Spoilers start here.
The movie begins promisingly enough, a simple prologue that explains the world and its inhabitants well enough. However, after that comes a poorly shot fight scene. This fight scene is a prime example of one of the movie's greatest downsides. As pretty (and I mean pretty) the CGI is, the frantic and erratic camera following the fight make it difficult many times to even comprehend the action and the stakes involved. However glamorous or epic the scale of the action is, the erratic camera makes the action scenes far less enjoyable than it should, which is a damned shame.
As we enter the movie proper, you may notice that the lip syncing is way off. Which is curious, considering the movie was shot with the English voices first. Not that it matters much, especially considering how atrocious some of the dialogue is. None of the characters in Kingsglaive speak like normal humans. The biggest offender is Lunafreya, the main heroi- damsel in distress of the film, who seem to speak entirely in what I call "Trailer Bait", who goes on vaguely saying such gems like "I must fulfill this destiny for it is my duty to fulfill this destiny" or some "destiny"-infused nonsense. Nyx's dialogue is mostly passable, he seems the most human of them all. It is really jarring to see how disconnected and artificial the dialogue is seeing as the actual game itself (judging from recent gameplay footage), and hell, the anime, have the characters speak naturally and normally. Ardyn's dialogue I rather liked, although that could be chalked up to how much fun his VA is having with is character. His scenes are a pleasure to watch, few as they are.
The story itself is simple, but poorly told. Many characters seem to be written backwards. What I meant by this is that, instead of having a character's motivation naturally progress them into a situation, most of the characters seem to have a purpose or a scenario they are required to be in and the writing tries to force the characters into fulfilling this purpose or being present in the scenario by whatever means necessary. An example off the top of my head is Libertus' betrayal and redemption. So the big guy gets mad, betrays the glaive, and feels bad after seeing that the Resistance members are all nutcases, and then comes back to save Nyx. His arc is so poorly formulated the only reason I can think of why he's written like this is because the writers wrote the scene near the end with Nyx struggling with Glauca near the end and they needed to write someone in to save him. That and Luna needs a driver and Cor's nowhere to be found (Cor's probably in the trunk of the Regalia methinks). Ravus' arc was pretty lousy as well, so he hates Regis for not helping him despite it was the Empire's fault his country fell and now he's actively harboring a personal vendetta against Regis specifically? Uhh, you go dude. I'd hate it if he ended up as the Main Villain of FFXV, his motivations are lousy and weak.
Ultimately the story ends as an ad for FFXV. Not complaining about this in particular, since this was basically the purpose of the film, but I'm sure a lot of casual moviegoers would be left disappointed as the whole story thread isn't resolved even after the end. Instead, the whole purpose of the film is basically to act as the 2 hour opening CG cutscene to FFXV. In that retrospect I can't hate it as much, but then I remembered I spent money to watch the opening cutscene of a game that isn't out yet.
At least Advent Children had a proper story with a beginning and end and the plot is resolved. Sure it reuses the same plot threads, but at least I knew what was going on in that Bahamut fight, the same cannot be said for the Ultros fight here.
In summary, this movie is a beautiful mess.
2/10.
Also where's my boy Cor in all of this? And Etro?
