[DreadBringer]

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Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

KAMEN RIDER: BEYOND GENERATIONS

The true legacy of Kamen Rider that will carry on for the next 50 years: most crossover movies are pretty goddamn boring.

I thought this one was pretty much a bust, save a couple clever ideas late in the game. It’s a story that the Saber cast is around for, without them ever feeling crucial to the narrative. (Like, there’s nothing thematically linking them to the story of Ryunosuke and Hideo, beyond an If You Squint thing about Ryunosuke wanting to keep a promise to his son that they’d ride the bullet train; they don’t.) Similarly, while the main arc of Kamen Rider Century is about family, it’s more about Daddy Issues, which means you could plug in nearly any Heisei Rider (and half of the Reiwa ones) and still feel like this story was in their wheelhouse. And that’s the huge problem with the story of Kamen Rider Century: it doesn’t specifically need Ikki or Touma to make it work.

Yeah, honestly the movies are unappealing for me. Ofc it's just a trope and it by itself isn't bad, but crossovers are often just done as a fanservice (and for Toei, more toys) to get some franchises mixing up. I felt the need to watch it to not missing out on some spoilers happening to characters when reading up info (only done it when you did too so that I can leave comments), and ofc you have the need to cover everything about the current series you're watching.

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Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

Even setting aside the irrelevance of our two main Riders to this movie… the story of Ryunosuke and Hideo sort of isn’t much? It’s barely enough to fill a normal two-parter, let alone a feature-length film, until you convolute the holy shit out of it so that just repeating it sounds like it’s two or three movies instead of one. Ryunosuke wanted to do mad science experiments on unsuspected victims, he abandoned his family to do them, one of his victims was like Hey I Don’t Like Being Modified Into A Shocker Monster, Ryunosuke was like Dang I Get It, tried to return to his family after god knows how long as a Shocker fascist, gets experimented on, gets SHOT INTO SPACE FOR SOME REASON, gets sucked into a wormhole (as one does), travels into the future, then travels into the present day to stop Diablo just as (but not before! Never before!) he enslaves humanity. It’s dumb enough to join the pantheon of Stupid Crossover Plots, and maybe even be its head deity. (Why in the world would Shocker shoot him and a bunch of other failed experiments into space??? Even for Shocker, which is where normal plots are modified into Stupid Crossover Plots, this is the stupidest plot point in the film by a mile.) It’s a messy film full of stupid developments, almost all of which need to be reexplained to try and absolve their glaring plotholes.

Daddy issues... setting this in a movie? You just gotta keep watching Revice instead. Actually perhaps Ryunosuke regretting what he did and trying to atone is a display of how Kamen Riders' actions can be inspiring to move bad guys. Actually I'd say that at least Ryunosuke's attempt to atone is genuine, but he does feel like treated as a normal person trying to reunite with family, instead of someone who did serious crimes (though people like Ikki and co being patient and tolerant would be expected). And it's not sympathetic enough to have someone turn bad only to satisfy their dreams, which is completely their own choices, as if they did that solely because they can (doing it under harsh circumstances also won't mean they aren't bad, but still). He also obviously isn't the type who is only merely associated with a bad faction (which actually can have them being actual good guys, not only sympathetic bad guy), but actually performed their job for long time.

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Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

And it’s all in service of a story of two men that I actively disliked. If Shocker are meant to be the Nazis – and they are – then Ryunosuke is a Nazi scientist who was eventually like Whoops Mea Culpa. Meanwhile, his 50-something son Hideo (a late-in-life dad who mostly doesn’t have time for his own son) reasonably resents his dad for a) abandoning his family to go do horrific experiments on innocent people, b) showing up to hijack his son’s body for some light apocalypse-prevention, and c) never trying to get in contact when he was shot off into space I guess? It’s the last one that makes a lot of this drag out; the movie really puts a lot of its weight on YOU NEVER CAME HOME DAD, which is easily explained away, instead of the more appalling and unforgivable YOU WILLINGLY EXPERIMENT ON HUMANS MULTIPLE TIMES DAD. I’m assuming the movie skips out on that one because, you know, unforgivable, but it’s hilarious to watch this movie try and rehabilitate a full-on evil scientist just because he misses his kid you guys.

