[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER W: BEGINS NIGHT



I think I enjoyed this overall, despite not really loving a lot of the details.

As a basic story, I like that it’s about the danger of letting grief turn into guilt. That’s a perfect noir story to tell, especially when applied to Shotaro’s fairly reasonable feelings of culpability in Sokichi’s death/”death”. Shotaro’s motivation has always been to earn Sokichi’s respect and/or admiration, and not only can that never happen, but now Shotaro will always feels like he let down the man he most respected. Telling a story where Shotaro has to learn to let go of that guilt and trust in his own decisions – which is what turns him into the man Sokichi always wanted him to be – is great little noir narrative. It’s a story full of guilt, grit, and eventually gratitude.

It’s also a story that bends over backwards to make everything you like about Double into A Sokichi Joint.

Like, I am fine with Shotaro (and, by proxy, Kamen Rider W) endlessly valorizing Sokichi. He works as an impossible ideal to strive towards, and that’s an okay piece of character backstory. But this movie works double-time (not sorry) to make Sokichi not just a piece of Shotaro’s backstory, but:

-the first Kamen Rider in this narrative
-the originator of Double's catchphrase
-the guy who named Philip
-the motivation for Philip to be a Kamen Rider

It’s a lot! It’s arguably too much! For a middle section of the narrative that’s all about making your own decisions and stepping out of people’s shadows, holy shit does this thing just sign Sokichi’s name to everything that put this show into motion! It retroactively makes a bunch of stuff in Act 1 less cool to me, and that’s a bummer.

(It also sort of boggles the mind that this movie decides to shove Skull into Begins Night, which is super weird. The movie tries to get around the question of Why Didn’t Sokichi Just Use Skull To Survive The Gunmen by adding in a personal code where he only uses Skull to fight Dopants, but it feels a little flimsy. He’s still going to have the Sonozaki Family trying to kill him! Taboo’s still floating around! Also, I don’t love the feral FangJoker form debuting here; feels out of place in the narrative.)

But, y’know, I did like the story being told, even if Sokichi always makes me roll my eyes. (Not my guy!) There’s some genuine sweetness to Shotaro throwing his entire life away because “Sokichi” showed up and told him he sucked, which is 1000% the half-boiled hero we know and love. The mystery is a neat one, and the action is – if not up to the grandiosity of the Decade section of Movie War 2010 – an improvement over the standard W fight scenes. (I don’t love saying it, but that Sokichi fight scene in the machinery room is iconic.) It’s an entertaining movie that’d be a great movie if it didn’t try so hard to prop up the legend of Sokichi. It was okay when he was just Shotaro’s Work Dad who taught him to love hats and detective fiction! That was plenty!

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ONORE DIE-A MEMORIES



-The Decade part of this team-up movie is still real weird, man. I absolutely adore the way it wants to culminate Tsukasa’s story in a touching recollection of all the ways he pissed people off over a year, but all of the Super Shocker stuff feels tonally dissonant. (Read the full write-up here!)

-The Crisis Fortress battle is laughably incongruent to the Kamen Rider W section of this movie, and basically comes off like a bonus Legend Riders stunt show. Fun to look at, but Double’s plot in this one ended way before Decade teamed up with him.

-Accel shows up in the end! Neat!