Steins;Gate: The Movie - Load Region of Déjà Vu

Steins;Gate: The Movie (2013) is not a standalone film and that belongs at the top. It continues the 2011 anime series, and without the series it will mean nothing. The series comes from a visual novel and its premise is that a group of students playing with a microwave accidentally build a device that can send messages into the past. Okabe changes time to fix one thing, and each change breaks another. Along the way the series constructs one of the most internally consistent time travel plots in the form. The film is set a year later, in August 2011. This time Okabe himself is the one disappearing. He is paying the price of excessive time travel: headaches first, then longer visions, and finally he is erased entirely into another worldline. The crucial part is that nobody remembers him. For everyone but Kurisu, Okabe never existed. So the search falls to her alone. The film inverts the dynamic of the series. There, Okabe was the one doing the saving. Here he is the one being saved. For people who loved the series it is a decent close. For anyone else it is an unnecessary appendix. It runs 90 minutes. Good for: anime, time travel, and anyone who has finished the Steins;Gate series. Less good for: viewers who have not seen the series will understand nothing. The pace is slow and little happens.