Review of Bungo Stray Dogs: Dead Apple

It's a decent movie, as far as most anime movies I've seen that go alongside a series. Starting with what I considered good, the art and music were the best aspects (though nothing regarding the music stood out in particular). Well, that lasted long, now to talk about criticisms I have. I know I shouldn't write any SPOILERS, but I feel like talking about one thing because it was such a random thing. I'm not actually sure if this is a SPOILER since this thing comes out of nowhere and is ultimately inconsequential, but I'll just mention that it may be a SPOILER here anyway. Sothis thing... is a dragon. Yeah, it just sort of shows up randomly. No reasons, it's just there for a minute or so, then it's gone. Pretty weird.

Anyway, stepping away from that spoiler(?) and into something else I probably shouldn't discuss in detail, the story content. It was kind of bad. I mean, not bad, just not good. The premise is interesting, though it kind of devolves into a battle royale-type thing with a Jungian twist. That's to say, the characters confront their "shadows" in as cliched a way as you can get with shounen. It could've been done in a more interesting way or to greater effect, but it wasn't so it's kind of meh. The reasons for it all, or the motives behind three particular characters that lead to this event, are also incomprehensible. It's even addressed in a meta kind of way at the end by another character, I believe they say something like they're "complex", though that doesn't really fix the issue that none of it really made sense. I'm not a fan of simply being told characters are complex or super intelligent, since more often than not it's a lazy cover for not displaying any complexity or intelligence. It's also kind of lame when stuff that absolutely has no way of being predicted happens and a character is like "Aha, just as I expected." To paraphrase a line from the show itself, the character and the writer are accomplices; in other words, the character isn't actually smart. Buuuut, overall it's a fine movie.