[barnstenchfartface]

I watched The First.

It wasn't a good movie. It was kind of a bad movie. It was a weird movie. I spent half of it with a mild grimace on my face and my eyes towards the ceiling. It wasn't a good movie.

So right off the bat, it's absolutely, just, baffling and bizarre to me just how much time this movie spends on the "plot thread" (and i use this term loosely) with Haruhiko and Miyoko, which is just beyond extraneous to the actual plot. That shit was just beyond useless and irritating. Definitely some of my least favorite scenes in the entire thing. That scene in the forest or whatever with the red thread? Literally made me want to die. Holy hell was that awful.

I want to say the movie would have been better off without all that, and it definitely would have, but it wouldn't really have like, tangibly improved it. Fundamentally, I think predicating so much of the plot of a retelling of the original show on M I S U N D E R S T A N D I N G S and a stupid fucking love triangle is a really dumb idea and basically just cements my opinion of Inoue as a massive hack (does the man even know how to write anything that isn't misunderstandings and love triangles? seriously. fuckin' Inoue.)

It's just. Dumb. That dumb purple prosy nonsense shit Inoue loves to do, this time about "muh beauty" was dumb. The attempts at realism were dumb (like the mask thing. making the Riders wear actual masks is such an ill conceived idea. making them materialize a whole helmet out of their asses every time they transformed is definitely not any more realistic than having them fully transformed to begin with). The heavy-handed overt references to the original show (especially the Tachibana Racing Club scene, which bordered on being offensive in how blatant it was about being nothing but pandery garbage, especially in light of how utterly disconnected it is from anything else in the rest of the film. and stuff like the Shocker grunts turning to foam near the end was sublimely groan-inducing. it's the sort of thing that in a different movie probably could have been a fun and cool nod to the Showa series, but it just did not work at all. contrasted to the rest of everything this movie does, it's just so out of place. I have no comment on Shinigami being there though. I can't imagine why they thought it was a good idea, but honestly the other two Shocker people don't fit in any more) were dumb. It was a dumb movie. A dumb, trite, overly long, often irritating, vacuous movie. I definitely didn't like it.

But, though I'm being harsh on it, I think deservedly, I didn't really hate it. It's a bad movie. But a lot of Rider movies are bad. Really, a lot of them. It's honestly not even a remarkably putrid crap on the pile. Even as Inoue's works go, it's not bad enough to be worth talking about. At least it's only 90 minutes, as opposed to wasting some 48 episodes worth of your time. And I said I spent "half of it" rolling my eyes, because I felt it got worse as it went on. The beginning portions were...largely unoffensive.

And at least the action is generally pretty cool. I don't have any complaints about that. The action was pretty cool.

But yeah, The First. Not good. But honestly, I'm not sure where the dark and edgy reputation came from, shit was tame as shit, especially for Rider around that time. Maybe I'm conflating it with what people say about the Next. I'll see what's up with that when I watch it, I guess.