[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER ZERO-ONE 01HERS: KAMEN RIDER VULCAN AND VALKYRIE



All these old men won't die too soon
Flesh balloons still waving their arms around and
Slipping over the sides
Closing my eyes, making room
Oh, for somebody else
-Superchunk, “I Got Cut”

There’s a nice finality to this Zero-One movie. In a series about what parents owe to children, or what one generation can teach to another, we get this film that’s all about realizing when your ways won’t work anymore, so the best you can offer as you exit the stage is an example for the next generation, to either follow or reject as they confront the problems you’ve created.

This is another movie that I didn’t love, despite respecting its take on passing the torch. Fuwa and MetsubouJinrai are relics of another time, another war. Their solutions were always going to be measured in battles and destruction. What the future needs is people like Yua, who can see both sides of a conflict and work towards common ground. She was a tool who became a leader. She’s a soldier who questioned her mandate. She’s someone who saw beyond technology’s use to find something that reflects the soul and hopes of humanity. If anyone deserves to be the voice of reason in the future, it’s her.

Too bad she mostly eats shit in this superhero story, though! The grim inevitability of this film means that Fuwa’s sacrificial nature was always going to be put on a higher pedestal than Yua’s empathy and self-control, but MAN does Justice Serval just exist for one brutal beatdown by MetsubouJinrai. I like the suit better of the two new ones (Lightning Hornet’s a fun base for it), but Yua’s bold new upgrade is just more grist for Fuwa’s feral heroism.

Fuwa… it’s so funny, to see Fuwa as the mediating voice in a MetsubouJinrai rampage. That’s a cute final story for him, trying to tell violent Humagears that they’ve warped the message of a Humagear terrorist organization. Like, the deranged lunatic of the early Zero-One episodes is the one fighting for the soul of his former enemies. That’s a neat summation of Zero-One’s goals as a story, that we need to better understand the next generation (of technology, or of people) rather than resort to aggression and mistrust. Fuwa’s this story Working As Intended, but he’s still too violent to stick around.

I don’t know if his melancholy death worked for me. Him or MetsubouJinrai, honestly. The metaphor, that old ideas need to give way to new ideas, is solid. It’s the end-point of this story of generations. But MetsubouJinrai is all inference here, with Fuwa going Here’s What They’re Saying, and that keeps it from feeling like a mutual acceptance of obsolescence. He’s just detonating a rampaging piece of technology, which sort of undercuts the supportive speech he gives the Swords.

The two main Swords, 9 and 20, are okay. They’re very clearly Proto Fuwa and Proto Yua, filling the Doctor Who companion role of asking questions and getting lectured by the main characters. I liked them being in the film as a way of demonstrating Yua and Fuwa’s growth, but they were never really more than plot devices. They didn’t come across as characters to me.

Yeah, I… I don’t know if this one really did service to its characters, despite feeling like it honored Kamen Rider Zero-One as a show. It’s an ending that feels both obligatory and inevitable, which is a kind of fascinating space to exist in. Not the most fun to watch, but interesting to think about.