While there are good action scenes to be had, some good character moments here and there, and the film did help me want to get to know the Kamen Rider franchise as a whole, I really, really, really, really didn’t like what that film did to Marvelous since what he did especially his treatment of his friends (Joe much more so) comes across as extremely out of character considering everything he and his crew have gone through over the course of their home series even it is a plan to outwit the villains. I honestly don’t think Yonemura even sat down and actually watched Gokaiger or even any other season of Super Sentai or most of Kamen Rider, or even anything related to Gavan considering the next Super Hero Taisen film before jumping into writing this particular movie.

Not to play Devil's advocate or nothing, but I sort of respected the way the movie suggested that the production history of Kamen Rider and Super Sentai -- specifically the way public interest switched over to Super Sentai during the Showa era -- was the real world expression of the battle between the two franchises. I wish the movie had made more a deal of it than just some tossed off Owner line, but I thought it was a clever way of contextualizing the "rivalry".

i mean tsukasa's hair is pretty bad in this one

Every time Blade or Joker Undead show up in a Phase 2 Heisei movie, a thousand Blade fans grip the arms of their chair in anger.

It's weird how much Marvelous is a jerk in this one? I don't know him, but even the Decade side of the story has Tsukasa trying to appeal to Kaitou. With the Gokaiger side, Marvelous is outright telling his all of his teammates that they were never friends. Seems harsh!

The thing is that not once Marvelous acted this way towards his teammates at any point before the events of this film and afterwards and he certainly wouldn’t keep them in the dark in a extremely unnecessary and even downright cruel way.

It just really pisses me off since I really loved Gokaiger in terms of both the series and the characters and yes, you should check this series out sometime if you want to get into the Super Sentai franchise somewhere down the line.

I feel like this movie set up a trend of this kind of "versus" movies that usually just have to contrive a reason for the two sides to fight each other in order to rile things up when fans would probably equally just enjoy seeing their favorite heroes working together and interacting with each other. Which is why I usually prefer the more normal Sentai Versus or Rider x Sentai Versus that happen in the actual shows.

Although if you were going to pair a Rider against a Sentai Red, Decade and Marvelous make a lot of sense. Although I'd probably enjoy a begrudging buddy comedy between these two more than I would them trying to kill each other.

Also look at all the returning in-suit heroes because there was no way we could get that many returning actors back for this! And watch them all die for the sake of the plot until they all show up again...I'm sure that won't become a common thing!

It definitely comes up a lot as a popular season! They've got that 10-year anniversary thing coming up, which (if OOO's 10-year anniversary outing is anything to go by) must mean it's worth getting the whole cast reunited for.

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I read on the Sentai Wiki (while looking for the name of JAKQ's Red) that this movie was in promotion of the 10th anniversary of Super Hero Time, so it makes sense to use the Anniversary Heroes as a way to bring back nearly every suit.

And, yeah, these two dudes seemed to be on a wavelength. They each seemed like the type to have a needlessly convoluted plan that required a bunch of stuff out of their control to go exactly as expected.

Still, they managed to get way more folks than I remembered. Owner! Naomi! The Den-O Imagin! Eiji! Hina! And that's on top of the cast of Fourze, Go-Busters, Gokaiger, and half of Decade's cast.

Hey, it's that movie where the good guys pretend to fight but are actually tricking the villains into gathering in that rock quarry. What a novel plot that we've never seen before and will definitely never see again.

Yeah, this one has always disappointed me. Decade and Gokaiger teaming up was an obvious and fantastic concept, but the movie just completely wastes it.

THANK YOU!

This has bugged me about this film for years. I legitimately think that Yonemura forgot that Doc is actually a Gokaiger and not, like, the male sidekick character that shows up in so many Rider shows.

I love that quarry, though. Kamen Rider Quarry. Seeing that always means things are going to get real fun. If there's any more logical place to have an All Rider x All Sentai conclusion, I can't think of it.

Yonemura mistook him for Onodera, the non-powered, non-Rider character from Kamen Rider Decade.

On the topic of the Gokaigers: What is the deal with Gokai Silver? Why does he... why is he acting like that?

