The first Attack on Titan already missed the point of the anime/manga. Disregard the source material, it still delivers enough dose of delightful violence. But since it now made an even more complicated storyline for this mythology, it would be tough to gain the chance of having a compelling story. And here we are, the sequel that is suppose to make sense out of something that's already made stupid. Maybe the predecessor was sort of forgivable for bringing a lot of cool action and bloody death scenes from the Titans, but here, it's more explaining; while that's not a bad choice, the characters aren't improved, the themes are even more vague and the plot is just shallow. The action is fine when it delivers, but we witness more horribly written characters here than whatever made the first movie at least fun.
This sequel is about unraveling conspiracies from tyrannical governments, and that doesn't sound so bad since it's representing its own dystopian future allegory. But every time it keeps explaining the life inside and outside the walls, things get seriously confusing. At one point, it states that life inside the walls is suppose to be some sort of a utopian facade, but we hardly even get to explore that commentary. We're just explained that everyone inside the walls are slaves from a classified science experiment. And the rest of the movie has these characters deciding which side should they choose, either to destroy the wall or kill many innocent civilians. It would be cool if this argument doesn't take forever, but it keeps going. The problem is it's not given much tension since we hardly even knew who the people they were defending. It's just a nearly unending argument of which choice is supposed to be the right thing and it gets tedious.
And the story gets even stupider the more they reveal the secrets of the villains, but we'd rather shrug it off and wait for the next action scene. Too bad, it takes a chunk of every ten to twenty minutes to get there. The first movie, while dumb, does spend a lot establishing the terror of the Titans. Here, the action is much reserved, which is a shame since these scenes are the only ones that are quite glorious to watch. Now we see hand-to-hand fights between two or more Titans and that's pretty awesome, but again, these scenes are just so little compared to the dreary expositions the entirety took over. The effects still looks nice, but it's easy to overlook these merits if everything else seems boring.
Attack on Titan 2: End of the World is just not trying anymore. The first movie have established too much of the terror of these creatures, but then there happens to be a greater villain, which is presented with dull verbal expositions that leads to an utterly underwhelming finale of a franchise that hardly has anything to put out to begin with. They could have made things simple, like a direct adaptation, rather than being a much shallow version of The Giver movie or an exasperatingly complicated version of The Scorch Trials. The anime/manga is already a pretty clever, and once again, morally complex material. So why follow these generic trends? Well, fine, if you want to be a mindless fun movie, then go ahead. Besides, the title "Attack on Titan" and even more so with "End of the World" are perfect to enough to indicated a mindless, but pretty cool epic. But this movie sadly justifies nothing.
