Ah! My Goddess: The Movie

A dangerous prisoner is freed from a prison on the Moon.  He has a plan to change the world to his own ends but to do so, he needs one critical element: Belldandy.  Attacked by her mentor, Celestine, Belldandy loses her memory of Keiichi.  Stalked by powerful enemies and with the Goddess Network in chaos, Keiichi, Urd and Skuld must find a way to restore Belldandy’s memory and find out why she is so essential to Celestine’s plans before her cherished feelings for Keiichi fade away forever.

I’d like to start by say for the record that I do like Ah! My Goddess as a concept.  The idea of one hapless guy who becomes the luckiest man on the planet living with three bonefied Goddesses, one of which is his girlfriend, is a neat idea that lends itself to all kinds of wacky possibilities.  However, the back half of the original 5 episode Oh! My Goddess OVA ditched any humorous schenanigans in favor of a very somber and joyless love story with needlessly excessive stakes.  My fear going into the Ah! My Goddess movie was that the story would continue down that humourless, dour pathway and wow, it actually did more than that.  Suddenly out of nowhere we have a plot, villain, and action that feels like it was meant to be a Tenchi Muyo movie instead.  There’s a way I think Ah! My Goddess should operate as an Anime, and Ah! My Goddess: The Movie does not line up with that mindset.
 
It was actually really hard not to think about the Tenchi Muyo in Love duology while watching this movie.  That’s because it feels like a hybrid of both films.  You’ve got a super powerful escaped convict with plans for worldwide destruction (no need for time travel to stop them though) from the first film and then you have the deep, somber character study of the second film, complete with another girl who wants Keiichi all to themselves (no kidnapping him to another dimension though). At least with Tenchi, the intergalactic scale was established way before the first movie and nothing felt out of place about the situations they found themselves in (Tenchi Muyo in Love 2 could still be argued for its drastic change in tone).  Nothing in Oh! My Goddess prepares viewers for just how needless epic and dire the plot surrounding Keiichi and Belldandy becomes.  In fact if it feels like an entirely different take on Ah! My Goddess, that might have to do with the fact that this is an original movie not taken from any source material.  Still doesn’t excuse how it goes overboard with just about everything. 
 
The real victims of this huge identity crisis of a movie (besides me for spending a needless 106 minutes watching it) are the main characters.  Keiichi, Belldandy, Urd and Skuld were the saving grace of even my least favorite parts of the OVA.  Theyre a fun cast with a lot of feel good energy from Keiichi and Belldandy’s always adorable romance to the sisterly misadventures of Urd and Skuld (and Urd just being a total hot Goddess).  It is still fun to watch them interact and try to figure out what the hell is going on.  But the plot doesn’t allow for any romantic pratfalls or any of the humor that made the first half of the original OVA work so well.  And what humor there is, isnt funny.  Sure it’s good to see Urd and Skuld get into some action scenes (something I don’t think Ah! My Goddess needs).  But seriously how many times can Keiichi and Belldandy’s relationship be threatened before someone figures out its virtually bulletproof?  And I don’t mean that in a bad way either.  Theyre great, I love them, they deserve happiness.  But much like the OVAs ending, The Movie wants to test it to its limits and make everyone miserable for no reason other than they needed some forced plot to justify a movie level event.
 
Ah! My Goddess: The Movie also makes the mistake of making a would be movie level event feel boring an unnecessary.  The main villains are dull with generic motivations that seriously just need them both to seek out couples counseling for their own respective issues.  Morgan is particularly dull being another girl who want Keiichi for her own ends and her entire dialogue could just be replaced with the lyrics to “I Want Know What Love Is” by Foreigner.  Belldandy’s amnesia plot feeding into another part of her past that was covered up instills more yawns than interest.  We also keep cutting back to Heaven (I think) and whatever central nervous system monitors the Goddess Network and a bunch of characters we never saw in the OVA who are just around to spout technobabble every few seconds while the action unfolds on Earth.  Also, also, why are the Goddess’ fighting a Kaiju sized Tree Monster?  More importantly, why is Shirō Hamaguchi’s operatic score trying so damn hard in every scene?  This isnt a romantic tragedy (at least not to me).  This sounds like it belongs in some huge scifi space opera than Ah! My Goddess.  Ugh, it sounds good, don’t get me wrong, but when mixed against this movie, it makes my ears hurt.
 
Ah! My Goddess: The Movie tries to be something more than it needs to be and suffers because of it.  It’s 20-30 minutes too long.  It’s way too melodramatic.  And it’s way more epic than anything we’ve come to expect from the franchise if you’ve only seen the OVA (the TV Series might do more but I haven’t seen it, so I’m just going with what I know).  A cast of amazing characters is subjected to needless depressing gloom while the villains just need freaking dates to get over their hangups and issues.  Add in some apocalyptic battles and imagery and I have no idea wtf I’m even watching.  Heck I wasn’t even 20 minutes in before I realized the movie was already in trouble.  Believe it or not, I still wanna like Ah! My Goddess.  Maybe I should give the TV Series a try and it’ll segue more easily into this kind of spectacle rather than the huge jump from OVA to Movie when really, I’m just fine watching Keiichi, Belldandy, Urd and Skuld get into mishaps and fun adventures on Earth rather than fighting love sick Kaiju or whatever.
 
2/10