Arisa NakajimaYuri TsunematsuTomomi MaruyamaYuina Kuroshima
Sagrada Reset Part 2
Medium: film
Year: 2017
Writer/director: Yoshihiro Fukagawa
Original creator: Yutaka Kono
Keywords: Sagrada Reset, SF, superhero
Country: Japan
Language: Japanese
Actor: Shuhei Nomura, Yuina Kuroshima, Yuna Taira, Kentaro Ito, Tina Tamashiro, Yuri Tsunematsu, Kenshiro Iwai, Mariko Kaga, Tomomi Maruyama, Arisa Nakajima, Mitsuhiro Oikawa, Goro Oishi, Rei Okamoto, Makoto Okunaka, Akiko Yagi, Yuka Yano, Hisashi Yoshizawa
Format: 126 minutes
Url: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6090764/
Website category: Japanese SF
Review date: 28 January 2019
Sagurada Reset
I quite liked it. It's okay. It's clever rather than great, being mostly a convoluted chess game of reality-rewriting and superpowers, but it does have a moderate amount of emotion in there too. It's more engaging than the anime TV series, anyway.
The premise is the same as usual. Misora can roll back time and Kei can remember the unhappened future when she does so. They also have friends with superpowers, some more impressive than others. However this is the story arc finale, with a baddie who's more dangerous than all of them put together and wants to erase all superpowers. (His power is troublesome enough, but more of a problem is how intelligent and super-prepared he is. This is a man who's built his lifestyle and supervillain preparations around having his memory regularly erased, just as a countermeasure against certain other ability users.)
The most memorable thing in this film is Mitsuhiro Oikawa's overacting as... no, let me rephrase that. His bold choices. Oikawa plays that villain, Urachi, and he's making sure you notice him. (You could argue that he's playing the opposite of our borderline-autistic hero.) He's jolly. He laughs a lot. He goes a bit nuts participating in the fairground attractions at the school culture festival. Oikawa can really ladle on the ham, but only in a controlled way since at any point he might calm right down and get serious. I quite enjoyed watching him, actually, but the laughing sometimes threatened to get a bit much and personally I think I preferred anime-Urachi. (It's also worth pointing out that he's not evil and doesn't kill people, since he's a good person who simply happens to have ideals and goals that our heroes don't share.)
There's some decent emotion. "Can you hear this message?" is a gut-punch of an opening. Kei's confession to Misora works. Stuff happens that really tears up certain specific people, although I think that sometimes worked better in the anime because, inevitably, we had more context. It might go either way. The film inevitably has less set-up, so for instance Misora's "reset when you see someone crying" rule just hasn't been grounded as strongly here. They do their best, but it's not the same. That said, though, there are other scenes that are clearly more powerful here, simply because we're looking at real people. Get a good actor to emote in close-up and you'll create something that animation would struggle to match.
It was interesting to watch this story for, effectively, the second time. It held up pretty well, but I'm now unsure that the "give me five minutes" scene makes sense. Theoretically he'd had weeks to set that up. Five extra minutes shouldn't change much, except to give the scriptwriter a chance to write a five-minute confrontation scene.
Another, less important, complaint is that I got dizzy from the spinning cameras in the Urachi-Sumire phone conversation.
It's basically the same, though. Same story, same people and same clever twists. Not much has changed, really. Misora's less robotic, but she's also not that important this time. The main difference is that the anime had had 24 episodes to get there, which is a mixed blessing. The anime can frankly get a bit tedious, which the film doesn't, but then again I liked some of that added context. I miss Sleepy Cat Girl. She was quite fun and I liked her friendship with Misora.
Including Part 1, is this a good film? In a distant, slightly clever-clever way, I'd say it is. Its main problem is that its protagonists can seem emotionally constipated, which the film doesn't even explain as the anime did. Kei thaws a little, if you watch him carefully. Misora starts out pre-thawed, I think, but she's also extraordinarily meek and quiet. I wouldn't really recommend these two films, but by all means check them out if they've piqued your curiosity. There are interesting things about them.