Forum - View topicREVIEW: Puella Magi Madoka Magica the Movie Part 3: Rebellion
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Markus Ramikin
 Posts: 6 |
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I'm sorry about dropping out of this discussion, but it became more involved than I had time for.
So let this be my final response to anyone who found my thoughts so far worth reading but didn't agree: http://www.reddit.com/r/TrueAnime/comments/1wrc4k/rebel_with_a_misguided_cause_how_madoka_magica/ I am genuinely amazed at this. To be clear: I'm not the author, but almost every single point of this critique is something I would say if I were a better story-critic. I've only had this experience once before in my life, where someone on the Internet posted extensive thoughts on a story, which were basically "me, but better written". So basically I'm done arguing Rebellion - now that that review exists, pretty much anything I might still say is superfluous. I particularly liked the reference to RLM's review of the Phantom Menace and the significance of lightsaber duels (and fights in general). I love that example myself, it hits the mark so well. |
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FierceAlchemist
 Posts: 75 |
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I've read this before. The author puts a lot of thought into this article and brings up some good points. However, I feel like he ignores some of the important answers and hints the movie gives that makes the whole situation surrounding "Is Homura evil?" a lot more complicated than it first appears. In the flower scene, you have Madoka telling Homura that being apart from Homura and her friends would be unbearable to her. It's a Madoka without all her memories, but still the true Madoka. This was even heavily hinted at in the TV show with the lyrics of the first ED which is Madoka's character song sung by Madoka's voice actress. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__q9fsZa5vk So not only is there some doubt cast on whether Madoka is being the Law of Cycles out of duty rather than happiness, Homura has another justification for becoming Homucifer: stopping the Incubators. If she went up to heaven with Madoka, who'd stop the Incubators from doing another experiment or continuing to devise ways to trap Madokami? Something decisive needed to be done and Homura now seems to have the Incubators squarely under her thumb. Plus she gives everyone happy lives in the new world and keeps the Law of Cycles intact, saving magical girls from despair. Then there's tons of suicide and guilt imagery associated with Homulilly and Homucifer, from her familiars committing suicide in the river to them throwing tomatoes at her to the post credits scene where Homura sits on the hill that's now split in half just like the moon. I highly recommend looking at all the official information that's been released about Homulilly, it's really depressing: http://wiki.puella-magi.net/Homulilly There are also all the themes, new and old, raised in Rebellion. If Madoka was Faust, Rebellion is Paradise Lost. It raises questions about the nature of love, free will, and happiness. It takes "You've gotta focus on the one thing that means the most to you and protect it to the end" to its extreme. Shaft subverted our expectations again, almost like a mockery of fix-fics. The movie begins in this world that's too perfect to be true and ends in a world that's also close to perfect. They just got us there in a way no one expected or was prepared for. Just as in the TV show, there's always a repercussion to any wish. Lastly there's Junko's advice from episode 6, that sometimes to help a friend who thinks they're doing the right thing but is only hurting themselves, you have to do something wrong. In this case, Madoka is doing the right thing by being the Law of Cycles but is having to sacrifice any chance of her having human happiness to do so. To Homura, this is unforgivable. So she does something wrong (defying God, becoming a devil) to help her friend. Personally, I think whether people like Rebellion or hate it, they should commend it for creating and maintaining such interesting discussion so many months after the film's release. That alone is a sign of a film that had a lot of thought put into it. |
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Markus Ramikin
Posts: 6 |
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You know, that's like saying we should praise the Star Wars prequels for being the cause of so much commentary, including the brilliant and entertaining RedLetterMedia reviews. As far as the people like me go, who think poorly of Rebellion, the credit for our part in the discussion goes to the original Madoka Magica. It's our love for the original show that fuels our criticisms of Rebellion, just like the love for the original SW trilogy is why anyone even cared that Phantom Menace was awful. Because we wish the story we loved had a worthy continuation. |
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FierceAlchemist
Posts: 75 |
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Well I'm actually a huge fan Star Wars and I love the whole saga. But that's beside the point. The thing I really admire about Rebellion is how much they packed into one film. I've read articles comparing Rebellion to Buddhism, Christianity, Paradise Lost, Faust, tarot cards, fanfiction, philosophy, and Nietzsche. Because they don't spell everything out and leave a lot of details for fans to notice on rewatch, it's created such debate within the community. Urobuchi said the film would be divisive, the creators knew what they were doing. The whole point was to let you draw your own conclusions from it. Then it comes down to which type of ending you prefer, ones where everything it neatly tied up or ones where somethings are left unexplained and up to interpretation. |
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Tachikoma1701
 Posts: 16 |
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Sorry, but themes themselves are not mark of quality. Themes are not synonyms with quality storytelling. In order to make great story, your need good storytelling; consistency, foreshadowing, character integrity, logical progression of plot and characters, you need to respect rules you set up... you need write a story that actually make sense. And the matter of fact is that "Rebelion" didn't make a lick of sense, just like your beloved SW prequels made no sense.  Sorry, you can't tell me that ending of "Rebelion" was anything but gigantic asspull - that's a bad writing, and no amount of themes will change that...
