As the part two of two full-length movies serving as the ultimate Lyrical Nanoha experience, Detonation had particularly big shoes to fill. Not only because of the setup the first movie gave it, so that it could stand on its own feet, although this was very much part of it. The other aspect is that the first movie, in my personal experience, did not smooth over so well, and we were left with a number of ambiguous elements, which could obviously greatly hinder the message the series is trying to tell. So, did this happen here? Well...the answer is half yes. Without giving away too much, the first movie initially set up Kyrie in an odd role plot-wise, where she somewhat floated aimlessly in the cast, neither defined as antagonist or protagonist, yet too big to fill the role of a secondary character. Iris had similar issues, as she hung in the background to be a major threat, yet she didn't really have that big a role in itself in the first movie. So, Iris lent herself to being more of a side character.
Here, however, the script is flipped: Iris comes into her own as an antagonist of sorts, and succeeds Kyrie as the secondary antagonist for the film. However, she's in an awkward position of being under the shadow of Phill, aka "The Director". He either didn't appear in the first movie or had a miniscule appearance, so it comes off as a bit of a surprise that he was never mentioned before, nor was any of this foreshadowed. The same can be said of Iris' backstory: as much sense as it makes on paper, it simply doesn't translate well when it wasn't foreshadowed even in the slightest before. This all comes crashing down as it conflicts with Amitie, who becomes a third wheel in storytelling, as well as Granz, who is important for all of two scenes.
The reason this is such a big deal is because Granz, the Florians' father, was Kyrie's entire motivation to save their world. Other than that, Yuri also works well. For a change, her character development was set up quite nicely and her backstory checks out with her history with Iris, another aspect of the movie that came out nice. Her relationship with the king and his (her..?) servants was a little less obvious, but it made sense once it was established. Despite his flaws, Phill works well as an antagonist: cold, cunning, manipulative to all the other seemingly-antagonists, and ruthless. He even has a hilarious death.
Unfortunately, a few great characters aren't enough to save the movie: Yuri and Iris' scenes are a great start and Phill is genuinely creepy, as are the Iris clones. However, in my opinion, it just feels like the movie is too disorganized to create a real impact. It feels like the first half wasn't set up nearly well enough, and the second suffered for it. It's a real shame: I was really looking forward to these. 4/10.