He's a Sentai Fanboy! In an anniversary series where the main cast doesn't know what a 'Sentie' is or what's so Super about them, their sixth ranger eventually comes along with literal encylopedias and gushes about everything to do with Super Sentai every two seconds. Apparently that also translates to "holy shit Kamen Rider is also so cool"

And also he knows about Metal Heroes too. In the next Taisen so we can just say Gai is just a toku fanboy

I feel like the actors for Owner and Naomi are just on-call by Toei in case they ever need them to appear in some random movie or special with the rest of the Imagin.
Kamen Rider Quarry so iconic it got mentioned in a video game.
He is us.

Oky, cool, got it. He was so excited and non-verbal at the end of the movie that (and I'm not joking here) I was wondering if he was, like, a dog's brain in the body of a man or something. It was strange!

I would bet money that Naomi has appeared in more Kamen Rider episodes than any other actor. Two full series (as different characters), plus a boatload of films and crossover projects? I gotta think she takes the record, at least in Heisei.

Gai was mimicking the pose that Fourze is teaching to the Go-Busters and coming across as rather adorkable. Though, that could be my personal bias talking. :p

Admittedly, that particular bit along with the latter two effectively becoming besties is one of the film’s better moments and without going into spoilers regarding the next Super Hero Taisen movie after it, this won’t be the last time you see Gai having some sort of role in the story in some capacity.

Thinking about it actually, if this was your only experience with Gokai Silver... god, yeah, I can see why you'd get that impression :lol He's just easily overcome with excitement at seeing literally any Toku hero in person, no less big events like the current Rider and Sentai interacting and becoming friends and shaking hands. God knows how he survived a microsecond of being in a crowd of Every Single Sentai And Rider

It was this weird combination of him being rendered a mass of panting excitement, and Marvelous immediately shoving him to the ground as Gokai Silver tries to tackle him. It was sort of a lot! I don't know if people ever act like that, or should be treated like that! But, y'know, the way Marvelous treats his friends in this movie...

^ Trust me. Marvelous really is a much better character in his own home series and in later appearances after this film and I honestly would not blame you for having a bad first impression of the character due to this. Then again, this is just personal bias on my part since I have watched all of Gokaiger not long before watching this particular movie when I was going through Go-Busters at the time.

Oh, I don't hold this movie against the Gokaigers in general or Marvelous in particular. Without even having seen the Sentai show he comes from, this film felt like he was out of character. Me and him don't have any beef!

That’s very good to hear. :)

Ah yes, the Japanese version of The Sting.

I have never seen Sentai when I saw this movie (as I was watching Fourze cononically, I guess you could say), but somehow, I loved the idea of Gokaiger being a bunch of space pirates who could use every Sentai (at that point) to fight. Though him beating the seven Riders solo was kind of cheap, but in the context of the movie, it gets a pass. And our boy Decade is leading Shocker again, what a villain!

Part of me always felt like if Rider and Sentai actually were fighting to the death, Sentai would likely win for having the numbers advantage, and depending on the Riders' overpowered forms, would be their best shot at victory. But the thing that still bothers me is how Decade can use Ichigo, when he was only limited to the Heisei Riders at the time, of course the justification could always be summed up as "a Brand New Toy!"

And let's not forget the coolest looking giant robot with the dumbest name: Big Machine! Seriously, this makes some of the goofy Showa villain names sound cool. And Kaito is the true twist villain (for petty reasons), with Fourze and the Go-Busters uniting to take the final boss down, which I absolutely loved, even if the final fight only amounted to "here are some brand new toys!" there are still a lot of great action scenes and cameos that make this a fun flick, despite how bare bones it is, which only shows more with many of the future movies.

Yeah, there's a bunch of stuff like that I'd crab about, but the whole Double Scheme aspect of the story lets a lot of that get waved away. Definitely bothered me the first time I watched it, though.

I laughed pretty hard at the big heroic entrance at the quarry for the hidden Sentai and Rider guys, where we get this sweet shot of all the Riders running in... followed by four shots of the exact same size for all the Sentai to run in. They got the numbers, for sure!

