Kaiju No. 8: Mission Recon Movie Would Be A Fun Two Episodes
Sony and its unit Crunchyroll will be releasing the movie Kaiju No. 8: Mission Recon in theaters in the U.S. and Canada on April 13, 14 and 15. Should you go see it? If you want most of the first season of the anime condensed into 96 minutes, with a tagged on filler episode called “Hoshina’s Day Off,” then sure, enjoy.
Is it worth the price of a movie ticket? I don’t see how it could be, even for Kaiju No. 8 superfans. That said, I’ll try to review it, without spoiling anything for those people who haven’t seen the anime or read the manga.
The movie spends it’s first three-quarters of runtime recapping the anime up to the end of Episode 10. So it takes about 230 minutes of show and squeezes into 96 minutes. It does that by mostly concentrating on just the story of main character Hibino Kafka, all but eliminating any character development for anyone else in the Kaiju Defense Force’s Third Division. It does this pretty seamlessly, however, with only one glaring reference to something very important left in. But, if you haven’t watched the anime, you probably wouldn’t even notice it was something important, and it gets left out because the last two episodes of the anime are completely left out of the movie’s recap section.
By eliminating the character development of anyone aside from Kafka, the original episode that follows Vice-Captain Hoshina and a handful of team members of the Third Division would likely be much less interesting to someone that never watched the anime, since that episode is almost exclusively about those team members you barely get to see in the previous 96 minutes. If you are familiar with Minase and Igarashi and Iharu and the like, you’ll enjoy this fun, filler-style episode, but if not, it’s a lot of time with characters you probably haven’t developed any attachment to. Kafka, the main character, is only in the original episode for a bit more than one minute.
Bluntly put, this is a pretty crass money-grubbing way to release a new original episode — tack it onto a 96-minute anime recap so you can release it as a two-hour movie. Wait until it lands on Crunchyroll as a standalone episode, or sail those buccaneer seas if that’s how you get your anime.
I don’t think I can give Kaiju No. 8: Mission Recon a numerical rating out of five stars, since it isn’t really a movie.
