RahXephon: Tagen Hensoukyoku

Ah, the Rahxephon movie. How much you get dismissed.
A lot of things you might hear about the Rahxephon movie is how most of it is just copied and pasted from the series, how it's rushed and makes very little sense. This is true. BUT you need to take into consideration two things: this movie was not a theatrical release, but a made-for-TV special. Secondly, NHK demanded this movie from Bones with a ludicrous deadline that they barely completed as it is. So, with that in mind...
I think, as a stand-alone "movie", it sucks. Which is no great surprise to anybody. I do, however, think it's ... a great supplement to the series. It's really best if you watch it DIRECTLY after seeing the last episode with no break in between. I find it's like End of Eva for me, in that it should theoretically be very confusing, but actually clears up a lot I didn't understand about the series' ending.
The movie is technically an AU or re-telling, but even so it helps clarify the series' version rather than make a completely new and bizarre one. So, as long as you're talking about it as part of the series, I really don't think it's so bad.

First of all this is neither a prequel nor a sequel to the anime series Rahxephon,it's more like auto play of all the 26 episode at 10 x speed with little cut on and add.
Movies like Evangelion 1.0,Lagann-hen seem to share similar traits: they have above-average predecessor series, but they encounter the familiar pitfall of rehashing material, perhaps in an attempt to replicate the same success in a different format. The movie chooses the same path by reusing the same events as RahXephon, tightly packing them all into one movie and hence it suffer from rushed pacing and incoherent storytelling.

Plot-
Ayato Kamina and his classmate, ... Haruka "Reika Mishima", are in middle school and are a young couple, still dealing with some awkwardness. However, the sudden appearance of visitors from an alternate dimension, the "Mu", tears the two apart. All of Tokyo is enveloped in the giant hemispherical Absolute Barrier, which looks very similar to Jupiter, and they become separated into the world inside and the world outside.

Characters-Focus mainly on the main two characters in expense of others.

Animation and music-More polished animation than the actual series and nostalgic music which somewhat make it watchable.

To be honest being a fan of rahxephon i expected more from the movie but considering it was released more than an decade ago we can't complain much, anyway the ending was something which we can cheer about.

Well, like any anime series that has a rise of popularity or being noteworthy, it was getting the compilation treatment of combining all 26 episodes of the series into a 120-minute feature-length film. Now projects like this often can screw up, especially in BONES’ case, although Eureka Seven made an alternate version of the series into a movie and how bad the reception it had gotten but there is the case of the two Puella Magi Madoka Magica movies that’s been running in theaters and has gotten great reception, so I’m quite skeptical on this.

Ayato Kamina was separated from the girl he loved, Haruka Mishima, ... when an event occurred that was thought to have killed everyone outside of Tokyo. But one day three years later, invaders suddenly attacked the city. It was then that he meets an agent of TERRA, Haruka Shitow, who tells him that she will give him the truth about the world. It is the beginning of a series of strange events, which involve him activating a giant mecha, the RahXephon and finding out that many people, including his own mother, has blue blood, and that he was actually living in a self-encased dimension where time moves slower than that of the outside world.

Well, like I said, this is a remixed version of the series and nothing I can say is going to sound different from the review of the series I did but I can say that it has the whole copy-and-paste feel to it as some of us know what’s going to happen with some added things that I never did notice fully, like the relationship between Ayato and Haruka Shitow, who has got me thinking that either she might be Mishima based off some of the Intel I got from it. There is also the fact with Quon not being fully utilized into the story but only bits and parts of it and also Megumi, Asahina (well, she wasn’t pushed aside but concluded her character quicker than the show did), & the other supporting characters are mostly pushed into the sideline or some that feel like they don’t exist at all. Now, about the romance angle between Ayato and Haruka Shitow, it does have the romantic link/theory between him and Mishima, thinking that all this time that he’s chasing to find her; she’s been there the whole time but I got a feeling it’s close to being like the romance in the Eureka Seven movie, which resulted into being romantic but instead of going with the mind and sometimes a little from the heart, it went with its head far up its ass.

For the animation, once again, BONES did an amazing job handing the mecha fight scenes, the art style being muted yet craftily done, and the backgrounds are tastily done to an extent. For the music, all the background music in there is fine, just like the series minus the awesome Yoko Kanno-produced opening, and I noticed some of the tracks in the film itself and the ending theme was marginally good for what it is.

And for the ADV Films dub, like I said, everybody did fine in the dub including Chris Patton as Ayato and I can say that Monica Rial as Haruka Shitow did approve on her performance and she didn’t quite overact like she did before.

FINAL VERDICT: Well, if I had a choice to choose between the movie and the series, I couldn’t because either way, this show is still good but I’ll say if you want to watch it but in the span of 2 hours, I would check the movie out. It does copy and paste some of the episodes in there but for a shorter pace and gets to the straight and narrow. But if you’re like me and you don’t care otherwise, check all things in the RahXephon universe.