I'm not sure I'd even give it that first thing, but I'm happy you've once again found things to enjoy in a movie not even I like all that much!

If I could say one thing positive that you wouldn't, it's that Diend's giant robot rampage was a great choice (well, a "great" choice), if only because it took something on that stupidly overdone scale for me to realize that Kaitou is definitely for sure straight up in love with Tsukasa, rather than it just being the usual rival deal. That is a plot point from this film that's pretty much unforgettable, and that's hard for me to say about the rest of it, which is often a huge blur.

(Doesn't Decade have #1's belt when he's transformed into him in this for the sake of selling the ruse? I can buy him having Showa cards despite being the Heisei guy because that's already how his show went, but like, that's not how his belt works. I remember that bothering me, but I suppose this is the least of the problems with Tsukasa in this thing, isn't it?)

The stuff with Fourze and the Go-Busters is fun when it's there, though.

Yeah, that's a new wrinkle for Decade's powers in this movie, alongside the out-of-nowhere reveal that both Decade and Gokai Red can send people to an interdimensional pocket. It's always nice when a mystery plot hinges on a brand-new ability that's never set up and never seen again. A+ storytelling!

I should point out here, that he's shown acquiring the Showa cards in his half of the Decade/W movie. Apparently he had to murder the Showa rider in the rider war to get them.

Yeah, what I was trying to get at there is pretty much that because Showa stuff had worked its way so thoroughly into Decade's whole mythos by the end anyway, I don't at all question the idea of Tsukasa deciding to transform into a Showa Rider if he feels like it. It's just very specifically the idea of it being a Showa Rider (or any Rider, really) not wearing a DecaDriver that bugs me, because that's like half the fun of his concept in my mind. You see that belt and you immediately know you're looking at a form change rather than a different person. Having Tsukasa actually attempting to impersonate another Rider is just one more way Super Hero Taisen subtly misses the point of these characters in my opinion.

(I mean, I'm making it sound like a huge deal, but it's only a tiny little problem by itself. There's just kind of a lot of those that add up in this movie...)

Oh no, that was absolutely the movie cheating to trick the audience. It's definitely bullshit, but so is pretty much everything else in this movie.

Well yeah, I agree about the belt thing being odd. I guess I always assumed it was a thing he could do, but normally would never bother.

KAMEN RIDER FOURZE THE MOVIE: EVERYONE! LET’S FEEL THE UNIVERSE!

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I love the end of this movie. It’s maybe my favorite non-Tomoko-saying-Amazon thing from Fourze.

It’s hard to say if I like this ending more than the TV series ending. TV show’s got a fantastic ending, one of Kamen Rider’s best. I love the idea of the heroes’ gratitude defeating the villain. I love how it reframes a struggle against the cosmic forces of destruction as a way of becoming better people; High School as crucible, which is how most people (especially the nerds who write/watch tokusatsu) remember it. It’s joyous, which counts for a lot.

But I will be goddamned if I don’t think of this movie’s ending – the formation of the Fusion Switch – more often than I think of the TV show’s ending. It’s so perfect. It’s Gentarou (and the planet) being saved by everything he ever did, every person he ever helped. Every tiny act of kindness, every friend Gentarou ever made, they come together to empower him. He doesn’t have to make some impassioned speech or anything. He needs help, and no one even needs an explanation: they just help him. It’s those shots of the Kamen Rider Club pressing Switches into the hands of old friends, recent rivals, teachers, students… like, the show’s main villain even pitches in to help out Gentarou. It’s a beautiful ending.

The entire movie ends up being in service to that sequence, so I can’t really find it in me to place too much weight on the film’s deficiencies.

