[Switchblade]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Switchblade

Kamen Rider Fourze: The Movie: Everyone Translates The Catchphrase Differently!

In which Gentaro does the friendship handshake with a space station.

So, complete honesty time here. This movie is one of the main reasons I wanted to rewatch Fourze. I first saw it months after the show ended and it really drove home for me how much I liked all of the characters (which, considering I watched it while Wizard was airing, hit extra hard). I haven't watched it again since then and there are a lot of details from it that I kinda halfway remembered. I knew that a bunch of characters threw Astro Switches for Gentarou, for example, but I couldn't remember if that happened here or on the show proper. Ditto for seeing a lot of the other teachers again (Nao Nagasawa, Alternative Zero, etc.). Other parts, like the fight that uses all 40 switches, I do remember clearly.

Seeing the movie again, the first thing that struck me is how this is pretty much the textbook Koichi Sakamoto film. If I ever wanted to teach a class on his style, I could just show off this film: crazy action scenes, lots of wire work, vehicle chases, swooping cameras, Nao Nagasawa and/or Ayumi Kinoshita, and at least one sexy lady doing martial arts (in this case the film's two biggest guest stars: Mikie Hara). That's not a critique, necessarily, especially since he was already Fourze's main action director and the movie gave him a bigger budget to blow up CGI with. At the same time, though, it does feel a little familiar given how much Sakamoto has worked on tokusatsu shows in the last couple decades.

As for the story, this is where I find myself a little conflicted. The movie is a lot shorter than I remember it being - only a little over an hour - and the pacing is pretty weird. Parts of it rush by really fast - I was surprised to find that we were already up to the Wizard cameo after just 25 minutes (the early Rider cameos always surprise me, even when I know they're coming - they always feel so random and forced). Other parts of the film just crawl, though. The returning character/Switch montage was really cool but it felt like it dragged on forever (as a side note, I swear there was at least one totally random new character in there that I do not remember from the series). The overall story was relatively straightforward, though, with a pretty decent plot twist going into the third act.

The villains were a little flat as characters, but they still bear a specific mention. There's this thing that Fourze did with this and the Wizard Movie War that's both pretty cool and really weird at the same time. This film's villains are reimagined versions of the heroes from an old Ishinomori tokusatsu called Kyodain. Other Kyodain designs are used for the good aligned robot and the little security drones inside the space station (I think the station is also from something, but I'm not 100% sure). Toei would pull a similar trick with Inazuman and Akumaizer 3 in the Movie War. I still think it's a neat use of older concepts from shows that will never get a follow-up, although it's a shame that most were used as villains.

We also got the Fusion States suit, which is both incredibly ugly yet not as bad as I remembered. At least it didn't have skis.

Your drinking game for this movie is any time Miu says "Oops" or Shun's twinkle sound effect plays.

Back to the series proper after this as the show makes up for the last arc not having much Yuuki and the movie generally using her well. I'm not looking forward to this.

Is this my favorite Kamen Rider movie, non-team-up category? Hard to say, but it's definitely a contender for the title, at the very least. I think that the movie still holds up after repeat viewings (unlike the very PS3-era CGI, but it's a Kamen Rider movie from 2012, what do you expect?).

I think my favorite part is the big training montage during the first half; it really feels like the actors are having as much fun goofing around as their characters are.

A few observations from this rewatch:

- Haruto's voice is definitely off in the Wizard cameo. Comes off as someone in the sound mixing department going way overboard with filters.

- The Sagittarius, Gemini, and Pisces Horoscopes get noticeably more screentime in the big fight than most of the others. This is probably because the filmmakers knew that they would be new to the viewers.

- I forget where I read this, but the reason Skydain keeps falling over is because she's not meant to work on the ground.

- Ground- and Skydain's combined form is easily the silliest thing in this movie and I love how ridiculous it is.