(no subject)

[skygiants]

I don't .... think I liked it very much .......?

And the thing is there were, like, three or four perfectly reasonable ten-minute episodes of Steven Universe in there. Spinel herself would make for a great ten-minute existential horror mid-season Steven Universe episode. The idea of factory resets -- you only need one in there, really, and it's Pearl, and it's not Greg that she imprints on, but when Pearl gets an accidental factory reset and as a result Peridot or Lapis gets a Pearl for a day and we do a deep dive into messed-up class stuff in gem culture, that's also a great ten-minute episode. But because it's A Movie, we can't have the sharp focus on any of these things and instead we've got to have a lot of inflated peril glued together by nostalgic retreads of character arcs we've already seen.

And, I mean, do I always love to be reminded of Steven and Amethyst's friendship and how much Ruby and Sapphire love each other? Sure I do -- there were a lot of little moments in the movie that I liked and that made me smile, because I love the characters and it's nice to see them again; Bismuth sang! Sadie had beautiful green hair! -- but one of the things Steven Universe has always been best at is slowly and carefully progressing its character arcs, and using each returning moment to tell us something new, and this movie didn't really tell us anything new.

I can imagine a version of this movie that I like a lot, is the thing. There's a version where Steven comes home, all ready to return to the vision of an ideal life that he left before the high drama of the ending of the series, only to find that everyone else has grown in his absence and his vision of 'happily ever after' doesn't fit anymore; where the parallel with Spinel is that they're both afraid of change and afraid that they've been left behind. The movie pays lip service to the idea that continuing change is important, but all the danger is completely external to Steven and Steven himself doesn't really have to change in any way so it doesn't feel like it really commits ...

On the other hand, maybe I'm just annoyed because I optimistically wrote up a whole list of stuff I wanted to see addressed after the end of the last season and the movie isn't interested in any of it.