Which, it’s got ‘em! Skydain and Groundain are paper-thin villains, robots who hate humanity for no specific reason. Inga Blink (from the hit anime/manga Gantz, apparently) is a bad-ass secret agent who a) probably could’ve just told the Kamen Rider Club what was happening instead of trying to murder them a bunch of times and then weirdly telling them that she can’t murder people; b) exists to give Ryuusei something to do, since he’s basically irrelevant to the whole Gentarou And The Power Of Friendship thing; c) like, Ryuusei doesn’t even really contribute anything to Meteor Fusion States! He just stands there!; and d) pales in comparison to Tomoko, so this potential love triangle just irritates me. Black Knight's an unstoppable weapon until he just gets randomly exploded two-thirds of the way through. Wizard’s debut is pretty stylish, but it both stops the story dead, and feels to some degree out-of-character. The amount of action is maybe too much?

Other than that, though, it’s a pretty stellar (sorry) summer movie for Fourze. It includes the entire team, for starters. Everyone contributes to the action, which isn’t a given! Miu and JK, who are usually relegated to reaction shots, actually get some pretty heavy combat sequences. (Tomoko and Yuuki get a fairly sweet one, as well.) Fittingly for a story about how Fourze’s power comes from all of Gentarou’s friends, every single member of the KRC gets to pitch in.

And, hell, so does every Switch! There’s a fight where it looks like Fourze cycles through all 40 Switches, which is nuts. I expect some form changes in a movie, but to use literally every suit and power-up? Between both of the show’s Riders? In one extended fight scene? Crazy. Completely over-the-top!

Speaking of insane heights, I love how the combat is choreographed in this movie. It’s a ton of wirework, which makes use of the entire frame. Stuff is coming in from top corners, or moving along the upper edge of the frame, which ends up making the whole movie feel extradimensional. The fights feel bigger on every axis: dudes are rocketing into the front of the shot, or gliding from one side to the other, or shooting from top to bottom. It’s a film that somehow feels like gravity doesn’t exist, even before the cast goes into space. Really exciting fight scenes for our two Riders.

Sorry, did I say two?

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Early-bird debut of (Kamen Rider) Wizard! I don’t really remember, and I’ll find out for sure in a few days, but does Wizard’s voice sound super weird here? There’s a distortion to it I don’t remember from the show, and Haruto’s voice sounds higher than I recall. It didn’t sound right, but maybe I’ve just forgotten. Either way, this wasn’t one of my favorite debuts. There’s no real chemistry with Fourze or Meteor. There’s a specific kind of self-assured charm Haruto has, and it doesn’t really come across here. The writing has him as more Dismissive and Ignorant, which… like, I get why Meteor is so pissed at him!

(Also, it will always crack me up that this movie has him refer to himself as Kamen Rider Wizard – a name he vows to go by from that point forward – and then literally no one calls him that for the first 51 episodes of his TV show. His TV show, the one where neither Kamen Rider is called a Kamen Rider within the world of the show. And they belabor the naming here. AMAZING.)

The villains in this one are totally forgettable to me (they coast by on colorful suits and Showa heritage; whatever), but it’s almost irrelevant for how much this movie pays off the journey of the TV show. It’s everyone Gentarou ever helped – even the show’s main goddamn villain – lifting him back up and giving him the strength to protect them. It’s friendship as both mission and reward. It's all sorts of people working together to achieve the impossible. It’s many things combining to make something special.

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So positives, I really enjoyed the big old All Switch battle against the Horoscopes. It was really cool to see Fourze and Meteor use the entirety of their arsenals to slowly grind their way through the strongest enemies in the series. Also you just focusing your post on the everyone does Switch On scene is great because I loved that scene too. Though admittedly I still love the "Graduation" scene in the finale proper, the entirety of that sequence was just magical and I'll never forget it.

Also you're not mishearing Wizard's voice being weird, it is. There's this weird filter that they sometimes put on cameo Riders that I noticed. I think I remember Fourze's sounding a bit differently, pretty sure Philip sounded hella different, and a Rider coming up later also sounds odd.

Anyway, for as much as I love Fusion States and it's first fight alongside the finisher that caps off the second half of the fight... I don't really like the second half where it becomes Fourze fighting against giant vehicles.

And this is for probably one of the weirdest reasons ever. But I'm going back to Battride War for my dislike. So Battride War 2 had the neat gimmick of deciding "Hey we're going to pay tribute to the movies that Riders were in" and that meant doing Fourze's movie. And the part they lift it from... the bike joust against the giant vehicle Skydain and Groundain.

