[Kamen Rider Die]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kurona

I struggle to come up with a form in Ex-Aid I dislike as they never at any point slow down and go "okay let's try and make this a bit more sensible", no; they EMBRACE the insanity of this aesthetic and force you to do the same. I love all of these forms.

Y'know, I think I do, too. In fact all the forms in Ex-Aid, and their insane aesthetic, are the reason why I'm even a Kamen Rider fan at all.

Okay, so, here's my Kamen Rider origin story.

I'm a Transformers fan, at least for the last eight years or so. (That's a completely separate, irrelevant origin story.) I lurked the TFW2005 boards for a long while. Sometimes, bored at work, I'd take a look at the other tabs up top. I've got a latent fascination with fan communities: how they're similar, how they're different, what they love, what they hate, the minutiae of the scene. I just think it's neat, in a sociological way. So occasionally, I'd click over to TokuNation.

As I said before, I never got into Power Rangers as a kid, but I knew a bit about the history and the Japanese roots. I'd see articles about new Japanese episodes, or American episodes, and thought it looked goofy, but I didn't care a lot. But I'd see these articles for Kamen Rider figures, and I was fascinated.

I'm not an action figure collector, but the Ex-Aid Figuart reviews were amazing to me. The designs were mind-blowing, the use of color was so far past the American-style muted, "realistic" colors of superheroes that I kept checking out the reviews when they'd go up: Action Gamer Level 2, Taddle Fantasy, Dragon Hunter, Bang Bang Simulations... I didn't know what show could possibly contain all of these designs. The little snippets of information that would precede a review, if anything, made me more perplexed: what the hell is a "gas hat"? They're all in a video game or something? Is this post-apocalyptic? After enough figure reviews, I was like, "I have to see what this crazy-ass show is like." And, Jesus, I never looked back.

I'd've never watched a Kamen Rider anything if it wasn't for how extra these suit designs were.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fish Sandwich

First of all, Maximum Gamer is one of my favorite Rider powerups ever. I love the gimmick of Ex-Aid having his own power armor. I love that they actually built a suit that bulky, and I love the gimmick of having him eject out of it to get more use out of the base form even way late in the show. Everything about it is just awesome and I could go like this for a while.

It is also a great design! Big, bulky suits are a rarity, and it's nice when a show figures out a way to do it well. (Did not love the Dark Knight Returns Ichigou design!) Along those lines, I appreciate that the base suits, the Level 1s, are the goofiest, least-imposing base suits I've seen in a show yet. That's a bold move, opening with a comedy suit, and I think it shows how much confidence the producers had in the world they were building.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fish Sandwich

Second of all, I think I might be the only person on the planet who was totally satisfied with True Ending. I guess everybody just has the problem I had with the Den-O movie back when I first watched it, but I really think everyone's expectations don't match up with why it's actually called True Ending. It's literally just because it's set after the finale and they probably didn't know Another Ending would be a thing when they decided on the title.

It acts as a nice, simple coda to the show that encapsulates its themes really nicely while delivering some big action you can't get on TV. The fact that it didn't concern itself with tying up loose ends (which Ex-Aid didn't leave a lot of), or advancing character arcs that were already over is the biggest point in its favor to me. It's the exact opposite of what went wrong with the Ghost movie. My guy Yuuya Takahashi knows what he can comfortably fit in an hour and also knew better than to try and make the TV finale the "fake" ending. So don't get too hung up on the "True" part of the title. Comparisons to 100% completion bonus endings or post-game content in video games are very warranted, and I think viewing it through that lens, it becomes easier to see what they were going for. Just a little extra Ex-Aid for the road.

It's honestly my favorite summer movie (which I'll admit is weird in a world where W A to Z and Surprise Future both exist), so it bums me out how underwhelmed so many people seem to be with it, given how popular Ex-Aid as a whole is.

You're probably exactly right. If I separate my gripes into two boxes, there's a mostly full one labeled "Why Did They Call It True Ending", and a mostly empty one labeled "Everything Else".

The main problem I have with the True Ending part is how it feels like it's making the Ex-Aid TV story sprawl out in a way I didn't like. If it'd just been "here's a down-the-road adventure with the Ex-Aid cast", and it wasn't tied up with the TV show ending, I wouldn't mind it as much. If this thing had been set a year or two later, like with RE:BIRTH, and they chopped off the Where They Went Next stuff from the end credits, it's a really enjoyable movie that I've only got a couple problems with. But, setting it more-or-less concurrent with the finale, regardless of the title, just bugged me. Mostly because, like I mentioned before, I love how Kamen Rider shows and stories end. They set out to tell a story, and then that story's over. They can show up in someone else's movie or series, but that's someone else's movie or series. Once they're like "Wait, there's a bigger villain and more for the whole cast to deal with", I feel like it's robbing the TV series of a bit of the finality that I think is one of its strongest narrative tools. And, y'know, maybe that's just my problem, and it's not fair to judge the movie for it. I don't know. I just feel like doing an Ending movie starring Kamen Rider Ex-Aid, for any value of Ending, made me like the story of the movie a little less.

And, yeah, the movie was overall a good one! Maybe that's why I'm so harsh on the True Ending part, because the story is mostly super solid. First, it looks phenomenal. The effects and camerawork are stellar. The new suits, especially VRX, are killer. The way the plot involves every character in ways that make sense for their character, that's so hard to do with a sprawling cast of various bickering, duplicitous assholes. (The evolved forms of Taiga and Hiiro are just god-complex jerks who don't want to murder each other! I love the Ex-Aid cast so much, you guys!) The fight scenes are coherent and dramatic. The emotional climax is so well-acted and heartfelt, it almost made me forget that Kamen Rider Deadbeat Dad has a story that makes zero sense.

If there's a non-title problem this movie has, it's this, and I just can't overlook it. (I am willing to let the Johnny Maxima/Gamedeus thing slide. It's not my favorite ending, but I don't think it comes close to tanking the film.) It is not that easy to see out how the motivations of one character can encompass both "I didn't care about my wife and daughter, so I abandoned them years ago" and "I am willing to destroy the world to keep my daughter safe and give her all of the happiness I never gave her before." That is, uh, that is a swing. There's maybe a way to explain it, and as a viewer I could probably concoct a headcanon motivation for why Kamen Rider Deadbeat Dad did both of those things, but I shouldn't have to. A baseline expectation for a villain whose emotional arc is the spine of the film is that his motivation and psychology should be expressed to the audience. Why Is He Doing This and Why Has He Changed are just, like, Intro To Screenwriting. This is not the sort of stuff that should be left to the audience. If they'd given us one scene where he explains why he abandoned his family, all of my concerns evaporate. I get why he's protecting his daughter, I just don't get why he didn't seem to care before. If it's just "I regretted being an asshole when I thought my daughter was going to die", y'know, understandable, but why? Why leave, and why come back to this insane extent? If the whole movie didn't orbit around Kamen Rider Deadbeat Dad and his decisions, it wouldn't be such a big deal to me. But it does, so it is.

All of the Kiriya stuff was golden, though. He's the best. A thousand Lazer V-Cinemas!