Gintama: The Final

Gintama The Final finished. Oh boy what a disappointing ending. Here are my final thoughts and review. Again it's my thoughts. I will be going over both this movie and the series. This is my first review so here we go.

Characters
It's no doubt that Gintama has one of the best cast if not the best. And with females, they put them to good use. I don't think I need to go long on this because characters are something I would say Gintama does the best with. You love them and appreciate them as you go on with your watch and in the final movie, ... they were as good as usual. Would say the cast is peak. But the final villain being trash stops it from reaching a 10.

Rating:9

Story
This is where the issues start. Think of one of those cartoon movies of a bad guy taking over the world for whatever bs reason and the main cast has to stop them. The story of this movie. As generic as it gets
Gintama's story arc overall has usually been good. Serious or none serious. SSA is the conclusion to SS which I would say is the weakest part of the series. Silver soul part 1 was just bad. It took me some time to let it sink in because of my love for Gintama but honestly, it's dead, forgettable, boring, and is a cheap adaption. 2006 Gintama ironically looks better. And for The Final honestly, the story and conclusion was mediocre. It had its comedic reference at the start which I liked. We also got that alluring scene with Katsura Gintoki and Takasugi and Shoya which was nice. But from the hype this movie got, it was such a letdown. Utsuro being the final villain is the first issue. He was an uninteresting final villain with such boring reasoning to why he is doing what he is doing with the im going to destroy the world plan. I don't mind villains with no motives or wack motives if they have other things that make them intriguing. Utsuro lacked that for me. Just felt like one of the generic villains I've seen in movies that want to destroy the world. And the plot of this movie was the students stopping him from doing that. Story-wise it was mediocre. And for a series like Gintama I would say it was not a good conclusion at all.It has no hype at all and no peaks close to Shogun Assassination and I don't think Gintoki vs utsuro is close to 305.Gintoki vs Utsuro was not a good final fight mainly because I couldn't care for Utsuro and of course, I knew how it would turn out. I would give the story for SSA story a 5. As its own thing, it was meh but as the conclusion of the Gintama franchise, it was disappointing.

Rating:3

Art and Animation
It's not a question the art style improved. But the art style was just not it. They made it more modernized, soft, and polished. I'm typically not a fan of this art style and a few examples are DXD s4 animation change and What kid naruto looks like in boruto vs og naruto. But it's something that is just personal taste. Definitely prefer the old art style. The animation was alright. Don't have much to say. Gintoki vs utsuro had a few great animated scenes. Gintama was never something to have crazy animation so it was nice to see. But for a movie, the animation as a whole was below average.

Rating:3

Sound
The sound was fine nothing much to say. I Liked a lot of the new songs. New ost was fine, but I wished we got more of the old ost. It would bring more feels into it in my opinion.

Rating:7

Few things I want to address
With the fact that I really didn't enjoy this movie much all the flaws that Gintama had made it worse.
-Starting around ss part 1 they started doing a lot of these cringe one-liners when a character appears and it just hurts as much as seeing Nagatoro saying sus.
-Another thing about Gintama is they don't really kill characters. Killing characters doesn't decide if a show is good or not but I just don't feel danger for the characters and feeling danger is what they try to do. I mean it's a battle shounen.
-They keep trying to do these scenes where they try to make you think the good guy got hurt or killed or whatever but do a quick twist and either someone comes in or it's clutched. After how many countless times it happens it's obvious its plot is convenient.
-I've seen so many fatal stabbings and it's as if in the Gintama verse you can't run out of blood. Literally. With all the stab wounds some of these characters got you would think they at least get some lifetime injury. I'm aware it does not have to be realistic but I've never seen a shounen exaggerate it as much as Gintama. It's to the point where during this movie when one of the characters gets stabbed in a fatal spot I don't worry because it's equivalent to getting a paper cut. Like if they are going to make a character seem like they have a serious wound at least follow up with it. As long as you are a good guy you are immortal in this show except for a few unlucky ones.
These are some of the flaws Gintama started having later on in the show but with the love and enjoyment I had, I didn't mind them but now that I didn't enjoy ss1 and Gintama The Final these flaws just annoyed me.

Enjoyment
Didn't really enjoy, unfortunately. No peaks or hype. Maybe if they put a crazy budget it could save it. Just maybe. This is one of the worst final battles I've seen. Having a 4/10 final villain is probably the issue.

Rating:4

Overall
As I already said, this conclusion movie was a disappointment. This review might seem like I dislike Gintama but I enjoyed the majority of the series. I was looking forward to this movie but, I just was disappointed with the outcome. Gintama went from making fun of anime tropes to becoming them ironically which brought ss as a whole down. I wouldn't mind it going that generic route if it did it well but obviously it didnt. With the way, Gintama makes you fall in love, i'm sure many will overlook the issues this movie had. As a whole, though I confidently can say I am grateful for starting this series. It was such a fun ride while it lasted but this movie doesn't feel like the same Gintama I fell in love with. I would have been better off stopping at s5 than getting a bland generic shounen movie.

Final rating:4

Overrated is the word that best describes this movie.

It feels like it was a movie made by some interns in a rush to meet a deadline.

