I don't want to go into any spoilers, but suffice to say, the first hour of this just feels like a massive pandering and giant piece of fan service for fans of the original show. You get to see the fight between Hamura and Mami that we never got the chance to in the original show. Familiar characters such Kyosuke and Hitomi turn up for the sake of cramming more of the original cast into the story and reminding us why we hate them so much. The only new character that's introduced is Bebe, and besides explaining a bit of the plot to one character, she has about as much relevance to the overall story to what Nami from the Rebuild films does. Both of them are equal amounts of fan service and overall uselessness. There was relatively little of interest for me going on during this time and I found the only thing engaging me was the unbelievable production value of the show. After the first hour of the movie finished, I felt like this would've been better off as 30 minute OVA dedicated as a side story to Homura's character rather than a movie.
And then the final act happened. From here on the review will be straying into spoiler territory, so if you haven't watched the movie before doing so, I highly advise that you do before reading on. To say that Homura's 180 degree turn as a character was a massive ass pull would be an understatement. One of the film's most glaring problems is that it breaks the most cardinal rule of visual story telling mediums-show, don't tell. When it occasionally decides to visually stop jerking off in front of my face for about five minutes and remembers that it has a story and characters, the characters basically announce how they feel and describe why they're doing what they're doing. This is especially egregious during the conversation between Homura and Madoka when they're on the flower field. Homura breaks down in front of Madoka and blurts out her feelings to her as if she was reading her own character page from a wiki. This moment had little to no build up or foreshadowing to really have an effect for me emotionally, mostly because Madoka has been pretty much a non character within the story at that point, and the plot had been focusing more on Homura's confrontations with the other characters.
And it's because Madoka and Homura's relationship felt so ineffective to me was the reason why I had nothing but indifference to convey to Homura suddenly turning into magical satan because she was completely overcome with her lesbo juices when Godoka showed up. If her motivations had alway been selfish and she yearned to be with Madoka regardless of the consequences, then why didn't she just stay in the labyrinth once she found out that the Madoka with her at the time wasn't an illusion but the real deal once Kyubey told her? Her sudden plunge into the dark side felt extremely half-assed and forced, and felt like it was there to introduce a superficial shock factor that was needed to justify for what up to that point was an extremely point-less movie.
Many have said that you need to watch this film multiple times to grasp the "deep" themes and meaning of the film to truly appreciate it, but I can confidently say that you'll pretty much get the entire gist of the thing on your first viewing, since 75% of it is a superficial, two-dimensional barrage of fan service and Shaft reminding us how loaded they are, and the final 25% of it is just the writers undoing the ending of the original show so that the film can appear "edgy" and "controversial", with Biblical allusions to Madoka as God and Homura as Satan, but it's really all a pretentious disguise and mechanisation for them to dish out more sequels and milk this dead cow of a franchise even further, because no way was the ending I just watched a satisfying conclusion that ties any untied threads the movie had introduced to the universe at this point. While I do recommend watching the movie just to see how it completely falls the fuck apart towards the end, the only reason I can see myself coming back to this is for the stunning animation, and even that struggled to keep me engaged during my first viewing of the film, considering how bloated and dragged out a lot of the sequences in the beginning were.
