I’ve been very slowly working my way through Frontier over the past few months (starting college has annihilated my free time, so the pace has been glacial), but I found myself with some extra time on Halloween and figured I may as well stop procrastinating and finally knock out the Data Squad movie, “Ultimate Power! Activate Burst Mode!!” Sadly, it fell far short of the original show for me and is my second least favorite piece of Digimon media so far, only trailed by the final Tri movie.
Starting with the plot, it’s completely separated from the events of the show and centers around a Digimon named “Argomon” who’s put the city to sleep (including Marcus / Thomas / Yoshi) with its vines, leaving it to Agumon, Gaomon and Lalamon to save the day alongside a new Digimon named “Rhythm.” I don’t inherently mind the concept, but the execution is horrendous. We don’t get any explanation or background as to why Argomon is around, with the film instead just opening with it already having taken over everything, and its only motivation is the same ultra-generic “humans are bad / destroying the digital world” screed that’s repeated by 90% of the bad Digimon in this franchise. In addition, Rhythm feels severely underused and pointless, hardly doing anything at all aside from acting as a damsel in distress and giving moral support to Agumon at the climax. Marcus appears near the end so the titular burst mode can be activated, but he also feels like a shell of his show incarnation who’s just acting as a key to unlock the new form.
Some of these issues are likely compounded by the dub, it wasn’t released in the US to my knowledge, so the English dub was produced by Disney XD Asia with different voice actors and the original Japanese terminology left intact (eg: mentioning child / adult forms rather than rookie / champion). I don’t want to be mean to the VAs since I’m sure they tried their best… but I wasn’t the biggest fan of their performances. They all gave off big “guys in a room” energy and didn’t capture the essence of the characters well in my opinion. The animation suffers from a similar problem, it’s far better on a technical level than the original show due to the bigger budget, but the more saturated colors and aggressive shading make it not fit in well with the show, it almost feels more like an alternate timeline than a part of the same series.
Ultimately, despite some admittedly pretty animation, the movie kinda felt like a waste of time. None of the characters go through any development whatsoever, the plot is incredibly straightforward and boring, and I just didn’t have a good time watching.