Munto The Movie Review – 30/100

Sora wo Miageru Shoujo no Hitomi ni Utsuru Sekai, or Munto TV, was the biggest disappointment of the past Winter Season. Here the creators had a great chance to take a flawed OVA, and spread it across the airtime of a TV-series so that the setting and the characters could finally get the chance to be developed properly. So, what do they do? A bloody recap. Only the final three and a half episodes featured new material, which was way too little for a story of this caliber. Still, with a movie scheduled, it still could redeem itself. But yeah, I guess that you can all see by the rating for this review that it obviously didn’t.

Oh, the announcement for the movie sounded so promising. Even though it would also recap the new footage for the TV-series, it did promise that it was going to be just a “director’s cut of various climactic scenes”, with “new footage” and it “ends with a finale”. Looking back, that was the biggest piece of crap that the creators could ever have come up with to promote this movie.

Let’s start with the “new footage”. Let me tell you exactly how much new footage there was in this movie: three minutes. No, seriously, it has some three minutes of strange back-story slapped on the beginning. Apart from that, everything else simply recaps the TV-series.

So, how about the “director’s cut of various climactic scenes”? Well, apparently the creators found every single scene a climactic one, because the rest of the movie is literally every single scene of the new footage of the TV-series. Even the useless comic relief ones. The only part that is missing is the final part of the last episode. You know, the scene that PROMISED THAT THE STORY WASN’T OVER YET.

And how about “ends with a finale”? Well, this movie sure as heck ends with a finale. The same that the TV-series ended with. Yeah, the same finale with its Deus ex Machina climax, the same finale in which the characters started to act completely out of character, and the same finale in which Munto dressed up the three teenaged leads into sailor uniforms with extremely short skirts. What the heck was the point in advertising that!?

It’s a shame. This series really had potential; if only the creators actually made a remake of this series, panned over 26 episodes or something similar, it would have been really good. This, however, is just crap. Even for a recap-movie, it’s incredibly cheap, the way it was advertised, the way it promised so many things, and instead just chose the laziest way out and even failed in terms of storytelling with that ending. If you want to see what Munto is about, check out the TV-series, skip the rest.