{Edit: Please don't over-quote. Thanks. ~ Psycho 101} |
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Polycell
 Posts: 4623 |
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Arise chicken.... arise...
Jokes aside, the ending does make sense, but you have to remember that, when spoiler[Madoka spoke about how she could never leave everyone] before spoiler[Homura figured out she was a witch, she said exactly what Homura wanted to hear]. So while there at the end might not quite make sense at first, after some thought it seems to me that spoiler[Homura's more or less deliberately ignoring Madoka's character development and using her earlier comment as a justification for her actions, when it's really just her selfish desire to keep Madoka human]. It probably would've been better to have a more straight-forward ending like Urobuchi originally intended, but the sequel(c'mon already!) should definitely help tighten that narrative up. |
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Tachikoma1701
Posts: 16 |
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No, it dosen't make sense, because I'm not only talking about Homura's motivation here - that's at least debatable. I'm talking about everything else. How is this possible that Madokami who had precognition, didn't know what was going to happen? In the moment when isolation filed was down, Madokami should know what Homura was going to do, so she should avoide encounter with Akemi. How is this possible that Homura can steal Madokami powers, and how Homura knows that she can do this, and who give her knowledge how to steal those powers and how to use them? And no, saying LOVE did it! is not an answer - it's just an asspull. How is this possible than love can affect sould gems, when it was impossible before; look how Kyoko was traying to bring back Sayaka with "power of love"... How is this possible that Homura can do things that Madokami was unable to do; bring Sayaka back to life, amongst other things? How is this making any sense, that Kyubey would hold Akemi hostage, experiment on her and want to undo Madoka's wish when he NEVER did something like this before? You think that if he is not concerned about free will of those girls, that he wouldn't be bother with contracts in the first place, that if he want to undo Madoka's wish he wouldn't grant it in the first place, that if he could just imprison Akemi he would do that in TV series when Homura was killing him over and over again, preventing him from "seducing" Madoka... And so forth and so on... And no, I'm not interested in fan's speculations and rationalisations, made on line. What's important, is the movie itself and the fact remains, that movie on it's own, don't make a lick of sense. |
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Polycell
Posts: 4623 |
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1) Madoka started freaking out about Homura tearing her apart almost immediately 2) Homura had seemingly sealed off Madoka from her powers for most of the movie
As for Madoka's wish, it's made quite clear that he didn't have any choice in granting it. |
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FierceAlchemist
Posts: 75 |
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I don't think Hope is giving enough credit to the voice acting. The movie falls apart if Homura's characterization isn't spot on and thankfully Cristina Vee stepped up to the task and gave an amazing performance. The flower scene in particular was heart-rending to listen to.
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JacobC
ANN Contributor
 Posts: 3728 Location: SoCal |
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I thought about highlighting individual performances, but honestly found I didn't have anything to say about them, because the whole package is basically uniform in high quality and everybody did a really great job, all in not particularly unusual or standout ways, just resuming their characters as well or better than they performed them before. So that's kinda what I said! |
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FierceAlchemist
Posts: 75 |
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That's fair. I do think all of them have improved over time. I got to go to Christina Vee's panel at Katsucon a few months ago and she mentioned that she's glad she got to play Homura in Rebellion at this point in her life because of some of the things she's gone through since recording the TV show. |
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jr240483
 Posts: 4446 Location: New York City,New York,USA |
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unfortunately its what also have some people disliking the whole movies in the first place cause they just maked a likable character into a more hated character than kyubey.
its like making fate give up her own humanity and become an even bigger bitch than her mother. not to mention that this ending makes the whole TV series ending pointless. Kinda makes even the ending for the end of evangelion look tame which is saying a lot. while its definitely a top notch movie, definitely not one i would be seeing again let alone recommend.especially if their fans of the TV series. |
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kotomikun
Posts: 1205 |
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I guess, at this point, I both like and hate this movie. The movie itself is interesting and complex and different enough from the series to not feel like a waste of time (to me). But I hate what it's done to the fanbase and, to some extent, the things it's indirectly shown me about human nature.
