My Hero Academia: You're Next

A lot of filmmakers have been eating crow lately. An obvious result that was Destin to occur after they made the fatal error of making a film with a villainous symbol that actively appeals to real people. They do this because they think it's right. They're wrong. They reach out, giving real aggressors a symbol to worship instead of one to hate. This in turn only serves to empower the people watching in the wrong way. We have just seen The Boys' Showrunner Eric Kripke throw his own series under the bus because he accidentally made his version of Homelander an empowering symbol. This is a filmmaking failure.

Most recently, Todd Phillips's Joker film series ran into the exact same problem. And now the sequel film is set to burn down both the reputation gained and the profit garnered by the first installment. This too is a filmmaker failure.

These filmmakers create symbolic characters they want the audience to despise, and so they fall at the first hurdle of storytelling. The same cannot be said for the My Hero Academia team though. They passed that test with literal flying colours. The villain is a villain. There is no way around it. He is perfectly loathsome and is guaranteed never to become the symbol of peace the lunatic believes he is in the hearts and minds of the real-life audience. No retcons here. Horikoshi and co won. The messages are out there, and we're delivered in a thrilling manner.

This film doesn't just look wonderful; it sounds wonderful too. If you can, watch it on the biggest screen you can because My Hero Academia: You're Next was clearly created from the ground up to be a theatrical experience that pushes cinematic animation to a whole new technical level.