Heroes Rising is the second film of the My Hero Academia franchise. It sees U.A. High School’s Class 1-A, as part of their training and education, being charged to serve a tight-knit, rural community that’s residing on a remote island that hasn’t had a hero for a while. While this assignment is expected to simply consist of community service-type tasks, it suddenly escalates into a mission that’s way above their pay grade when Nine, a deadly villain whose Quirk (i.e. superpower) is similar to All For One’s ability to steal Quirks, and his underlings attack the island.
The plot of the movie takes place quite some time after the events of season 4, the most recent season. Thus, it contains some elements that have yet to appear in the anime series. According to what I read, this particular adventure can be reasonably estimated to be set around – or even after – the latter part of the storyline of the upcoming season 5, and that when it was first released in theaters, it was even ahead of the manga’s storyline at that point.
Almost all movies coming out of long-running shonen TV series are inconsequential, as they feature stories that are either non-canon or detached and irrelevant to the anime’s main, ongoing storyline. Thus, I rarely seek them out to watch, even when I’m a fan of the series. But, somehow, it feels like I’m always tricked into watching these My Hero Academia movies, kind of anticipating them to be different from the usual stuff. In the case of Heroes Rising, a big reason was it being set at a future time. The promise of a look into the future status quo proved too intriguing for me to ignore.
However, although it does show characters, dynamics, and details that haven’t made it to the anime series yet, they are too subtle, fleeting, and trivial to truly warrant enthusiasm.
There is, however, this one incredible, dramatic, jaw-dropping development during the climax that would have been deemed impressively ballsy if it actually stuck. But in the end, the movie takes it all back. As I witnessed this, I experienced this dramatic shift in emotion – from awe and respect for the movie’s boldness to being pretty frustrated with it and with myself for actually thinking for a second that a movie such as this would actually deliver a permanent game-changing twist.
Hence, in the end, Heroes Rising is every bit as fundamentally negligible as the first My Hero Academia movie. Ultimately, it’s simply the usual unessential annual movie of a popular shonen series.
That being said, I enjoyed Heroes Rising a lot more than its predecessor. It may be disconnected from the series’ arc and doesn’t truly contribute anything of true value to it, but it does manage to succeed in presenting striking demonstrations of the things that make My Hero Academia extremely lovable and fun – a quirky superhero world, compelling bond and chemistry of its wonderful ensemble of colorful characters, and above all, visceral, spectacular shonen action that’s brimming with hype.
Thus, for the most part, I don’t think I wasted my time on watching My Hero Academia: Heroes Rising, since it got me to become generally absorbed on it. At the end of the day, I was enormously entertained. Plus, for a while there, I thought it was awesome.
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