I'm just going to say this once: if you are going to watch the movie for the story, you are in the wrong cinema. Think of this movie as an animated musical.
Given the expectations I have it's fine. Story is not as well structured as μ's, but this is due to the different direction Aqours is taking.
It is a bit difficult to give all 9 members equal amounts of screen time, so unfortunately some members fell by the wayside. Poor Hanamaru, being relegated into comic relief for the eating scenes. That being said, some others received a tremendous amount of character development. When the series started, I really didn't like Ruby, since she just gave an image of being a timid crybaby who's only there for comic relief, but as the series progressed (and indeed in the movie), while she is still as timid as she always was, she has shown that without the people helping her out all the time her she actually becomes a girl who spits straight fire while keeping Yohane in line and is able to actively contribute to Aqours as not just a performer but also as a support staff. Hats off to her for developing so much throughout the series.
The music was good and fit into the movie very well. A lot can be said about how the music segments were able to transition seamlessly from the classically animated segments into cel-shaded CGI and back smoothly. The songs are thematically linked with the story. Music list will appear below, with a short description on the scene that the songs appear in order of appearance. Spoiler alert since the music does frame some of the plot points in the movie.
僕らの走ってきた道は Bokura no Hashittekita Michi wa: Performed at the start of the movie, canonically just after Wonderful Stories at S2E13.
逃走迷走メビウスループ Tousou-meisou Möbius Loop: The third years performed this song as they escaped from the rest of Aqours to their safe house, after throwing a shirt to distract the Watanabe cousins.
Hop? Stop? Nonstop!: Aqours performed this at Piazza di Spagna to prove to Mrs Ohara that school idol activities are not an idle pursuit.
Believe Again: Saint Snow song. Watanabe Tsuki prepares a stream for them to make up for Saint Snow's inability to directly go up against Aqours in the finals due to early elimination.
Brightest Melody: Companion song to Believe Again. This is song Aqours came up with to compete with the earlier Saint Snow song.
キセキヒカル Kiseki Hikaru: Background music for the preparation of the town performance.
Next SPARKLING!!: End of movie, as Aqours prepares their performance for the town of Numazu
The main problem with the story that I have is that the entire movie is based on a premise that ignores the world that the Love Live series built.
During the start of Love Live Sunshine we get an exposition by our resident School Idol otakus the Kurosawa sisters that after μ's Love Live has become this sensation that swept not just throughout Japan, but around the world. Even within Japan we are looking at over 500 school idol groups, so Love Live isn't this niche thing that you have to explain to people just what it is so that people will understand, unlike that one time I had to explain the plot of the Love Live Sunshine series to a visiting Japanese university lecturer. So why did the Uranohoshi girls need to prove to others once again that school idol activities aren't some random activity that gets approved willy nilly by the previous school admin?
Another thing of note is that compared to the first movie, the people we are dealing with in the second movie are considerably shittier than the ones in the first movie, mostly because the problems μ's had to face were just in terms of performing and having continuing success even as they were planning to retire from being pop idols for good. In the second movie, the problems Aqours had to face were in terms of integrating with their new school and about the future of the third years.
Major spoilers ahead, so I'll go ahead and hide them.
Mari's mother (who I'll now thereafter call Mrs Ohara) is an interesting character to say the least. At least we now know where Mari gets her eccentric personality from. What's less forgivable is that Mrs Ohara manipulated the rest of Aqours into searching for the third years who were having their graduation trip in Italy so that she can bring Mari home to get her married off, even posting pictures of the third years around Rome to get people to find them. Good thing Mrs Ohara didn't have the presence of mind to write the posters in Italian (they were in Japanese) so to the Italians the posters might as well be "Look at these beautiful women".
It is worth noting that the rest of Aqours only knew of Mrs Ohara's fuckery because they were told so by the third years, who made them go on a detoured route around Firenze in total radio silence because of concerns Mrs Ohara may have tapped their phones. Didn't matter anyway since Mrs Ohara managed to find that random white feather that Yohane dropped from that mansion the third years were staying in.
