Story:
Kyon, our main protagonist lives in a world where aliens, time travelers, and espers exist do in large part to his classmate Haruhi who is basically god but has no idea on the matter, so Kyon's world is a little weird until one day he wakes up and finds that the world has completely changed into regular normal world where nothing weird happens and Haruhi is no where to be found and no one has any memory of her even existing.
Impression:
To get this off my chest this is one of my favorite movies in general, but if you haven't seen the series first you might feel a little left out of things because of the whole attachment to the characters the series establishes but I have heard of people that enjoyed it without seeing the series but most people will tell you to watch the series first which is a con because it makes going and watching this all the more complicated so all I'm going to say for that is the movie has more of a full effect when you watch the series first, the choice on how you want to watch it is totally up to you.
As for the movie it's self, well when you get to the end you feel like you have been taken for a ride, maybe not a hugely adrenaline filled action ride but a ride, though the movie is nearly 3 hours long and they really pack some detail into this movie, the actual story doesn't start until about 15 minutes in, and through out the movie a lot happens, it's probably an hour before the story picks up.
Now the good side of this is that the movie really establishes what is going on and not a single moment is really wasted however some people may get a little bored with it, I'm not sure who but I'm just putting that out there.
As far as writing goes this movie does not disappoint and does not leave any plot holes even when some of the plot involves time travel which is hard to write about. Another thing that this movie does well over the series is character development, a lot of the characters go through some serious development which isn't seen much in the series.
As far as the Art and animation is concerned, Kyoto animation goes a few steps further to make everything have that cinematic feel which is to be expected from a film.
The only bad thing about this film which could be counted as a good thing is the fact that it makes you want to see more, even though it could count as a good conclusion to the series I still know there is more that happens after wards but none of that really effects the film it's self.
Sound:
MHS has alway's had a good soundtrack though I never really liked the first opening for the series which is what they used at the beginning of the movie but that aside the sound track kind of reminded me of the soundtrack from "Forest Gump" which isn't even an anime but it had the same feeling, but the soundtrack does it's job at telling you that this is a good movie.
Characters:
Like I said before there is a lot of character development in this movie and if it's not character development it's at least explores more into the characters.
Kyon of course develops through the story which I won't spoil, however there is also Nagato who is usually seen to be the emotionless machine like character but in this movie you get to see an alternate version who is more or less shy and timid book worm but it was kind of fun to see her like that as almost a new character.
There is one character that I defiantly liked the return of and that was Asakura, MHS's only real antagonist, I won't go into what all she does but you do get to see her as a normal person but eventually she becomes the main element of what is one of my favorite scenes in film history.
Other than that you get to see a lot of the characters through a different filter though some do remain the same like Kozomi who sits in the background smiling about how much he doesn't give a shit, but I kind of would have liked to have seen more of him develop but I digress.
As far as characters go in this movie, there weren't many weak points.
Sub vs. Dub
I tend to lead more towards the dub on this one mostly out of necessity but also MHS's dub is considered to be one of the greatest dubs of all time, that doesn't necessarily mean that the sub is bad the Japanese does hold up pretty well though now that I watch it, the japanese just feels out of place to me, but if I were to say one thing I liked out of the sub was kozomi's voice, I kinda like both to be honest with this character because they are both so different, I english he has a light voice and he speaks in a sophisticated manor while in Japanese he had a deeper voice that made every thing he said sound important which in the series it was but thats just me.
Now I can't really tell you which version to but I can tell what quality they are, many people would recommend watching in english (including me) but It's hard to really stack up how good the sub is, because for the most part it sounds like the emotion in the sub is placed in the same way the english is which feels kinda weird.
Final Verdict:
I will give this a 9 out of 10
this was a great movie and I would definitely recommend it.