The animation direction and execution is terrible. They put a joke animation at the beginning of a movie, but when the joke ends you will realize that the joke was here to prepare you for this horrible animation. Will you even notice that the joke ended and the actual movie started? I wasn't sure for certain for like 20 more minutes and was really hoping it's just a joke, but it was not.

The sound as for characters ... is not bad i think its the only positive thing in this whole movie to be honest, but the sound of anything else makes you wanna cry (from pain, it is so bad its actually going to hurt your ears).

If you are a die hard fan you will watch it regardless. You will regret watching it and wish it was erased from your memory. This series just didn't know when or how to quit and that is why we get this 'thing'...

Is it still funny like it used to be? No. It's just a mess, a literal mess of an ending, a movie so bad it should have never been created.

Cheers.

I wasn’t planning to watch this movie, since I only bothered with a dozen episodes, a few clips, and didn’t like any of them. But then a friend of mine who is a huge fan and has been following Gintama religiously insisted on watching it together. I was going for Fast & Furious 9, but he said ‘that is a stupid movie of a franchise that overstayed its welcome’. Unlike this smart movie which is not part of a franchise that overstayed its welcome. I mean, if it’s the second best anime of all times according to MAL (at the time of posting this) and ... the Gintama entries take up half of the top 20 in general it can only mean it’s a masterpiece according to the majority. And the majority is never wrong. So I watched the movie and I hated it and I wasn’t planning to make an overview about it, but then I found a Reddit topic where someone insisted that if Gintama isn’t in your top 10 it means you either didn’t watch it or you dropped it early on. Especially if you watched a lot of anime. It triggered me enough to write this text. Thus it’s not my fault, it’s his fault.

So the movie starts by trying to fool you into thinking it’s going to be serious, since aliens invaded earth and everyone is about to die. And then anime references appear that have nothing to do with the plot, ruin the seriousness, point out the lack of creativity Gintama has, and how it would never be popular if it wasn’t taking advantage of other popular titles. I know what you’re about to say. But Snob, Gintama was always doing that so it makes sense to keep doing that, if you don’t like it. Such a bold claim from the fans who agree that they didn’t like Gintama until they watched 150 episodes. No show that demands from you to watch 150 episodes before you start liking anime references can be considered great.

Also a movie should be good by itself, regardless of not watching everything that came before it. Well, this movie sucked ass in terms of pacing. It had a ton of flashbacks to stuff that you already know from the series, and even if you don’t know because you didn’t watch the show, the flashbacks were so many, so long, and interrupted the plot so often to the point you didn’t give a shit. My friend who is a diehard fan of Gintama, was playing a Dragonball gatcha game during the flashbacks because he got bored of them.

When the plot was not interrupted by flashbacks, there was a lot of action, which wasn’t good at all. Remember when I said I wanted to watch Fast & Furious 9 instead of this movie? Well I watched it the next day and what did you know, it was the exact same thing in terms of action. Dozens of bad guys shooting, multiple explosions and crashes and beatings, and none of the good guys ever got hurt. It was impossible to take it seriously. And I know that many of you are going to say, I didn’t watch enough episodes to get used to the action being like that. The fights were always that improbable and if you had watched 500 episodes, you would like them. No, I wouldn’t. I would hate them every single time, because they can’t be taken seriously despite the show desperately trying to come off as serious in those scenes.

There is a scene where a dog shits out old men, who turn out to be Gintoki’s legs, so the dog needs to eat them and then puke them so they can combine. This thing happened in the middle of a serious battle. My diehard Gintama friend was eyerolling. The final duel has the bad guy slashing and punching Gintoki a hundred times. He lost 10 gallons of blood and every bone in his body broke. 10 seconds later he was perfectly fine. What kind of a final battle is this? The same shit was happening all the time in Mortadello and Filemon, another movie I watched weeks ago and it was brilliant there, because it never tried to take itself seriously. There was never any tonal whiplash, since it always had the same comedic tone. Gintama is the definition of tonal whiplash and anyone who insists it’s amazing for instantly switching from tragedy to comedy is an idiot.

Then the battle ends and I have no idea what happened. Something-something mind control, something-something multiple personalities, something-something I regret being a bad guy who wanted to kill everyone so let me magically fix everything and you can all forgive me. What a load of bullshit. Gintama should have stayed as nothing more than a plotless rip off of popular shonen instead of trying to have a dramatic plot. Everyone will tell you the same, diehard fans included.

And then it gets worse. The movie goes on to show the aftermath of the story and how every character got his closure. Or better say, didn’t. Because it’s basically the same joke a dozen times. They tell you this character changed completely later on, only to be proven it was a troll and absolutely nothing changed. 500 episodes, a dozen movies and a gazzilion adventures later we got zero plot progression, zero character development and zero story closure. Everything ended exactly as it began. Where’s this amazing story all the fanboys kept talking about? ‘Gintama is not just references and toilet humor, it also has an amazing plot’. How is that possible when nothing changed in the entirety of the series?

And it doesn’t even stop there; the end credit scene shows the mangaka self inserting as a gorilla and telling the audience that he didn’t want to give closure to anyone so the fans can speculate anything they want about them. What a genius. Why bother thinking of an ending when the fans are going to make one for you? Less effort, more praise. And that was the end of Gintama. A movie I see nobody’s talking about, regarding a series that nobody cares about for a long time now.