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R2 DVD Reviews
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Tuesday, 24 August 2010 00:00 |
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 The battle to rescue Gaara goes on. And on. And on. And....
The Leaf teams may have the advantage in numbers, but it's the Akatsuki warriors that are making all the running in the current battles, to the point where Naruto's beginning to wonder what the hell's going on. Putting up a good fight is one thing, but if you're just not good enough... well, it's not going to end well. And the Leaf don't seem to be good enough. Guy, at least, has a weapon of last resort for just such an occasion and knows that it's time to use it. Naruto, though, is finding it impossible to avoid being caught up in Itachi's genjutsu. Jiraiya once taught him how to break free of a genjutsu, but theory and practice are two very different things. Later, the battle continues when the two Leaf teams are united, but it seems that the Akatsuki are well-prepared for their arrival...
This will be a short review, as there's really not a hell of a lot to write about here. In true Naruto tradition, the entire set is taken up by the continuing effort to free Gaara - with the vast majority of the time being filled by the ongoing battles of the gang. Some get more emphasis than others, though, and the short straw this volume goes to the members of Team Guy, who send a sizeable chunk of the story playing with themselves - as in, fighting against clones of themselves, which as you might expect isn't particularly easy, when your opponent thinks and fights in exactly the same way as you do. There are only the briefest of flashbacks to the team's battles, by way of letting you know that they're still going on, but for now at least it's Naruto and Sakura who are doing the heavy lifting.
In Naruto's case, that's solely through letting himself be riled in a tally predictable way. On reaching the Akatsuki lair and finding Gaara apparently dead (and I don't believe for a moment that that won't be undone), he goes into a rage and sets off in pursuit of Deidara, one of the responsible Akatsuki members - despite knowing that Deidara has been tasked with capturing him so that he, too, can be subjected to the same treatment as Gaara. Forward planning? Not really his strong point.
It's Sakura, though, who gets the majority of the spotlight this time around, as she takes on Puppet Master Sasori with no small amount of help from his grandmother, Chiyo - this battle is the focus of the second half of the set, and while it starts well enough it quickly falls into the old trap of each combatant stepping up the power levels over and over in turn until it reaches the stage where, to me at least, it was just getting silly. By that stage it had also gone in for far too long, and more than any other part of the series so far (including the first 'season') had me wishing it would all just stop. The whole arc is just being dragged out beyond any sort of reason, and has thoroughly worn out its welcome with me.
There are moments of real plot, where the reasons behind Gaara's capture are explained (all to do with the tailed beasts that are sealed inside Gaara, Naruto and others like them), but these are few and far between. You're more likely to find yourself in the middle of a flashback, where the training behind a particular fighting move is explained - and since that just break up the flow of the battle and drags them out for even longer, they're not scenes I particularly welcome.
If the events of this set - 13 episodes - had been crunched down into half the time, it might have been worth watching. Stretched out for as long as it is, though, it becomes tedious beyond belief - and I don't believe the arc is remotely near finished yet. Oh joy. If you're a die-hard Naruto fan, I admit that you'll probably get more out of this than I did, but it's still a long way short of Naruto's finest hour.
For full episode summaries and screenshots for this set, check out the following pages of the review.
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