[TheTakoTank]

It's time for another episode of What's up with Agito?

This week: Project G4

The movie felt a bit weird and disconnected from the show, but that's to be expected considering the nature of the pre-Den-O movies. I did find the facility with the powered children to be interesting, but it wasn't explained very well. Why did it exist? It couldn't have been to harvest powers for G4, as they didn't have that design yet. I liked the Unknown attack at the beginning, but why did they attack? So many questions...

Composition-wise, nearly half the movie just felt like a string of short vignettes. The story shows one character for a minute then it jumps to another character then to another. It made the movie feel too choppy, and while I know it was probably to show all the characters before bringing them together, but the scenes felt to short to smoothly transition.

The plot...doesn't really make sense. Aside from the unexplained facility at the beginning of the film, why are the bad guys (I don't think they even named their organization, did they?) interested in G4? Where's the Overlord of Darkness during all this? Story just feels kind of awkward and unexplained; the evil organization wants to create G4 and kidnap Mana because...reasons. How did they even know about G4? And what's up with the Unknown? Why are they helping fight against the main Riders? Or is it just coincidental? And what''s up with Mana's vision at the end? I'm assuming its just an AU thing that's not really important, but it's weirdly focused on.

Side note: Anyone else think this movie felt a bit similar to Kamen Rider Blade: Missing Ace? New mysterious bad guy comes in, infiltrates the good guys' ranks, kidnaps a girl close to the protagonists to facilitate his plans, and at the end they need to fight their way through a crowd of generic bad guys to get to the big bad.
EDIT: Both were written by Inoue, so that explains it.

But the real star of the show is Hikawa/G3-X. Hikawa felt more like the main Rider of the movie, as he actually had a decent story and some neat interaction with G4. I think if they had fleshed out his role more and made it his movie, it could've been a neat little G3-X story.

Speaking of which, that final fight between G3-X and G4 was one of the highlights of the movie for me. Very cool to see them fight, both physically and ideologically, as well as G4 coming back to life after the guy inside it died. The part where that rotating mirror thing slows to a stop when G4 dies was also beautifully done. The G4 suit itself is a very neat black redeco of G3-X. My only real problem with it is that its head crest is a bit tall, but I can forgive that in light of the giant rocket launcher.

Overall, it could've been better with a bit more focus and explanation, but I'm willing to forgive it since its a movie (we all know how those are). G3-X and G4 were the best parts of an otherwise standard AU Kamen Rider movie. But it did give us a chance to see Ryou and the G3 unit again, so it wasn't a total loss. And it has Hiroshi Fujioka (Kamen Rider Ichigou) in it! How cool is that!

Quote:

Originally Posted by SanoBaron

I do like the brutality of the unknowns in the movie.

I think the Unknowns in both the movie and the show have some pretty brutal ways of killing. One guy makes people slowly disintegrate, and their victims are almost always normal, innocent people. The Unknown and Grongi are probably the most violent killers in the Heisei era so far.