[Kamen Rider Die]

MASKED RIDER KUUGA EPISODES 40 - 41



It's an interesting story, if not necessarily a good one. Two indelible images, alongside some decent thematic work, but a little too much "people talking in a room" for my tastes.

So, those indelible images. Kuuga's had some super solid camerawork in the back half of the series, with a few sequences (Ichijou/Rose Grongi faceoff from the last story) that are flat-out gorgeous. There're two in this one that I thought were worth calling out.

The first is the whole Laptop Grongi attack from the end of Episode 40. The eerie hum as Kuuga tries to pinpoint Laptop Grongi on the pier, the disorienting flashes of (I assume) Daguva, the quick change to Pegasus Form in the mist of the bay, the harpoon launching out of the water and pinning Kuuga through the shoulder, dropping back to Growing Form with the bloody hole in his shoulder?€? it's a really taut, tense sequence.

The other great set of shots is super quick, but it's a clever physical effect that's thrillingly immersive. As Laptop Grongi is running to dive in the water near the middle of Episode 41, the camera operator chases her off the pier and into the water in one fluid shot. It's not a bravura segment or anything, it's a shot that's over in seven or eight seconds, but it definitely got a Holy Shit out of me when I saw it.

The camerawork for the action and Grongi stuff has been really excellent in this part of Kuuga. It's a shame the show doesn't get to shoot more scenes like that, what with all of the talking.

Yeah, it's a very dialogue-heavy story, even by Masked Rider Kuuga standards. Tons of time spent explaining a lot of the stuff that went over my head in the last story, which I wish wasn't necessary. It's a problem that's come up a few times on this series, where something inexplicable will happen in a story, go unacknowledged, then an episode or two later someone will spell out what happened. It's not fun and mysterious to me, it's just inefficient writing. There's no percentage in stringing some of this stuff out, when a little bit of exposition can keep the reveal and the relevance of the reveal within a couple scenes of each other. It can feel disjointed and tossed off, when a character's like, "Oh, here's what that thing we found a couple weeks ago actually meant."

The rest of the heavy dialogue scenes are devoted to Nana's anger at a classmate's cruelty, which, look. The use of Nana's rage to illustrate the stakes of Godai losing control and becoming an unstoppable dark warrior, it's a decent way to dramatize and foreshadow the stakes of the final batch of episodes. For a series that frequently forgets to have the A plot and B plot of any story link together, I'm really glad they tried this time out. But, Nana's occasionally-mentioned audition? That we never saw her practice for? In a storyline partially about the bloodlust of a background character no one watching probably cares about? Weird choice! Maybe a bad choice! I'd almost rather it was a brand-new kid, someone's nephew or niece or whatever, who didn't have the baggage (for me, at least) of an irritating bottom-tier character. I don't know, it might just be me. I liked the storyline, I wish it weren't about Nana.

Not a bad Kuuga story, but, yikes, too many scenes of people in rooms talking about monsters and threats and rage, not enough monsters and threats and rage.