Seeing as how it’s basically a summary of the TV series, I wasn’t planning on watching it. But then, seeing a certain GIF of the final battle scene tided me over.

Even though it’s basically a compressed version of the TV series, it’ll probably be incomprehensible if your only exposure to Gurren Lagann was through the movies. I’m not sure about the new intro. For people who’ve seen TTGL, it’s awesome. For people who haven’t, it might be confusing.

Everything from Simon’s introduction to the fight with Viral was essentially the same, just with some cuts. Some of the cuts were pretty awkward and required an eyecatch to do the transition, which I felt was kind of a cop-out.

Where the movie is destroyed for newcomers is when we meet the secondary characters. The part where we meet Kittan and Rossiu and their respective “crews” and the bathhouse episode got turned into some sort of giant musical montage. I’m not a fan of those episodes, but unfortunately, they introduced some pretty important characters. Of course, this might mean that Rossiu and Kittan’s roles may have changed in the next movie. Either way, suddenly, we end up with some more party members.

The fight to take the Dai-Ganzan is relatively unchanged and happens just as it did. The excellent part of the movie is in the fight with the rest of the generals, which they changed completely. Nia and Yoko get slightly more expanded roles and the time that Simon is emo gets cut down. In the end, we’re treated to some awesome. I would definitely replace what was in the series with the movie version.

I feel like ending with taking down the generals is a strange place to end the movie. Does this mean the Spiral King gets taken down in like fifteen minutes in the next movie? How will they compress the Anti-Spiral episodes into less than one movie? Does this mean we won’t get those terrible Rossiu drama episodes?

All in all, not bad. The new material was great, but as a standalone movie, it’s a bit lacking.