[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER DEN-O THE MOVIE - "I'M BORN!”




It was always weird to me how many Riders are orphans, or have a dead parent. I'd joked back in Ghost that All Dads Are Dead, but it's really prevalent over this franchise. It's something I'd write off as some weird quirk, an overused trope, but it's such a deliberate choice that it got me wondering why.

The first reason you'd have a main character with dead parents is to create some unfillable void, some unresolveable wound. It's not a loss that happened as a result of the character's actions or inaction, give or take a Blade. It's not some heroic thing, like you'd get over the course of the series. It's a tragedy that befell them, and all they can do is live with it. It creates this absence within the character, a pre-show acknowledgement that loss is real and irrevocable. It's also a way to bake into the hero a motivation to overcome hardship, to make the best out of what you have left. Dead parents... it's a preexisting condition, a thing that the character can't ever fix or undo, so they fight to keep other people from having to experience it.

The other reason, though - and maybe the main reason - is because the character can try to fill that void with a found family. Those parents are never coming back, but you can make a new family out of a sister, some imagination monsters from the end of time, a time-displaced version of your almost-brother-in-law, an eccentric train owner, and a vinyl-clad timepiece-enthusiast. It's not about replacing anything, really. Your parents that are gone will never come back. But you can keep their memory close while still creating something positive in the present.

So, yeah, really liked the way this movie approached concepts like loss, memory, and found family. Mostly, though, I just liked how it all felt like a Den-O story? And a really good Den-O story, at that?

I mean, all of the themes I just talked about are 1000% the themes of this series, so expanding them to movie length works out great. There's no weirdo AU to muddy the water or distract from the message. It's Ryotaro trying to figure out how to explain to a younger version of himself that you can't hide yourself in the past, because time's always moving forward. The best you can do is remember it, while looking to the future. They didn't need to have this story exist in A World Where Water Is The Only Currency, or make everyone samurais or whatever. (Although, uh, there are some samurais!) It's a Den-O story about Den-O themes with the Den-O cast. It's probably my favorite Phase 1 Heisei movie so far?

There've been some fun ideas in earlier films, and a few that were just generally entertaining, but they always felt at least minimally compromised. They needed to cram a season into seventy minutes, or create some goofy new world to explore. Here, it's like Episodes 27-29 of Den-O, where there's no time wasted on restating the premise or explaining relationships. (I mean, maybe to a fault? Sieg, a two-episode character, appears basically out of nowhere and everyone acts like he's a main cast member. A couple lines of recap probably wouldn't've killed Kobayashi!) Literally everything good about Den-O (and bad: Airimirers) gets shown off in this movie. It's a giant, big-budget celebration of everything the show is about, and it's not toning that down for newbies.

Like, the first sequence is a Ryutaros dance scene that now includes a kick-line, because Movie Budget. That is such a statement of intent, moreso than any extra explosions or whatever. Everything's plussed, everything's sweetened. You like Form Changes? Here's every goddamn Form Den-O ever used, and every Form Zeronos ever used! You like Hana kicking ass? Here's her fighting ninjas and spanking Imagin! You like Owner eating fried rice? He does it twice! You like Ryotaro? Here's him twice.

Kotaro! Man, I think Sword Form Junior is my all-time favorite Movie Form. Did that thing ever get a Figuart? Money left on the table if it didn't. Kotaro's a fantastic part of this film, in all respects. He's great at channeling Momo, absolutely nailing that Ore Sanjou pose. But he's also interesting for what his performance tells us about Ryotaro. It's weird, him being so energetic and excitable, knowing that Ryotaro is neither of those things. But that works for me, because it invites concern about what the last few years have been like for Ryotaro: the choices he's made, the burdens he's carried, the regrets he's ignored. There was this kid who was happy once, despite everything he'd lost, and now there's this soft-spoken young man who lets his emotions lie fallow. There's a disconnect between the kid he was and the man he's become, and I'm curious if the show's going to tell more of that story.

The whole arc of this movie was great, with a look at how Ryotaro has moved on from memories to make something real in the present. Focusing in on the Ryotaro/Momotaros friendship was an ideal way to do that, but this movie didn't skimp on anything else you might like from Den-O. It was a blast, from start to finish. All climax, you might even say.



THE BAGGAGE CAR

-One of the only downsides of Phase 2 going to a more interconnected universe when it did its movies, with all of the Legend Riders and whatnot, was that we missed out on actors from previous shows popping up in background roles. Like, if you're bringing back the actor who played JK in Fourze, you're probably going to want him to play JK from Fourze! That's a better use for his talents! But that does mean we don't get incredibly fun, totally random cameos like this film's Todoroki From Hibiki as a ninja and Todokoro From Kabuto as a bodyguard. I'm not sure anything will ever top Kaido From Faiz showing up in the Blade movie to participate in a chase scene as the most WTF cameo, but these felt nicely random and nonsensical. (I also liked that, in whatever timeline, Todokoro has people making his job more difficult. That guy!)

-Super funny that the movie spends a bunch of time having characters ask why Sieg is hanging around, since thematically he's the absolute best Imagin to have in this story. Sieg's whole story is about the value of found family, about how what you get may not be what you wanted, but it can still have value. Of course he's going to be in a story about Ryotaro trying to explain why he's able to move on from his parents' death because he's still got people who care about him!

-Gaoh! Great visual, huge villain presence, tons of charisma, absolutely zero character. There's never a compelling motivation for what he's doing, he's already 90% done with his masterplan before the story even starts, and his death is just him going Oh Shit I Died. Kamen Rider Kabuki, he was not.

-Watched that Momo's Summer Vacation short. It was cute! The end!

-Really can't say enough about how great it was to see a story that foregrounds the bond between Momo and Ryotaro. There's a real pain to Momo when he sees his connection to Ryotaro severed, and the movie treats his loss seriously. There's this shot of Momo wandering down an alley that is just heartbreaking for how isolated he looks. But, eventually Momo's reunited with Ryotaro because Memory Beats Tragedy and we get a hell of an exciting climax.

-Oh, right, Ryotaro's Narratively Convenient Amnesia. Ehhhhh. I love that the kick from Gaoh only eliminated the Den-O stuff from Ryotaro's brain. That is the hackiest shit! The movie gets away with it by a) playing up the schism with Momo as incredibly sad; b) spending some time with Ryotaro and Kotaro bonding over their shared trauma; and c) making the whole point of this thing that Memory Beats Tragedy, so we need Ryotaro to lose and regain memories. Thematically it works, but kicking off the plot with a kick to the head is pretty lazy.

-I keep feeling like there's something else I wanted to talk about from this movie, but I can't remember what it was. A fitting way to end this post!