And uh... it's not good. Trying to slash at them while riding a bike in that game is not good to control at all. And then there's the fact that the boss has two phases, one where their on the ground, and once you deplete the healthbar, Groundain dies and it's just Skydain zooming all over the place while you swing wildly to try and hit her and that just ends up making it my least favorite level in that entire series.

Fourze, much like the other big Friendship show -- Decade -- manages to have two different endings that are both pretty good. I like the way this incorporates not just the KRC and the school, but (to my limited memory) everyone they ever helped on the show. That's... how was that not saved for the TV show's ending? It's so smart!

This was the first of the Phase 2 guys where I was like I Think It's A Different Guy, though. Fourze and OOO sounded like themselves (I mean, Eiji was completely in the Early-Bird appearance), while this just sounded wrong. Both the actual audio, and the performance.

groundain is literally a truck from showa, so thumbs down

So overall good movie imo. But Fourze wasn't just the 40th anniversary but also Ishinomori. And I gotta say the way go about it for both this and the next movie is a bold choice to say the least. Let's turn lesser known Ishinomori heroes into homcidal villians, that I'll honor the guy's memory. It's even worst with the next one but will get to that when we get to it.

Hmm. I vaguely remember the Inazuman stuff from the next movie, but I think I liked it better than this? Skydain and Groundain are just so boring in this one. AS soon as they're revealed as the villains, they lose all of my interest. It's 100% just The Power Of Friendship after that, and Fourze could've been defeating anything/anyone. It's (and I don't know if I really touched on this enough) the biggest weakness this film has, that they aren't really saying anything about Fourze or Friendship or whatever? Like, at least Inga's presence brings up the need to work as a team, but she already worked in a team? With Black Knight? And Kyodain are already a team, too?

Very weird choice of villains.

I don't go back to it nearly as much as the Double summer movie, but I enjoy this one quite a bit for similar reasons. The intensity of it is great, and like you said, it's got a killer ending. I'll always remember it as the one where Fourze does his handshake with a giant space robot, because that's the sort of moment that defines this character for me. He really makes friends with *everyone*.

Yeah, if you haven't noticed yet, fight scenes like this are a bit of a tradition in insane Sakamoto movies. Or, heck, not even just the movies? He's also the guy who directed episode 38 of Ghost where Takeru uses all his basic forms in the climax, for example, and there's Ultraman stuff he's done that also goes out of its way to get a ton of forms in a short amount of time.

The distortion is there in the show, but way less prominent, (I always really liked the effect, actually), but yeah, his voice was way deeper right away in the show proper.

Meteor told him not to arbitrarily call himself a Kamen Rider! Haruto is just being a good listener, Die!

The action in the movie was good, but overall I didn't care for it too much. As the one guy who is dead neutral to Fourze, the ending to both this and the TV show felt really hamfisted and undeserved.

Fourze for me was a show that I got very little out of; Feeling that it more came across like a standard season of Power Rangers than anything else. I liked a grand total of two characters and that was about it. Meanwhile, Gentaro and JK were doing everything in their power to make me not like alot of the show's' aspects, but thankfully Meteor and Spooky Chick were always there to pick up the slack.

Ah yes, Haruto's well-known tendency to listen to strangers about his mission as Wizard. That's the Wizard I remember, now: always taking criticism on board and altering his demeanor and approach accordingly. I can't believe I'd forgotten that! It's a good thing I'm rewatching these movies.

The bit in this movie where Gentarou is in tears because he accidentally caused a computer he was trying to befriend to commit suicide... I can see that not working for some people! It's a very big swing, even for Gentarou. I loved it for its simplicity (Gentarou doesn't want anything bad to happen to his friends, no matter what they are), but it's weird for how little presence XVII has in the actual narrative by this point. Fourze's all big emotions! Like teenagers!