I've tried, many times, to argue that despite its appearance, Rebellion has many similarities to the original story. That the ending demonstrates how a different presentation can make something formerly good and perfect seem horrible and evil. And, of course, there's a heck of a lot more to the movie than just that; if it was just dumb and frivolous and contrived, we wouldn't still be dissecting it to death. But, at the same time, I feel like arguing about it is pointless. It doesn't change anyone's minds. People who hate the movie usually seem angry at me just for suggesting that it might not suck, to say nothing of when I try to explain why I feel that way. If emotional perception of something as good or bad comes first, and thought and reason only acts to defend it, why do we even have these discussions? What do we learn from them? If we can't even see eye-to-eye about a movie, it's no wonder people will argue about political ideology until the end of time... Among other things, Rebellion seems like a metaphor for its own unpleasable fanbase. The original ending was perfect. (And I agree with that, but there's more than one kind of perfect.) But if you leave well enough alone, people would get bored of the franchise. But if you make a sequel to something perfect, people will hate it if it doesn't change anything because that's pointless, and will also hate it if it changes things because it was perfect and now it's different so it must be imperfect, i.e. terrible. So, they decided to go all out, "blow up the ice scuplture" as the review put it, but also make the ending a different kind of perfect. spoiler[Nobody's dead! Everyone's happy! Well, Homura isn't, and Madoka's a normal person again, but there's always a price. If there was no price, people would have doubled up on the "but they didn't earn it!" complaints. As it is, they combined those with complaints that it's out of character for Homura, and stuff about it being "fake happiness." (I've tried to show that it's no less genuine than what Madoka created, but that's one of those things that makes people yell at me.)] What could they have done? People would have disliked it no matter what they did. At least all the literal insanity of what they came up with makes for more interesting fanworks, and that's what really sustains this series, anyway. The comparison made above to the Star Wars prequels is interesting, because they faced a similar series of catch-22s. Everyone already adored the originals, but they had to at least make prequels, after having labeled the originals 4-6. Thanks to them being prequels, the ending was already known in great detail, so there wasn't much wiggle room (when your fans will fuss about plot holes as tiny as R2-D2's rocket thrusters, creativity is a bit stifled). Yet somehow they had to create a trilogy that lived up to the quality of the original, plus the considerable nostalgia factor, while also making it accessible and modern. There was no way they could have avoided a trainwreck. I think they did a decent job, given the circumstances. If nothing else, the fact that Madoka found itself in this situation in the space of less than 3 years is pretty impressive. The modern world moves quickly, but nostalgia and emotional attachment has accelerated to keep pace. The anime fandom as a whole is no stranger to this--how often do you see arguments about whether anime ain't what it used to be? From people in their 30s and 20s, and even teenagers? But the world isn't going to slow down. I think the most important lesson here is that we've all got to get used to dramatic change, to exploding ice sculptures. It's not all bad. Blowing up ice doesn't destroy the water. And even someone as cynical as Homura still wishes for a world where people can be happy. |
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Hameyadea
 Posts: 3679 |
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Haa, the 3th movie. It was a nice piece of content on its own, but I found it to be a bit confusing when taken as part of the larger Madoka-verse.
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TarsTarkas
 Posts: 5922 Location: Virginia, United States |
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For me it is just crappy writing. The TV series gave them the lead in for a sequel at the very end of the show. But for some reason they decided to ignore the buddha like wraiths/demons for a 'lets turn the good character evil' plot line.
To do that, they had to crack Homura's character. So the decided to brute force it using the Kyubeys to imprison Homura. But somewhere their writing logic failed and they cast Homura as someone who would suffer an eternity of torment and complete isolation to protect Madoka. And then when Homura was set to receive her richly deserved heavenly reward, the writers threw Homura under the bus, and then dragged her corpse through the gravel for good measure. I would have grudgingly accepted an insanely evil Homura, who was made that way by the tortures of the Kyubeys, but the writers failed that by making her heroically good in the final battle with the Kyubeys. So we get devil Homura, who comes out of nowhere, who throws away her heavenly rewards for the ultimate betrayal. Who power strips her friends, who memory wipes her friends, who implants false memories in her friends and for the cherry on top, who ultimately threatens to destroy her friends if they get in the way. Insane Homura, would have somewhat been believable. The devil Homura we got, was not. |
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