No intros no nothing let's cut the shit at once: I don't like this movie, and any reason I've been given to like it boils down to the exact reasons I dislike it. If you liked it then good, you probably don't overthink stuff and/or are happy just having cool action and a bit of fanservice, but as someone who was a big fan of Gridman and Dynazenon for all the things they tried to say and the universe they built this movie at best just kind of incompetent or at worst self-absorbed to no end, one of the greatest cases of "it insists upon itself" I have ever seen

Gridman and Dynazenon were pretty sweet but they had obvious flaws, be it Gridman's main cast being pretty uninteresting besides Akane and Dynazenon feeling kinda rushed and like it forgot what it was going for near the end. Trigger and rushing things is nothing new, they've been doing this for years, but you'd think that with a movie that they were in no rush to make and would serve as an epilogue to their miracle child of a series they'd learn from their mistakes, tie up any loose ends and then everyone would be happy, a job so easy any half-competent AO3 writer could make work. Sadly, Universe is too busy sucking itself off while apologizing for its own existence to do this

Mecha and metafiction have been going hand in hand for a long while now, and every time it's either some life changing franchise-defining work of art or a half-assed insult to the rest of the series. Universe is closer to the latter than the former, seeing as the first half of the movie is every character going "Wow guys isn't Gridman WEIRD?! he's kinda cool tho i think" in the bluntest and least interesting way possible, a metafiction is supposed to make you question the very building blocks of the work not just point at them and go "damn that's crazy", which Universe is adept at doing

The second half of the film tries to bait powerscalers into adding Gridman into their pantheon of misunderstood overpowered mechs like Mazinger ZERO or Demonbane or Aquarion Logos Genesis (go watch Aquarion Logos btw that anime is the realest shit ever) etc etc. It tries to pull off some Mazinger ZERO thing where every Gridman is a creation of Gridman and the amount of spin offs is breaking the balance or who gives a shit. It's well executed for about 3 minutes before they remember the movie is ending in 20 minutes and have to shove in one last high-budget key jingl- i mean one last final fight with all the new toys before the movie ends. That's right baby they made the same mistake as Dynazenon AGAIN

Speaking of Dynazenon I hope you weren't expecting an actual crossover or anything like that, this isn't Gridman x Dynazenon this is Gridman ft.Dynazenon. I almost closed the movie when the Dynazenon cast !literally got fucking erased for like 30 minutes, as someone who likes the Dynazenon cast WAY more than Gridman's that shit felt like a slap to the face, it was insulting. Oh and forget about any mention of any spin off or even Hyper Agent, all the manga spin offs appear for like 5 seconds as loose panels probably just so no one complains that the movie about Gridman's Universe forgets about most of the universe, but I'll complain anyways because Dogma is one of my favorite mangas of all time and it deserves way more respect that like 4 panels put straight from the manga into a throwaway scene

Akane is there too, the Kaiju kids get mentioned, Anosyllus gets a mech form which I thought was fucking awesome until I realized she doesn't even get used. Then the movie ends

But here's the thing, and this is what really makes my opinion on Universe go from "it's incompetent" to "go fuck yourself": What if it's all intentional!
What if the movie is supposed to suck, what if it's repeating mistakes because hey Gridman had those mistakes, what if it's rethreading every step and every slip of the SSSS series as one huge looks-into-the-camera-and-says "wow guys, get a load of this anime" moments. Maybe it's just the creators talking to themselves and addressing all the criticisms of their animes themselves, maybe every word spoken by the characters is just an echo of the shit that goes down at Trigger HQ, maybe the movie is extremely smart but just not in a way that the audience wanted or expected. Maybe, Gridman Universe is a movie made for the Gridman team first, and the audience second

Well, good for them, but if something is supposed to suck intentionally then it still sucks. I'm the audience, I didn't do shit for Trigger and I'm pretty sure anyone reading this also didn't, I don't want to hear what the crew of this movie thinks of their franchise for two hours I want an epilogue to the franchise I've been loving these last few years. They had every chance to fix every problem with the franchise but instead we got two hours of the team ranting on about how weird Gridman with a focus on the two least interesting characters in the franchise, while anyone actually likeable never gets the spotlight or is, well, forgotten half way through the movie

So in conclusion, if you just want to see the SSSS cast one last fight and check out a cool kaiju fight, go watch this. But if you're expecting any sort of gratifying conclusion to Trigger's only work that doesn't give me a headache you're shit out of luck. There are many better meta-mecha works out there and most of them don't feel ashamed of their own franchise

I ain't proofreading this