Other than the complaint, I'd say that Ryunosuke needing to hijack someone to fight as a Kamen Rider feels like other toku; Ultraman, with human hosts, and the consequences of them going berserk feels like when an Ultraman human host dislikes Ultramen and disrupt their fight (not exactly the same as Century here, but it does have consequenes too). Regarding YOU NEVER CAME HOME DAD, this being a Saber movie, ofc it'd take promises seriously, instead of explaining it away, but unlike Saber... Ryunosuke didn't actually fulfill his promise, thus his redemption against Hideo isn't earned or even feels deceiving, unlike how in all Saber extras, Touma (and Kento as for end) would make sure anyone fulfills their promise, and they did. I actually'd hope the scene of them saving the Riders via a bullet trait would be how they fulfilled their promise while also getting into the Rider scene, but the story still didn't refer to that as fulfilling the promise.

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Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

(I rolled my eyes so hard that I gave myself permanent Showa Eyes And Tears at the scene where Takeshi Hongo – played by the skinny Son Of Hongo – tells the guy who murdered dozens of innocents in pursuit of genetic dominance that he’s actually a hero because he created Kamen Rider, which… that was not this guy’s doing! That was not the goal of the project! Takeshi Hongo subverted evil to do good; the evil still happened! Shocker is not retroactively benevolent just because Takeshi Hongo used the power they gave him to destroy it! That’s an incredibly dumb thing for this movie to say! Out loud! Holy shit!)

Agreed on this. This is perhaps done (and perhaps Hongo's patient and forgiving nature) to make Ryunosuke feel better because he technically has atoned for what he did by creating those who fight off shocker. But judging how good or bad someone/actions is by the outcomes of their actions is just promoting those shitty stuff, letting it go unpunished. And actually many people (not talking about here) also has similar view, to glorify villains when their actions have benefit. Sometimes good things can come out of a bad situation or a bad thing. However, people should not misconstrue that just because something good was born out of something bad/evil, does not make that something good, just because the end result was good does not mean that the bad guys did something good.

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Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

But, hey, if we’re willing to put aside how little this was either a Revice or Saber story, and if we’re willing to ignore how bad and drawn out and ludicrous the Kamen Rider Century story was… it’s still not a great movie? The best fight scene is the one in the future, where Daiji, Vice, Sakura, Touma, Rintaro, and Yuri all inhabit different clone bodies to fend off the requisite Army Of Dark Rider Suits, and even that’s a little lackluster. It’s neat to see a lineup of Valkyrie, Blade (for Blades! Hilarious!), Accel, Black RX, Knight, and Ex-Aid Muteki, but almost none of them utilized the things that are fun about those forms. Ex-Aid Muteki’s whole thing is being an invulnerable, overpowered Final Form, but Yuri’s running down a hallway, having a tough time against mooks. It’s just suits; nothing more than suits.

This one too, with the Riders provided to the cast consisting of random power level of it, I wondered how capable are those Rider forms, which like you said, it's just a disservice to have Hyper Muteki getting hard time against fodders. I hope it's about the clone being nowhere near as good as the original, because it's just humiliation otherwise. And as I've completed Revice but watched this movie now, so actually the Revice intro part of George being shown with Riders being used as a lab experiment, which makes him suspicious at this stage (though in this movie he seems just helpful), it was done on this movie only, of his clone Riders. Hiromi in this movie feels more hostile and standoffish, even though I know he's professional. By contrast, Rintaro is established as a professional but still stands up for George dismissing Hiromi for his failure, of which only considering results over efforts do often happen in "professional" setting....