My Tri marathon continues with the second film: Determination, and to my surprise I found it a drastic improvement in nearly every way over its predecessor. One of my favorite changes was Matt and Tai’s bickering (which I frankly couldn’t care less about) being pushed somewhat into the background in favor of focusing on Joe, who was by far my favorite character in the original Adventure. He brings up a good point about how it’s not fair that the Digidestined have to constantly interrupt their lives to fight evil Digimon, and he goes through a really compelling arc throughout the course of the movie, as does Mimi, who struggles with being overly self-absorbed at times, with her not listening to Izzy causing a PR disaster for their Digimon before slowly becoming more considerate. It helps address my complaint that the characters were being frozen in amber, and it feels like they’re starting to use the kids’ greater age / experience to craft interesting conflict instead of hyper-relying on nostalgia like Reunion did.
The main plot is also getting more intriguing, they haven’t done much with the Digimon PR stuff yet, but apparently Meiko’s partner is involved in the chaos spreading (I was pretty shocked when it killed Leomon at the end, though I should’ve seen it coming after how much Digimon I’ve watched), and the 02 kids seem to be involved as well since Ken’s showed up in his Digimon Emperor outfit. The plot seems to be heading in an interesting direction, and I hope the next movie keeps up the positive momentum.