Attack on Titan: The Last Attack Review

The Last Attack is not a new film. It joins the two Final Chapters specials of March and November 2023 into one 145-minute cut with 5.1 surround sound, and anyone who skipped the 87 episodes before it will be lost within minutes. On those terms the compilation plays better than the broadcast did: Yuichiro Hayashi's direction gathers momentum without the eight-month break, and the Rumbling, walls of Colossal Titans flattening the world, finally has the scale of a cinema screen.

The material is the last stand of former enemies, Marleyans and Paradis soldiers crammed onto one flying boat, against a friend who has become the threat, and Hiroyuki Sawano and Kohta Yamamoto push the score to near operatic pitch. MAPPA leans heavily on computer-generated titans, which suits the horde and flattens the close fighting. The core cast get the closure the series owed them, Armin and Mikasa above all.

What a remaster cannot fix is the ending. Hajime Isayama's last chapter divided readers in 2021, and his revisions for the anime make Armin's disapproval of Eren plain without settling the argument. It opened in Japan on November 8, 2024 as a three-week limited engagement and took about 1.45 billion yen there. CBR said it offered nothing new, which is true; the finale still deserves this scale.