YMMV / Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha Detonation

• Alternate Character Interpretation: In the flashbacks, Maxwell barely needed a stimulus to turn from a benevolent environmental researcher to a mass murdering sociopath willing to exploit Iris for military purposes. How do those two facets jive with each other, therefore, is up to speculation. Was he Evil All Along? Why was he working on an ecologist project in that case? Is he just interested in money and joined the Eltria project believing it would somehow make him rich? Was he a sincere worker whom the executives's callousness affect much more than he showed? What was his real reason to kill all his scientist colleagues, assuming it was not For the Evulz? This is even pointed out in-universe at the end with the movie, with characters wondering in which moment did he turn evil and whether it could have been avoided.
• Ass Pull:
  • Iris now having an entire army of duplicates, some of them so powerful that even Nanoha and Amitie struggle in individual scuffles. This had never been foreshadowed in the previous movie and raises the question of why didn't Iris deploy them earlier (aside from script convenience, that is).
  • Phil Maxwell revealing himself to be an amoral scientist in the instant the Eltria project was cancelled, even unveiling a completely new personality and goals, is so sudden and unexplained that it even gets lampshaded in the movie itself.
• Complete Monster: Phil Maxwell is the film's manipulative, sociopathic main antagonist and Iris's father. Pretending to be a well-meaning scientist, Maxwell would secretly create his daughter to be the ultimate soldier to profit from in wars all over space. When the project to restore Eltria is shut down, Maxwell has the entire population of the colony brutally gunned down. When confronted by Iris's sister figure Yuri, he reveals he's already infected her with his Formula system to make her another weapon he can exploit. When she manages to kill him regardless, he tricks Iris into trying to kill Yuri. Having backed himself up inside Iris, he manipulates her into controlling Yuri as a weapon and beginning to convert Earth into more weapons he can exploit for his own selfish ends. Fully resurrecting, he controls Iris and Yuri to fight their friends against their will, fully conscious the entire time. When Nanoha challenges him, he seeks to do the same to her. When finally defeated, Maxwell attempts to vaporize the city with a Kill Sat purely out of spite.
• Moral Event Horizon: Maxwell murdering the entire colony in cold blood. This stands out more because it was completely unnecessary to his goal to take Iris and Yuri to exploit as living weapons for his own gain.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The end of the final battle ends with Nanoha losing one of her arms and an eye off a suicide attack from Phil's last Iris Unit. While this does lead to an interesting character moment regarding how little she can care about her own life, there's no time for it to have any further affect on the film's story, since the denouement starts right after. It doesn't help that just a few minutes later her arm is back, with supplemental materials revealing it and one of her eyes are artificial replacements. Whatever implications this has on Nanoha's character will have to wait until the next installment, whenever that is.