Steven Universe: The Movie came out the other day, and I want to talk about it. I really enjoyed it, it was fun, it made me feel some feelings, had the good slice-of-life-but-also-aliens humor that I crave, and the soundtrack was full of bops. But it was also kind of… weird, structurally. The plot made use of two tropes that I conversely hate and love to feel sad about, so click on this post if you want to read about that because I’m about to spoil basically the entire show.
That said, I don’t think I could talk about this movie without spoiling the entire show. The one thing that I really didn’t like about The Movie is the way in which it retread the entire series up to this point. On one hand, it was great to have a chance to sit back and reflect upon the story that Steven Universe has told over five seasons, especially after the breakneck pace of the season five finale. I don’t really have beef with repetition - I’ll explain what I think happened later. But the way the writers went about repeating themselves initially made me so, so worried.
One of my least favorite tropes is the one where at the end of a great journey, characters’ memories are erased, leaving them ignorant of both the part they played and how they grew as people along the way. I could not figure out what TVTropes calls this. This first really got to me when I read the The Dark Is Rising Sequence in like elementary or middle school - at the end of this series, the characters save the universe from eldritch horrors or whatever only for their memories of the events to be taken away. And I remember thinking that was really dumb! Cool, they saved the world I guess, but who cares if no one remembers that it happened except the reader? More importantly, why have you given the characters I have grown to love dementia?! I’m not trying to make light of dementia here at all, every time I encounter this trope it is absolutely crushing. I am also not saying that simply being made to feel bad is bad, because there are plenty of negative emotions stories make me feel, and my response to them is appreciation that the story was able to make me feel a certain way so effectively. But here, I’m just left feeling deflated and all my excitement for the story evaporates, knowing where it leads. Why tell a story just to revoke everything that the characters have gained from their struggle?
So, the Gems getting reset to their factory defaults in Steven Universe: The Movie triggered this knee-jerk reaction in me. As of writing this, it is very unclear where exactly Steven Universe is going to go in the future. The season five finale tied up so many plot threads that the writers are going to have to establish some entirely new conflict in order to keep it moving, and I was worried that this was going to be it. They win the war, but at the cost of their very experiences, and moving forward this would be one of, if not the main, source of tension and conflict in the show. Steven Universe is largely a show about the relationships between its characters and how those characters grow as people (or gems (they’re aliens)), so the loss of five seasons of growth is soul-destroying. Pearl finally overcame her programmed subservience! Amethyst was finally confident in herself! Will Garnet ever even come back, since her existence relies on two individuals falling in love? Are we going to have to go through all of that character drama a second time? ANYWAY, they did not do this, thank god. Rebecca Sugar (the showrunner) knew how painful this plot point would be, so she threw it in there to twist the audience’s hearts into a pretzel. But it gets resolved, which is great, because man, I hate this trope. Steven is able to remind the reset Gems of what had made them change as people, echoing various key events in the series, and reminding the viewer of the extent to which things have really changed over the course of the show.
To speak on tropes that make me feel sad yet relish the pain, the scene in The Movie where Spinel reveals her backstory was absolutely devastating. If you are writing a story and want to bring me as near to tears as I tend to get, add a part where a character has time pass them by rapidly and uncontrollably. When I think of this, I think of Click (Adam Sandler’s best horror film), in which the protagonist’s lack of control over his rate of travel through time causes him to miss incredibly important events in his life and fall out with all of his loved ones in the lead up to his death. Or maybe Interstellar - the scene where the astronauts find that relativity has caused time to accelerate ahead of them, and they tearfully watch several decades of messages from their family that they missed. I think of this as the inverse of the above trope, because while in the first case a character changes as a person but revert to their initial state, here the characters does not change in the first place, while the world jumps ahead without their control. There’s something about this that is just as crushing but to me feels more earned. It’s like the ultimate FOMO, it exaggerates something everyone has experienced to a life-altering extreme. The Spinel backstory scene executed this trope perfectly. I honestly hated her character, did not know what her point was, and thought her factory default was annoying. That is until she started to sing, and stood in one place, and began to get visibly just shittier as the garden died around her over the course of millennia, and as her face became more and more visibly conflicted about what had happened to Pink, and whether or not she’d been taken advantage of. And then the shot of her finally pulling her foot out of the vegetation and decay that had grown up around her… damn. Instant sympathy, to say the least.
Part of me wondering where Steven Universe was going to go after its last season was wondering what exactly The Movie would be like. Are they going to make it its own, standalone thing? Or is it going to be a huge, high production value, normal episode? The answer ended up being “both, sort of”, and the compromises they had to make to do that didn’t necessarily lead to great plot decisions, in my opinion. SU: The Movie is frontloaded with a gigantic amount of backstory, which seems to imply that this was made for people who haven’t seen the show before and needed to be caught up. This ends up spoiling basically the entire show. Part of my enjoyment of Steven Universe has been riding the wave, so to speak - I’ve been watching since maybe episode six (shout out to my ex) and as a result have encountered the big plot twists and reveals more or less as they came. It’s already different now, I think a lot of people go in knowing, well ok the Gems are aliens and Garnet is a fusion, etc. But I really wonder how a viewer’s experience is going to differ from mine if Steven Universe: The Movie was their introduction to the series. Is the show as enjoyable if you know what’s going to happen? I’d like to think knowing the twists actually makes it retroactively better, but my opinion is colored by my own experiences. The recapping is definitely necessary because I don’t know how you could just be thrown into this plot in media res, but at the same time it doesn’t really improve the movie, it just makes it work at all.
On the other hand, The Movie falls short of being a solid episode of the show. Something that’s really driven the success of SU is that it’s serialized, events from one episode have huge repercussions on the rest of the series, even in episodes that people assume are filler at first pass. But here, everything is nicely wrapped up - Steven is on earth, the Gems are back to normal, and the diamonds are back on Homeworld having whisked away the antagonist. A slowly healing Spinel lives with the diamonds now, but that’s really the only thing that affects the status quo, it ends almost right where it begins. It seems like, in the pursuit of making this a stand-alone-ish movie, it had to both take into account the progress of the normal show, leading to the huge amount of recap, and not advance the plot too far, because that would make it required viewing and it would interrupt the show’s pace too much if too much changed from the last episode of season five to the first of season six. You end up with a story that exists something of a parallel timeline to the main show, it takes place at an indeterminate point during a time skip and doesn’t need to have happened at all. Granted, given that we have no idea what happens next season I could be completely wrong and this was all very important. But I’m willing to bet this sort of hermetically-sealed plot is why the diamonds are just sort of grandmas now (new viewers would not be ready for the movie to unpack the diamonds’ genocidal tendencies or the systemic prejudice in gem society) and why the chest in Lion’s mane is open when Steven goes in there (if the movie actually takes place after a season six episode where the chest opens, but the movie had to air now because Cartoon Network scheduling reasons).
All this said, I hope I don’t sound like I didn’t enjoy it. Steven Universe: The Movie is great in that it ends up being a sort of condensation of the whole series, like if the crew took the five seasons of the show and juiced them in to a glass, and you’re just chugging it all at once. The plot takes every previous narrative beat and mirrors them back to you in a new context, which, while not my preferred tactic, is neat. It restates the show’s core themes and forces the viewer to reflect on everything that’s happened and realize how much these characters have changed while restating the show’s core themes. If someone came to me and said that they wanted to know what Steven Universe was about, thematically, but that they’d been cursed to never ever be able to watch the television program, I’d direct them to Steven Universe: The Movie, and they would have a great experience.