Article contributed by Isabella Haberstock
The Steven Universe movie has been highly anticipated by fans of the show for the past several months, and its release completely took over Labor Day weekend. The movie takes place two years following Change Your Mind, which is the first major time jump we’ve seen in the show’s history. Steven is older, the Gems haven’t had to fight anyone, and Steven and the Diamonds restored peace across all of the Diamond colonies across the galaxy. Everything seemed to be perfect, until a new Gem came to earth with a giant injector and the intention to kill Steven. This new villain is named Spinel, and she may be one of the most complex adversaries Steven has ever faced. With a soundtrack of amazing songs, a new storyline for the next season of the show to take on, and good character development, Steven Universe: The Movie is a very entertaining and suspenseful addition to Steven’s story.
The movie opens with Steven’s ideal reality and is ruined when Spinel enters on a giant injector, the contents of which will destroy all life on earth. She then uses a weapon never before seen on the show to poof all the Crystal Gems and corrupt Steven’s gem before she herself is poofed. When all of the poofed gems returned, they had reverted back to the way that they were made and had no memory of rebelling against Homeworld. When Spinel reforms, her gem is inverted to be an upright heart and she has a much brighter appearance. She has also lost her memory of everything that happened to her after she was created. For Steven, he starts to lose his Gem powers and becomes weaker.
As Steven tries to help the Crystal Gems get their memories back, he learns that Spinel used to belong to Pink Diamond but was abandoned when Pink got her own colony. This furthers the ongoing theme in the show that Pink Diamond/Rose Quartz was not the kind hero everyone remembered her to be. At the beginning of the movie, Spinel appears to be an insane Gem who only wants to kill Steven, but as the movie progresses, the audience becomes more sympathetic towards her. She was used and forgotten, only to find out that Pink Diamond was gone. This is the first villain of the series who hated Steven because she hated Pink, while previous villains hated Steven because they wanted Pink/Rose to come be alive instead of him.
As for the Crystal Gems, the audience got to learn more about their pasts and what key events made them who they are. When they lost their memories, Steven had to replicate those key events to restore the Gem’s memory. For Pearl, he had to make her want to rebel against her responsibilities as a servant. This resulted in a new fusion between Steven and Greg that convinces Pearl to be herself. Greg has never fused before on the show, and this specific fusion has been highly anticipated among fans of the show. To bring Amethyst back, he taught her how to sing and dance and be his friend. For Garnet, fusion and her love for herself restored her memories. Steven also wanted to restore Spinel’s memories so she would be able to stop her injector from destroying the earth, and this is how he found out about her relationship with Pink Diamond. Spinel became who she is because she was repeatedly rejected by both Pink and Steven. This showed Steven that the perfect reality he was living before Spinel came to earth was just complete denial that there were any more problems that needed solving.
The one downside of this movie is that yet again, the villain was completely turned around after Steven got through to her. At the end of the movie, everything is rebuilt and assumed to be perfect again, just like at the start of the movie. Spinel’s issues with being abandoned and what Pink Diamond did to her should not have been so easily solvable. Six thousand years is a very long time to wait for someone who had no intention of coming back, and the effects this would have on a person is not curable in the course of one musical number. Because the movie ended pretty much the same way it began, there was not really any set-up for the plot of season six of the show. Aside from this, Steven Universe: The Movie is funny, heartwarming, and suspenseful, and it teaches the audience that you should always learn and grow as a person no matter how perfect the world seems to be. It gets a 9/10.
