But these guys? They all look the same and fight the same and don’t even have a face. Not that the evil underlings in the other movies were any better in terms of personality but at least they had a face and each one of them had a unique style of fighting. They all look like mass-produced robots instead of specially trained stealth spies or assassins.

We are so used to see magic hand seals, gained after years of training or after a horrible experiment was done on them, that this is just stupid. They are using technology, which is so off with the rest of the setting. The invading ninjas are not using ninjutsu to the most part. Why?EVERYONE IS SO WEAK AND STUPID! Seriously, all the elite super powerful ninjas you were watching for so many years doing all sorts of epic stuff, in this movie they feel like they are average people who can’t even move fast or fight properly. It seemed like a good marketing trick and normally it should have worked. They even tried to tie the events with the main series in a very subtle way by making Orochimaru to be in need of a scroll some doctor in this film has. The trailers mentioned that it will feature the return of Gaysuke, the real protagonist that is, who was absent since the first movie. They just wanted to see cool magical ninjas doing lots of exciting stuff and instead got a rather uneventful movie with some anti-war messages and a blurry sinister plan towards the end.There was a major hook for the fans to see the movie though. The problem here is that Naruto was never mature and the target audience never expected it to be.

This made it feel more mature as an overall.

So in this regard the movie was much closer to a war drama or a mystery adventure than a bunch of teenagers kicking the crap out of each other. And the main villain’s motives were left hidden for the most part, making the main objective of the film to be hidden from the audience. There are no henchmen that need to be defeated fro example, just generic faceless mooks with fancy technology. I must admit though that this movie has a very different feel from the previous ones. The budget is still quite high but there was no work given on making interesting battle choreographies, while all the characters act rather bored and distant from the viewer. Even the directors seemed to have lost their will to make something exciting and just created this as basic as possible.

Once again the excitement was over and the audience started to drop it for the second time. This is the fifth Naruto movie, made after the initial high spirited continuation was saturated and the show entered a state of slow pacing and full of fillers phase.

Naruto shippuden movie 2 english dub