God Speed Love has the distinction of being the first Kamen Rider film I actually got to see in the theater, so I have a soft spot for it. (And also a nifty little card holder thingy that has had a Suica card in it for, uh. Almost 15 years. It sits on a shelf now, because Kamen Rider promotional items are not always well made and I would like for it not to fall apart due to overuse.) I want to join the camp of appreciating how amazing it looks - it is visually spectacular and I will occasionally go back to it for that alone.

Nostalgia and visuals not withstanding, I really enjoy AUs in the canon-divergence flavor; I think some really great character exploration can be done by altering the setting and looking at how characters might change. Experience is a huge part of building character and personality, so when the experiences that make a character who they are don't happen in the new canon, how does the character develop differently?

Which is a bit of a roundabout way of saying I can see why the creative team went for a different setting and different versions of the characters. I don't think they did it well; it's really hard to see what might have led to the characters we see on screen coming out of the people we know and love from the show. Which is a more roundabout way of saying that it's a concept that I really love but I found the execution disappointing.

I do have some new appreciation, given Fish's take on the bleakness providing a deliberate contrast to the joy at the end, instead of just being grimdark for the sake of being melodramatically grimdark.

I always did love the rose bit, though.

As for other Kamen Rider movies, because today apparently I'm just going to talk a lot :D I tend to have generally positive feelings about them (Hell Yes OOO In Generations Final, for example, and the Wizard movie was super fun, and there were multiple Den-Oh movies I enjoyed, and I could do this literally forever) but since I also really love time loops, I am the only person I know who liked the Kamen Rider 4 special for Drive :lol It is my go-to for warm fuzzies or just to relax for a bit with something I don't have to think too hard about. There is no good reason for this, except time loop, lol

pet tax :)

What about the debut of Hyper Kabuto though, that was pretty awesome right? What do you think of the suit and the ability to fly and move so fast that time goes backwards?

I was really surprised by the part where Caucasus killed Kagami and Hyper Kabuto just went back and changed the outcome. Sure, it was kind of pointless since that version of Kagami ended up being negated by the next timeline change but I think it was a cool way to show off Hyper Kabuto's ability.

This movie is also the debut of the Natives, those Worms with the large horns who fought Kabuto on the bridge.

Wow, you laughed at Hiyori's death?

Replace "Kabuto" with "Hibiki" and I feel like we had this exact same conversation about that movie except our roles were reversed. I find it humorous that you critique God Speed Love for the characters acting like different people but not Hibiki's movie where the characters were literally different people. Can you identify anything specific to God Speed Love that elaborates on why it didn't work for you by comparison?

My favorite summer movie is Surprise Future but my favorite Movie War and movie overall is Movie War Ultimatum!

Yeah, I think the fact that everyone is just so different, especially Tendo and Hiyori, is there to highlight how everything in this timeline is not how it should be. Seeing Hiyori being more open and Tendo being not just slightly emotional but out of control emotional as if he was suddenly a normal human being, it all just gives this feeling that the world is terrible and they're acting OOC out of desperation, with Hiyori's imminent death making her afraid of being alone with nobody by her side and Tendo faced with a scenario he can't make better. These are characters pushed to their limit.

The dilapidated Tokyo Tower could also be a metaphor for a wilting flower, starved of water due to a world with no oceans, which symbolizes that the world is on the verge of death and the comet being destroyed by the second meteor completely destroys all hope of saving it.

Ketaros' death scene is easily the most humorous moment in the movie for me, especially with how it happens immediately after Neo-ZECT Girl says to Hercus "We still have Yamato!" I mean, talk about irony!

Yeah, it's kind of hard to even talk about canon when time travel is involved. But I think of God Speed Love as being like a prequel to the show and setting up the canon while technically being non-canon itself except for the belt which is an artifact, kind of like Sento and Ryuuga in the last episode of Build.

Anyway, when I watched Dinosaur Panic last year, I thought the whole breaking a giant meteor in to a smaller meteor in the past thing seemed familiar and after rewatching God Speed Love, well now I get it. The major difference is that Dinosaur Panic exists in a causal loop whereas God Speed Love is literally removed from the main timeline.

One of my favorite things! In all of Kamen Rider! Just them taking all of the little things Gentaro has done for people, and showing the enormity of its value... so great. In some ways, I prefer its directness to the ending of the TV series, but they're honestly both great. Good pick!

Neat! Thanks!

That's pretty much my defense for loving Heisei Generations as much as I do. For someone who barely understood that there were other Kamen Rider shows, or how they worked, I had no idea what I was supposed to be feeling about all of these non-Ex-Aid folks. (I thought Shinnosuke was a supporting character on Ghost's show!) It was a blast, though; this deluge of costumes and characters. I try to view things critically, but I am not immune to nostalgia!

That was probably a trip!

Good choices! There are so many fun and good Kamen Rider movies!

Adorable.

I liked it, but it's almost impossible for me to appreciate it in the context of a story I can't invest in. I'm very much looking forward to being able to talk about it when it debuts on the TV series, though!

Yes. Hard. Her death was something that already didn't really work (she doesn't get to do anything in the movie beyond act as a concept for Tendou and Kagami to protect, so her dying from Narratively Convenient Illness isn't doing anything for the story), and then they dressed her up in a wedding dress, and then everyone's humming her childhood song of God Bless America (?????), and then it all just keeps going into Grim Determination as two skinny men walk along a beach... It takes a scene that doesn't work, piles on elements that are insane, and then stays on the scene way longer than they should've. I was dying watching it, just like Hiyori.