The justification for Mrs Ohara marrying off Mari was because she felt that Mari was too rebellious starting from when she was a child and kept running away with Kanan and Dia, Mari unilaterally transferring from the high school in Italy back to Uranohoshi and becoming the school director (which Mrs Ohara only allowed because Mr Ohara insisted on letting the case rest), and Mari restarting Aqours. To this end, marrying Mari off was so that Mari has a husband to "control" her, which is a very shitty reason to marry someone off for and a recipe for what would be at best an unhappy marriage, and at worst an abusive marriage, neither of which I'm sure Mrs Ohara is enthusiastic about. Mrs Ohara, marrying your daughter off so that you can impose your will on her is the very definition of /r/JustNoMIL and you will not only be looked down upon by your daughter for your controlling behaviour, your future son-in-law would also hate your for being a nosy controlling bitch.
I shouldn't have to teach the Japanese how to embody Japanese values, but here goes. School mergers aren't anything new: my primary school was the result of the merger of two smaller schools near each other, and just recently there was this mass merger of junior college pairs over in my country. The most important thing to establish with the merger of the schools is to create a new shared identity while also respecting the identities and cultures of the constituent schools. This is even more important in Japan, where the concept of the in-group and out-group is very clearly demarcated.
Therefore, the new school decided to throw the former Uranohoshi students into a random run-down building in the middle of nowhere far away from the main school building. Right off the bat, the new school is sending a strong message to the former Uranohoshi students that they are not welcome in the new school at all, even though they have done their best to avoid the closure of their own school by creating a country- and even world-class school idol group. Apparently to the new school, it is not enough that the name of Uranohoshi should be forgotten from the memory of Numazu and Uchiura's people, the legacy of Uranohoshi has to be destroyed by putting the last students in a poorly maintained satellite to be forgotten as well. Bringing it closer to my home, it would be as if Pioneer Junior College decided to, instead of merging the student population of Jurong Junior College with it in the PJC grounds, kick the JJC students into the random blocks of classrooms just off my old home that are used as temporary classrooms when schools are being renovated. You don't do this without being eaten alive by literally everyone in the JJC community, parents, students and alumni alike. Instead, what really happened was that the junior colleges that were merged got a name that was the result of the combination of the two constituent junior colleges, even if the result would make absolutely no sense (Pioneer-Jurong Junior College is neither in Jurong nor in Pioneer, for example). Also, the student cultures of both junior colleges were fully combined and integrated with each other so as to ensure that a new shared identity can be created and it wasn't an annexation.
When it came to light that the segregation is because the parent support group of the new school decided that the Uranohoshi girls would not be able to participate in the club activities to the level that the existing club members are at, this really got me absolutely pissed. Club activities are extra-curricular activities. These should remain secondary to the main objective of the students, which is to study. And besides, every year the new school has to receive new students as the seniors graduate. That shouldn't be a problem they should be worrying about since they should have some sort of succession/acceptance system already in place. We are talking about increasing your student population by around 48 (since there were around 72 students before the seniors graduated), or 1 class per year equivalent if based on my high school class size. This should be a solved problem by now. My high school has a mid-term intake of around 2 classes and I don't see the club activities in my school crumbling either.
Given that this decision was opposed by the student community as a whole and was a decision undertaken only with the approval of the parents support group and the school administration, it is clear that the students understood that this decision is a completely boneheaded decision that would likely result in animosity towards the new students, especially considering that the students understood very well that the Uranohoshi girls have put in a lot of effort in helping to support a school idol group that, after all the competition that it had to go through, became the winner of the finals. And the administration, instead of being supportive towards the continuation of this spark of glory that Uranohoshi brought with them, cast them out into some forgotten corner, a "subsidiary school" to be left to wither to nothing. That's not how you treat the legacy of a school that has existed for decades (which we know it did because Chika's mother and sisters are Uranohoshi alumni). The school administration should consider themselves lucky that Aqours was willing to speak for Uranohoshi by holding performances with what's left of Aqours and the other former Uranohoshi students have not decided to turn this affair into a media showdown.
Final verdict: worse than the 1st Love Live movie, still pretty decent for the fluff. 5/10.
