[spoiler]- The movie is a complete re-envisioning of the E7 core theme: Boy meets girl. There are very few similarities between the E7 TV worldview and the movie worldview. The characters look the same and have the same names, but the circumstances are vastly different.
- Anemone appears in most of the movie as an old woman, as seen from the trailer, but she does turn young again at the end. The old Anemone and the young one have different voices, but they have indeed essentially retained Dominic and Anemone's quirky romance in a different way.
- Nirvash and TheEnd both have larvae forms which are extremely cute and described as ghibli-style mascot characters.
- The opening segments with young Eureka and the larvae Nirvash are extremely cute and seem to go over well with most of the audience and reviewers.
- Lady Coda from the TV series serves a very different role in the movie, and her role is rather pivotal to the overall structure in the movie. I haven't actually read in detail what the role is, because most reviews avoid outright spoiling all the plot events, but one reviewer said it was very well developed and serves the movie storyline very well.
- The final battle sequence in the movie is a brand new high speed aerial battle between a final form of Nirvash that combines with TheEnd, hence gaining funnel attacks ala Nu Gundam. The battle is between Nirvash and the Devilfish equipped with the insane backpack seen in the mecha designs on the official site. It's a battle between Renton and Holland to settle all their differences. It's said that the battle is really well animated and impressive even on a movie level.
- The hyped up 12.5 second aerial action sequence is a rollercoaster style missile circus, with the camera moving the audience through the battle sequence in first person. While extremely impressive, there are several mentions that on the big screen in particular, the scene is very disorientating and causes dizziness.
- Eureka has an additional form aside from all her various TV forms in the movie. The final scene in the movie has a long hair Eureka in the nude that resembles sort of a cave woman I guess. I've seen a picture of it from a photo of the Program Guide, but I'm not entirely sure if it's okay to post that here. Might be a little NSFW? Her hair covers her breasts but it's a design sketch so she's not wearing anything and it shows her lower body too, but with no detail...
- The Gekkostate crew interactions with Renton and their development is pretty much completely gone in the movie. The movie focuses mostly on Renton and Eureka and their story, and very little on any of the side characters at all.
- I've seen mentions that the KLFs that appear in battle scenes have newly designed equipment attachments and weapons in the movie, which is good news.
- The newly animated footage is mostly in 2 parts: the opening segment when Eureka and Renton were kids, and the action sequences throughout the movie. While the entire story is brand new, it uses lots of TV footage with slight alterations and background/foreground replacements to cheat in terms of creating new scenes with old footage.
- The new character animation is said to be average and nothing outstanding, while the robot action scenes are totally worthy of movie standards. It's a bit disappointing to me, because I felt the TV series had great character animation as well, but I guess they were really short on budget.
- Ray and Charles do NOT appear in the movie at all. The characters have no part in the story and never show up. I think they might have used the Spearheads in some action footage, but it doesn't have anything to do with the two characters in the original series.
- Most of the negative reviews I've read seem to be annoyed with the fact that the movie either tries to do too much for a 2 hour running time, or that it simply isn't the TV series. I think it's understandable that the movie doesn't fulfill the wishes of every single fan, but most fans of the series seemed to enjoy the fact that the movie was a brand new vision of the themes in E7, but without reusing any of the same ideas. The only consensus that pretty much every single person has agreed on is that the action scenes are fantastic.[/spoiler]