It should also be noted that this review is for just the first movie. Being merely the first part of an overall trilogy, I can see why separating it would seem weird. But having written three separate reviews, I think gauging the interest level across 6 hours ended up being worthwhile.
If you want my thoughts on the trilogy as a whole, I came to the conclusion that I would skip it. The caveat is that I imagine people who have already gone through Heaven’s Feel in the visual novel will get a kick out of it being in movie form. I wouldn’t be surprised if my lack of enjoyment here merely came from details being cut to fit the movie format.
But as it stands, I’m keeping my initial thoughts and ratings for each individual part intact. With that said, here’s my review of Heaven’s Feel I:
There are three important things to know about Heaven’s Feel before going into it:
The problem with Heaven’s Feel I is that it accelerates and decelerates very quickly very often. For example, it starts by carefully showing you Shirou’s life and goings on, then shows scenes from Fate stay/night to skim past him meeting Saber since that’s all the same, then goes back to slowing down to show things that differ this go around, then speeds through a fight. My recommendation is to watch this ASAP after watching Fate stay/night so you retain as much of the skipped scenes as possible. I waited quite a while and, while I still generally remember what happened, not remembering everything made Shirou’s relationships with Saber and Rin feel shallow here.
Speaking of relationships, several chunks of the movie focus on Shirou’s new, deeper relationship with Sakura. Rin isn’t nearly as much of a deal this time. The problem is that Unlimited Blade Works showed A LOT more of Shirou and Rin’s relationship developing into something that seemed real. Shirou obviously has less time with Sakura thanks to the movie format. Yet at the same time, scenes with Sakura felt sluggish. I think the big issue is that most of the scenes devoted to her and Shirou didn’t spend their time effectively. Perhaps it’s explored to a much greater extent in the second and third movies, but for the first third I simply can’t help but think of Sakura as a worse alternative to Rin.
As for the fights, all of them were very curt. It felt as if they had to make space for the story sections, so speeding to the results of the fights was prioritized over making them interesting. While the story sections aren’t bad, I do miss the much more grandiose Servant-on-Servant fights from the episodic anime.
I want to say that Heaven’s Feel I felt like a movie to setup the other two and not much more, but I can’t entirely. Without spoiling anything, a lot of things do still happen. The Holy Grail War does make some serious progress within the first movie. But some of that progress is too fast — so fast that I was believing each movie was going to be its own separate route until the end!
I think Heaven’s Feel I is still a competent start to a movie trilogy, but it’s rough. I would temper your expectations for these starting two hours.
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