Love Live! The School Idol Movie
Incoherent. Lifeless.
Season two of Love Live dwelt painfully long on reaching an end point for the characters who were set to graduate...but here we are again. The next event for the Love Live competition is scheduled to take place in a giant dome. Interested in securing the future of school idols everywhere Muse takes off to a foreign country, where a foreign television station is interested in covering the Japanese oddity. At no later point is the television station really shown, referenced, or talked to. There are no interviews. There is no real coverage other than when an intense burst of computer generated graphics transport the viewer to an empty Times Square where Muse puts on an elaborate show that they showed no preparation for. Part of me still questions where this scene even happened. The early New York City "antics" are set up as location scouting for a place that really fits Muse, but this almost imaginary concert repeatedly flashes back and forth between Times Square and Central Park as backdrops, at completely different times of day.
Almost none of the ideas the Love Live movie presents feel fully formed. The exploration of New York never amounts to anything more than pasting the characters over basic landmarks like stickers. Going to the Statue of Liberty, for example, doesn't develop into a scene beyond the characters standing in front of it to take pictures. A few basic interactions with Americans are set up that primarily revolve around a basic communication barrier as people greet them. In maybe one of the most amusing moments of the movie a black woman jogs up beside the cast, and without any context or prompting, offers a "konichiwa".
Even the most basic building blocks are just completely underdeveloped. A scene flashes to two characters looking at shoes tied together and thrown up on phone lines. One of my favorite American pastimes. One character somehow magically takes off the shoes of the other offscreen and we see them tossed up on to a nearby lamppost. This is the entirety of the scene. If something amusing could be gained from the removal of the shoes, or the journey back home, it's left out. Instead we just get this few second take of what amounts to a meaningless reference.
Love Live's music kind of follows along in this vein. Outside of the few major performances in the show there are splinter groups of three girls that each break into a short over the top musical number at various points of the show. These feel especially unremarkable with run times clocking in around a minute and a half, as odd inserts that don't really help express how the characters feel or add much to the movie outside of offering a short break from the tedium of the movie's flat-lining "antics".
For as incoherent, messy, and astoundingly illogical as this movie is it never really leverages this wiggle room into something that it can have fun with. There aren't really wild scenes. Even the aformentioned musical numbers, which can delve into being fairly abstract, can amount to little more than the characters running around empty hallways, sitting in an elevator, and pressing buttons while wearing sunglasses. This musical number about dealing with the overwhelming popularity they've accumulated after returning to Japan features nobody outside of the group somehow. There isn't silly imagery about the characters avoiding publicity...the idea is just presented and dropped even in the brief moment it's being turned over before it slips away.
The second act of the movie somehow ups just how senseless and directionless the plot is. Somehow merchandise and marketing materials for this school based idol group litter Japan on their return. At this point we enter a long process of the characters mulling over the same problems they had last season. They promised to break up the group when the third years graduate, but this increased popularity is giving them second thoughts (but not really) about breaking up the group. It's all painfully slow and pointless internal drama that silently comes to a conclusion, as the girls seem to understand one another and their feelings without saying much of a word to each other. The approach is is so dull, and much of the conflict that exists is simply girls staring off into the distance, with their head tilted to maybe look at where the floor meets the wall. Because I guess that's pretty sad.
The third act just doesn't make any sense. There's like...some last concert for Muse but they team up with a rival school idol group. The clock is ticking, or something, so they magically put together a big concert in an open square with hundreds of other school idols that seems like it's mostly for the other school idols. How this really relates to tempering their popularity across Japan or saying goodbye to their fans is a mystery, and the song sequence here puts the rival group A-Rise so far in the backseat that they don't even really bother to put them in the dancing sequences mixed with Muse.
There's a brief interlude that shows things progressing to next year, and then somehow the movie ends with Muse putting on another concert inside this dome. While the size of the dome and the massive audience was played up as the entire selling point of using this as a performance arena, this last musical outro is abstracted as the group singing and dancing on a flower surrounded by stars and the open air.
The movie is just painfully slow, without much to show for its musical side. Season one sort of seemed like a lark, where the characters could sort of enjoy the absurdity of the situation, but nothing about it is really presented as absurd, strange, or fun at this point. Love Live has increasingly borrowed the sometimes somber tone you get from im@s, but without ever providing dramatic situations or really creating substance to its cast. A moment where Maki could potentially bond with a rival idol from A-Rise as they craft a new song cuts away to turn into a joke that plays up the girl on girl shipping. The creators don't really care about these characters but they dwell on their emotions for obscene stretches of time while nothing ever really moves forward. The creative hand of an older male manipulating these characters hangs over the series. There's this protective bubble around the cast that pushes out even a hint of male side characters that has just become noticeably eerie.
This movie is bizarre. A rambling emotionless mess of nothing that drags on the viewer and fails to do anything remotely fun or interesting with its characters. Both the creators and fans alike should be ashamed for indulging this rotten garbage. It's so poorly pieced together that a legitimate argument could be made that nothing in this movie actually happened, and that it all took place inside a character's dream.
