I'm having Thoughts about Descendants: Rise of Red again so now you all get to read about them.
Because this movie was a mess and I don't think it quite manages to be a Hot mess. Time Travel often is, it's a very hard trope to pull off correctly and by golly Descendants missed the mark by a wide margin.
number 1: The entire premise for sending Red and Chloe back in time is to alter the Red Queen's personality. By definition, accomplishing this would erase the reason they went back in time and we're left with a paradox. I don't mind ignoring this paradox so much if the rest of the movie is good, but. It's not.
(To be clear I thought the characters they introduced were great, but they squeezed so much into the movie nothing was fully explored)
number 2: Red and Chloe accomplish nothing. They did not prevent the prank by catching Uliana and her crew in Merlin's office. The books would have been a trap either way, which means Uliana would have gotten caught in the original timeline, and the prank still happened. So the girls didn't change anything, and there's no reason the Red Queen should have changed when they went back to the present.
number 3: they spent the whole movie building up to the Castle Dance and we didn't get a Castle Dance. The girls went back to the future before the dance happened. I'm very salty about this.
number 4: Red and Chloe could have prevented the prank with one very simple action: Telling Bridgette about it. All they had to do was go up to her, say "Hey we were worried about Uliana retaliating against you and spied on her, heard about her plan to give you a cupcake to turn you into a monster, so don't eat any weird cupcakes, mkay."
(Now, obviously, this skirts around the moral quandary Chloe wrestled with and isn't nearly as dramatic, so, of course we can't do that. But imagine a movie where they did tell Bridgette, and then we get the Castle Dance, and all the drama we could have had there from the girls trying to keep the cupcake away from her and Bridgette opting to eat the cupcake anyway to try and be Uliana's friend or something. Like we could have gone in some really interesting directions here.)
Ultimately a lot of this movie suffers from a pacing issue, which is common in DC original movies. They're trying to fit big epic storylines in a kid's movie time slot, so everything has to move pretty quickly.
But the girls did not change anything when they went back in time and I will not forgive that plot hole.