Let’s face it, one of the issues with featuring a character before their series has begun airing/production/writing is that there’s bound to be a few things that don’t seem off when you get to the series proper (Eiji carrying his own Core Medals, Gaim doing a Rider Kick, Takeru being essentially a floating zombie and that’s just some notable Rider examples)

Oh, for sure. I'm not mad about a completely different creative team getting minor details about a character wrong, especially when that character's actual creative team is still nailing down those minor details. There's a bit of guess-work that comes with an Early-Bird debut, and I'm okay with that trade-off.

Still, it's funny to get a look into the, like, embryonic versions of these characters. Funny to see how it's just that little bit wrong.

They really advertised finally having all 12 Horoscopes in one movie, together, and fighting the Heroes and it was the perfect excuse for Sakamoto to go full Sakamoto and have the Riders use everything to take them down, cycling through forms/gimmicks/etc. And then Wizard shows up for the finish to take down the "main ones" left since that was reserved for the heroes in the actual series.

Inga Blink really kind of cemented the "Sakamoto Girls" thing for me by that point. Which, okay, maybe not a lot of character depth but she's hot and kicks butt, and that's about it.

Skydain and Groundain are the first but not the last attempt at taking older properties and then turning them into villains, but the most I can say about them is that their suits look really good and Ayumi Kinoshita is playing a villain, so that was enough for me.

Random thing I remember is Cosmic States (or was it Meteor Fusion States?) riding Fourze's bike. Like, how often do we actually see the Rider, in their Final Form, ride the bike?

The scene of everyone coming together to help Gentaro reminded me a lot of when the W supporting cast/past cases cheered on Kamen Rider and that gave W their new power up to finish Eternal. You might not remember some of the characters who they show, but you can still appreciate the sentiment.

Meteor Fusion States I will always remember for just being an excuse for Gentaro to cut loose and go Bruce Lee on the villains and just beat the @#$% out of them while the theme song plays in the background, which has got to be one of my favorite final fights in a Rider movie. At that point they really couldn't improve on Fourze's movie exclusive forms, especially considering what came next.

Speaking of the theme song, "Voyagers" is a surprisingly atmospheric yet epic ending song for the movie, and one of the rare times the singer for the series' Opening contributes to the Ending song for the movie. I think there were more examples in Phase 2 than there were Phase 1 (save for when they just reused the series' Opening for the Ending or Gackt who did like every Decade Theme Song) but it was still really neat.
I love how that's the "off thing. It's like if TaToBa's debut had it actually use its Rider Kick and succeed with it.

Gentarou is absolutely the kind of dude who would have an emotional breakdown from a five-second commercial. It is physically impossible for him to not get immediately emotionally invested in everything.

As for the film, this is probably one of my favorite summer movies in the whole franchise. It's a really good distillation of all of Fourze's characters and it has a lot of fun with the admittedly bonkers premise of "robots trick a bunch of high school students into going into space to help them steal an orbiting super weapon." I'll shamelessly self-plagiarize my comments from when I rewatched the film last year (it feels like it's been longer than that, but that's kind of the last two years in a nutshell, I suppose):

Never liked they turned old superheroes into villains. Its disrespectful.

It's incredibly rare! Part of me wishes that Fusion States had led to some sort of cosmic update for the bike. I'd say "it could combine with Meteor's", but, no thanks:

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Maybe some sort of new paint job for Fourze's bike, though? Sparkly purple paint? I don't know.

It's very similar, yeah. The things that makes the Fourze version work better for me are the mechanics of it -- actual Here's How It Works stuff, instead of feel-good Magical Realism -- and the way it doesn't... like, it's not about people praying to Fourze to save their lives. Most of them don't even know what the hell is going on in the plot (like, no one seems all that concerned that space robots are planning to laser beam Japan into oblivion), so them opting to help Gentarou is just Gentarou Needs Help, the end. That's so much cooler to me.

I like the callback from the beginning, where Gentarou tries to befriend his Computer Lab computer (complete with handshake via mouse) and it almost dies. He can't bear to watch any more of his computer friends die! NOT AGAIN!

It's a little unusual, yeah. I don't know enough about the other Ishinomori characters to feel aggrieved or offended, but this movie probably didn't play great for old-school Kyodain fans.

Oops my mistake corrected.