcase the trials they went through to become successful, but the sudden handing of a life that "worked out in the end" just felt cheap and left me wanting. However, an extra 10 minutes of this movie would definitely drag it on to be way too much.
