Review of No Game, No Life: Zero

It's a big disappointment, I'm by no mean a big fan of NGNL but I find it to be a fun, light-hearted story, the kind of thing you can easily watch on a whim and have a good time. That's clearly not the case with that movie, first the tone is for the most part very different, there's still some comedy but it only for a short period, the tone is way closer to that arc in the series where Sora disappear, yes that arc everyone forgot because it wasn't really interesting and kinda bad. But to be honest the tone is at first quite goodand the world and situation describe interesting. The story starts with a quick but meaningful flashback on the MC childhood and then change to him and a team exploring the ruin of a darwf "spaceship" (not really a spaceship but close enough) in a world destroyed by an eternal war cover in ash, awaiting destruction (as a Dark Souls fan I was immediately interested in a world like that ^^). Joke aside the start is good, managing to quickly expose the world and characters' situation, their motivation and problems, all of that through the action and not some long exposition speech.

Everything starts to fall apart when we're introduced to the second main character Schwi, who is basically a robot who has leaves the hive to study the human heart. And from there on, everything revolves around their relationship, which is yet another "oh no I'm a robot who only think in number and can't feel -- but I can become human through the power of <insert your BS, the movie choose human heart but power of love, plot hole or friendship can also work>".

That type of story can be interesting when it's well done but here that really not the case, plus most of the argument for Schwi humanization come through her not understanding the human heart because it is unpredictable, ... But it's BS the human's actions are not particularly strange or unpredictable, Schwi just suffers from the usual problem of being one of those IA which throw number and probability (likely random) all around but is totally incapable of the most basic of prediction. For example at one point someone says to her "what's the probability of me saying that I love you right now ?" and her answer is "near zero" --', like... come on! after that type of question, when he will know your answer before making or not a declaration...
Well as a whole, I want to know who design the ex-Machina because it's terribly done, like why humanoïde, why is the weak point of your big war machine at the front exposed, why wing, why hair, and more importantly why give tear to your emotionless robot when clearly they don't need it for their cameras.
Also the whole "it's a mystery how human survive" is just stupid we see that a bunch of weaker species also survive (bird, insect, even some bigger animals) and human seem to have quite good settlement, a species survive as long as more individual are born than die, no need to be the most powerful.

So Schwi is a bundle of question and frustration, but the MC isn't really better, the "imanity is weak, but that weakness can be a force" message (which was fairly good) being here replace for a "we will win by cheating, because we can't win fairly" which at first seem like an okay idea until we learn that "cheating" means manipulating information... Again, really?! in which circumstances is information management cheating, it's just basic warfare.
Oh and I won't spoil the goal of all of that but it's just stupid that nobody has ever think of it before.

Well now that we've spoken of how bad the characters and story are (and yeah I only spoke of the 2 MC... because there's nothing to say about the other, they could be faceless mobe it would be the same) let's be positive for a time:

- the animation is good, nothing fantastic for a film, the problem is the combat. They're not bad but they're rare and quite blend most of the time is just something shooting lasers at something else without a strategy.

- the music is okay, it does its job but it's forgettable.

To conclude it's not really worth your time and even if you like NGNL it may not be to your taste. You don't really need to see it, the relevant information can be reduced to one sentence anyway, so just watch the beginning and the battle it's the good parts.