Spoilers if you did not watch the movie
Good points:
-The movie was based around the most boring parts of the novel and covered it as fast as it could. Good for the production team. Good for the audience who already read the novel since they can keep up with the fast pace since they already know. Bad for the audience who started with UBW or any of the DEEN adaptations
-The movie seems to have quite the unlimited animation budget
-The female characters are visually appealing to the audience. This is important because the fans of the spin off games of fate/stay night are primarily interested in good looking characters
-Regarding story, this is a fine watch. Alot of major plotpoints happen in this movie, and that will guide the story into movie 3, which will be my favorite part about the entire fate novel adapted into the big screen, so if you're looking forward to movie 3, this movie will satisfy you, and so will the small trailer that appeared at the end of the movie. This movie did a good job of hyping the audience into movie 3, where the major stuff happens
Bad points:
-In the novel, sakura has dreams where she is on the POV of the shadow that consumes hundreds of people every night around town. Sakura acknowledges that she knew all this time that she had been killing all those people at night as the shadow and goes along with it in her dreams, only for her to later crumble as she realized she was tricking herself into not thinking about the people she murdered and the harmful thoughts she had in her mind, that was the cause on why the shadow did some of the bad things it did, such as wishing harm on shirou. All of this showed the reading audience an interesting perspective on the sins she did and how she reacted to them, but in this adaptation, they retconned sakura into not knowing she was killing all those people at night as the shadow. They also cut the scene where gilgamesh warned sakura that she should kill herself before she becomes used to being a murderer. This sucks big time, why did the movie makers think this was a good idea or that we wouldn't notice, or why did they retcon this? I mean, there's no reason to make sakura not notice the multiple deaths in town nor the fact that she is supposed to see the shadow consume all these people... or is there? It's clear as day once you consider the only options available to explain this decision. What I am assuming here is that the intention of whoever was behind this movie was to repaint sakura as this sweet innocent girl that did nothing wrong. This is my problem. There are three audiences for Fate. The movie makers did not care to please the casual audience who wanted to watch a good story, nor did they want to please the visual novel readers who wanted an unchanging story from the novel, because there is a third audience that earns them revenue. which is the audience that likes the fate franchise for the cute girls. Having sakura be a bad person could ruin her role as another cash cow anime girl type-moon will use to generate huge revenue, because the waifu loving fans don't like characters who have imperfections, but rather have sakura be a mary sue who is just a victim of what's going on around her, rather than have her face the consequences of the actions that she brought onto herself in the original story. I have a problem with sakura getting retconned into not knowing what's going on nor later realizing that she is the shadow because now she doesn't have to do much in the story, she's just the damsel in distress that shirou needs to save in the third movie from the evil influence that's making her evil. By making her unaware of what's going on, she's locked from doing anything that could affect the story because she doesn't know what's going on. I don't really enjoy characters who previously had personalities being turned into one sided characters in adaptations like these.
-The movie is very vague for its main audience, the people who only watched ubw and fate zero.
-Not enough attention to the other girls from the previous routes, particularly Illya. Some of these characters will get their big spotlight once the last movie comes out, but they haven't got much attention in movie 1, so you could say that people who are fans of those two girls are forced to not see these characters and instead forced to see sakura be the main girl. All fate girls got alot of attention in the ubw anime, so it can be wierd seeing sakura getting most of the screentime
Too long didnt read version: Very fast paced, astounding animation, the girls are cute, the movie went along with the hf3 hype, but the movie characters, mostly sakura are one sided, the story is too vague, and the girls you are used to seeing get little screentime