I can try? (Although, keep in mind: I don't really think the Hibiki movie worked either, if I recall.)

I think the main difference, and the thing that buys a lot of Let's See Where This Goes from me, is that the story in Hibiki was fun? It's an AU set in a totally different world with totally different characters, but it has an energy to it, a playfulness, that GSL just doesn't have at all, outside a death scene or two. There's a cast of fun characters, and a bunch of good gags. Hard to get too grumpy when I'm being entertained.

Plus, the story in Hibiki has more to care about? Kabuki alone is a hell of a villain, and that dude's story is incredibly compelling. By comparison, who is there to get invested in from this movie, as far as villains go? What is there about ZECT's plan that even makes sense, let alone allows for introspection or pathos?

Finally, while I didn't care about the formation of Takeshi like Kurona did, that's at least something of value for the main narrative. Here, you can maybe argue that this is a prequel to the main series, but it's really hard to see how that Tendou/Hiyori scene lines up with Hiyori's TV flashbacks. Beyond that, it's neither addressing the themes of the series (something Hibiki is also guilty of) nor adding to our understanding of the characters. (For me, anyway; I know that you and Fish found something of worth in the new versions of our old favorites, but it didn't work for me at all.)

It was... something! I think it infected my brain.


I guess to actually get around to the question... my favourite summer movies are OOO, Build's and Fourze's; because the movie apple doesn't fall far from the series tree; or something! Something I like about a summer movie most is when it's able to basically just be the series in a nice hour/hour-and-a-half package; something you can just watch and all the feelings and vibes from it come rushing to you and is exactly what the season was about -- and OOO and Fourze's are exactly that! Do I need to say much more than Eiji proclaiming every single person is his family, or Gentarou making friends with a freaking space station? I can't really say much more; those alone are just perfect and it's pulled off so well!

Build's on the other hand enhances the experience for me. If OOO and Fourze's movies are what it's about then Build the series was almost set-up for everywhere Build's takes it. Does it have uninspiring villains? Sure. Does it flounder a little? Yeah. Does it suck that multiple emotional high points in the series are retconned as things The Blood Squad did? ... yeah, what the fuck?? But that cannot take away from a movie where Banjou and Sento's relationship reaches its apex; as they're torn away from each other only for them to come back together and fuse into a mess of a being that saves the day with love & peace. What more could I want?

I think I should mention that the actress playing Hiyori got ill for real while filming this movie. So the character will be phased out of the show for the next few episodes, though not without some awkwardness involved.

And history repeated itself next year, when Den-O’s leading lady got ill filming their movie. Though instead of phasing her out until she could return, they just pulled a Doctor Who on the situation.

One of my favorite things about the Fourze movie (at least in my memory) is that a chunk of it is built around the KRC needing to train for a mission to space -- when they already go to space after school every single day.

(Also, I love that the Wizard cameo has him proclaiming that he's "Kamen Rider Wizard", a thing I'm pretty sure he never refers to himself as on his TV show.)

Oh no!

Ooh, I like that interpretation! Definitely seems like the kind of symbolism this movie would go for. I mean, it does start snowing after Tendou saves the day.

You've really gotta take the laughs in God Speed Love wherever you can find them (Die certainly picked an interesting place!), and I definitely think the dark humor of having the movie-exclusive Riders themed after Olympic medal colors in order of how long they survive is pretty dang amusing. Although if we're talking about how memorable their deaths were, then Ketaros absolutely gets the gold medal. :lol

Well at least she's still the most relatable character then! :p

I'm honestly not even sure why I feel as generous towards this movie as I do, when it's doing so many things I don't really like as ideas any more than you do. I guess the way I'd put it is that I just found it interesting as I was watching it? Like, "fun" isn't quite the right word, but I also wasn't bored, or mad, or anything like that. It goes all in on the weird choices it makes in a way I find a little fascinating.

Plus, Hiyori did get to say "nande boku ga...", so maybe that's enough to keep me happy. Or maybe it just really is *that* stylish visually, who knows?

This is definitely what I like to see too! I don't know if you could say that about God Speed Love outside of it being really weird, which Kabuto is in spades, but the ones I'd consider truly great all meet these criteria. Which is actually a whole lot of them, now that I think about it. Like, I was going to name some examples, but nearly half of them that even exist instantly leapt to mind. Huh.

Right?? I think just about all the post-Decade ones are like this for me. Aside from, uh, the soccer movie. I'm genuinely looking forward to when we get subs for Zero-One's movie, and I feel like getting to Ghost's movie in my rewatch is going to be... pretty interesting, if nothing else

I was going to wait to talk about this until after it affected the series, since I would consider that to be a spoiler (YMMV). But yeah, Hiyori's actress, Yui Satonaka (Google warning: there is another Japanese actress named Yui Satonaka who... let's just say makes movies for a very different audience), is generally said to have gotten really ill during the filming of Kabuto. She retired from the entertainment industry after the show ended. This is the vague production issue I mentioned in one of my early responses to this thread, as the show had to figure out how to work around the absence of one of its central characters. She doesn't leave entirely, but she makes very few appearances after episode 32.

I stumbled across this video a week or two ago while looking up some Kabuto information and it gives a pretty decently researched rundown of what happened. There's not a lot of public information about it, but what actually may have been more complex then the "she got sick" explanation I'd always heard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57Z1...ature=emb_logo