well shit. just finished a journey of revisting the dgimon movies I had scene and checking out all the ones I hadn't seen, finishing with 02: The Beginning
first things first, holy shit most of the digimon movies sucked at actually having a cool climax. biggest culprits are the algomon movie, the armagedmon movie, the ornismon movie, and the gulfmon movie
Secondly, 02: The Beginning was way better than I expected from the memes. It's biggest sin is retconning Ukkomon to soft replace digignomes, and it's lesser sin is being a bit too grimdark with Lui's parents abusing him. But ultimately it was a movie about the importance of communication and it ended on a message of "You don't need devices or destiny to maintain a relationship (with your digimon) with feels like a well-deserved kick in the teeth for the writers that had digimon entries end with the humans and digimon being separated
that said, I have no idea why they still needed to kill Big Ukkomon beyond the need for a big fight scene after Lui spoke with him. Felt like they could have had all those action sequences happen first, and then Lui leaps into Ukkomon, and their chat happens. Maybe I literally blinked and missed a line. I dunno.
My ultimate winge though is we should have gotten picrel instead of TRI. I don't even dislike Meicoomon as a concept but it would have been so much cooler to have a series of ONA's about the cast travelling around the world working with rando tamers from place to place against a common threat than the whole thing taking place in tokyo