Unnecessary revisitation of a successful 70's anime cult series lacking the vitality, freshness and emotion of the original.
A bad development plot and lack of rythm are only two of the problems that lead this film to a forgettable movie, a mere sequence of images with little interest even for the fans. Let's see why it flops:
The story begins years after the last Mazinger battle. Koji, Sayaka and the rest of the characters are no longer in their teens but adults now. Sayaka has taken her father's place as director of the atomic institute and Koji has become a scientist.
From the beginning, the movie stays -and remains- in a low tone, even a bit depressing, with "sentimental" scenes that do not bring anything to a not very well developed plot but contribute to make it slower and rather dull, leading to fail in mantaining the interest; characters look unmotivated, lack of drive, disoriented, not finding their place in the world after the war ended. Sayaka is no longer a main character (Lisa takes her place instead) and is rather insipid here, while her main interest seems to become engaged with Koji, who does not take the decision and seems to be lost with no wars ahoy. In fact Sayaka's role is one of the worst here: she is bland and useless and she does not even participate in the battle. The love/fight relationship between Koji and Sayaka that contributed to bring some fun moments between battles making the rythm never go down is hardly seen here and so are the battles themselves! In fact, one of the TV series main interests was to see the hero fighting a new mechanical monster in each chapter, each one improved from the last one with more and more deadly weapons. This does not happen in the film. All robot monsters do appear together mainly in the final battle. And, being so many, they can't be destroyed one by one (since it would take too much running time) but all together in a sort of messy boring chaos that is anything but thrilling. Also, Dr. Inferno reason for attacking is clumsy and poorly planned and worse explained, seems more like a bad joke: from conquer the world to create a parallel universe? Quite absurd. Fortunately original Mazinger Z does appear but too late and in a poor way. Why do not make the final battle the peak point including new weapons for Mazinger? That would have been a must and what fans really expected, a sort of longer episode with more time to develop the plot and longer battles. I.e.,Wouldn't have been great to use the doctors' 3D printer to make fake (non Z-alloy) Mazinger-Z copies to confuse the mechanical monsters making a great final battle?
I guess the author's intention was making a tribute to the original series in its 45th. anniversary, but maybe because he was not in the mood or had a lack of creativity to bring us the best of it, the final result is rather poor and ends to fail into a decaffeinated mélange that detracts from the 70's series. In the end few good, exciting scenes are only those who bring us emotionally back to the verve and intensity of the old chapters, like the opening titles where the original music plays and you can feel its strength (new musical score is simply awful) or the amusing scene where the Boss robot fights against the mechanical monsters.
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