[NeonZ]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kamen Rider Die

First, Rider/Sentai movies are so weirdly constructed, at least the bunch I've seen. Rather than the Rider fall movies that feature two main Riders at least, and possibly two full casts, the crossover movies seem to be built around Who From The Last Few Years Is Available and Who Can We Spare From The Current Shows. Like, the Fourze/Go-Busters one? The main Rider characters are Hina from OOO and Diend from Decade! There's some fun to the randomness of the cast, but it's to the detriment of a cohesive story. I never get the feeling that a story was constructed, with a clear thematic goal, and then a cast was hired to support that goal. Instead, it's like 75% of the asks came back No, so they cobbled together something for the 25% who said Yes. It's not that you can't tell a story like that, but it's very difficult to tell a good story. The most you can do is distract people with a lot of costumes.

The Spring crossover movies were all contracted after the fact and separately from the tv series, so cast availability, even for the current shows was wildly variable. On top of that, they all had the same writer and producer behind them so there's much less variation among them than among the series themselves. Also, all the ones that feature big Sentai crossovers also had the same director (Osamu Kaneda) who is just weak all around and a really bad fit for these movies specifically. The ones where Sentai only appears for one fighting scene had a different director (Kamen Rider Taisen and GP Rider 3), although still the same writer and producer.

Osamu Kaneda directed Decade's movie, All Riders vs Dai-Shocker which had the highest box office for a Rider movie, and due to that kept getting calling back for future mega crossovers involving Rider, but it's clear he just didn't care for the concept at all. All Riders vs Dai-Shocker itself was fairly inconsistent in terms of presentation with some attempts at using practical effects for some scenes before they just give up and go back to cg and green screening later on, with most Riders in the final battle just doing generic punches and kicks outside of a couple of specific shots, but rather than building up on it and improving, Kaneda actually seemed to get worse later on.

The big fighting scenes with many suits just became sloppier in his later movies and he often just tried to get rid of them to go back to less suits (like them all disappearing during the Den-O power up scene in Let's Go Kamen Riders). However, those movies had high box office and his attempts at branching out all ended up in box office failure - Kaneda directed the new Gavan movie, Gaim summer movie, Drive x Ghost and Rider 1, all movies which performed badly, and in fact got increasingly lower numbers if you don't count Gavan. So, he returned to the mega crossover movies with Chou Super Hero Taisen for seemingly a last attempt at this directing gig - They even hid name from the marketing, only listing him as the director when there was the first screening. That shows pretty clearly even Toei realized that his name was poison (He is the CEO of JAE too, from where Toei gets most of their suit actors, which is probably why he got so many chances). CSHT performed even worse than Rider 1 though, marking the end of the spring crossover movies and Osamu Kaneda's career as a director (well, he technically "directed" a compilation movie for Amazons s1 but that's just cutting and pasting existing footage).

Kaneda's Super Hero Taisen movies specifically have assistant directors who often handle some secondary battles, which helps improving them visually, but it all falls apart when the big climatic battles are handled in a sloppy way due to going back to Kaneda's main staff. In Chou Super Hero Taisen, specifically, you've got the fairly dynamic battles in the tournament... which are basically irrelevant story-wise and basically have no script (with only Momotaros getting a scene outside of battle), but then the big climatic Brave vs True Brave battle, which should be the big emotional climax of the story, is a sloppy brawl where they just slash each other until the finisher, with no abilities used beforehand or any real flow to the fight. And then you have the actual final battle where you just get both heroes and villains one shot by weak looking finishers too (wasting even the returning heroes with actors, like Zolda).