[Kamen Rider Die]

HEISEI RIDER VS SHOWA RIDER: KAMEN RIDER TAISEN FEAT. SUPER SENTAI




Oh, Yonemura.

It’s the Decade stuff he gets the most correct in this movie, I think. He treats Tsukasa like Doctor Who, and that’s just the best. Tsukasa shows up out of nowhere, mostly understands the objective, and immediately constructs a plan of attack for everyone else to execute. A lot of that plan hinges on Tsukasa convincing people to follow his lead despite *vaguely gestures at everything Tsukasa has ever done in regards to things like Friendship or Communication or Compromise or Transparency*, but his ability to innately understand motivations allows him to rally a group of variably committed participants. Eventually, the day is saved.

I just like Tsukasa here. He’s on the playful end of his spectrum, where having to navigate a Showa empire’s revival amidst a Rider War is just another day at the office. He’s nimble in his strategies, charming in his entreaties, and overall just the right level of easy-going about this weird-ass story of dead children and apocalyptic fathers and mournful mothers.

The rest of it, though! Oh, Yonemura.

I was looking forward to watching this one most of all, for this project. I’d seen it originally way before I watched Faiz, and I wanted to revisit it in the aftermath of my favorite Phase 1 show. But, boy, it mostly didn’t work for me.

The idea of Takumi spending a decade riddled with guilt over Kusaka’s death (KUSAKA), unable to find a reason to fight… no? No, I don’t think that’s right for the character? The series had ended with an optimistic future for Takumi, ready to engage with the world for maybe the first time ever, so it’s a colossal bummer for another writer to go No, He’s Constantly Depressed. And, I can see why a writer might go there, because: Takumi! If any Phase 1 guy is going to fall into a ten-year funk, it’s probably the Grumpiest Rider. I just don’t feel like this movie made a great case for it.

Like, basing a lot of Takumi’s guilt on the fact that he’s alive while Kusaka isn’t, that is hilarious. The movie constantly reminds us - sometimes in dialogue! - that Kusaka was a giant asshole who is inarguably less-deserving of a long life than Takumi. So having Takumi believing that he doesn’t deserve to live instead of Kusaka, only for Kusaka to show up and outright say I Deserve To Live Instead Of You… it’s incredibly funny, but I don’t know that it does a lot to make Takumi’s plight feel something other than pathetic.

And it… that’s always the sort of tricky line, when it comes to telling stories with Inoue characters, let alone trying to continue them. Takumi can totally beat himself up over something that a) wasn’t his fault, b) happened to the most deserving dude in the Faiz cast, and c) isn’t really something he can ever fix, but it needs to feel more balanced than this. If you told this story a year or so after Faiz, in the never-produced Faiz/Blade Movie War, I’d be okay with it. (I wouldn’t love it, because of the show’s A+ ending, but I’d be okay with exploring the concept.) But to do it a decade later, with the idea that Takumi never got over Kusaka’s death (KUSAKA), I just can’t get on board with that.

(It also doesn’t help that the Faiz suit has shown up in probably a half-dozen All-Rider things, including things with both Gaim and Decade, so I guess his reluctance is a lot less firm than he lets on. Maybe he was just really committed to the laundry when Tsukasa came up to him, like he said!)

It’s a movie full of stuff like that, where a germ of a reasonable idea (Takumi feels bad about himself!) gets telescoped out into something laughable and insane.

Like the Showa Riders!

Setting aside that this is all yet another We Secretly Fought To Trick The Villains bullshit plot, the Showa Riders almost all come off as colossal pricks in this movie. (X largely escapes the massively unsympathetic portrayal the other old guys get saddled with, but he still ends up being a violent jerk to Takumi for half the film.) The tension it seems like the movie is going for - Showa guys bravely confront their pain while Heisei guys let it consume them - instead comes off as glowering old guys threatened by modern versions of masculinity. Like, Takeshi Hongo immediately says that Kouta is too weak to be a real Rider! IMMEDIATELY! It’s how he’s introduced to a new generation of Kamen Rider fans! As a dude who is telling the star of the movie that he’s too soft!

And, y’know, I’d like to write that type of negative interaction off as a ruse, the Showa plan to draw out Badan… but then at the very end of the movie, all of the Showa guys go No, We Actually Do Think All Of You Heisei Guys Are Weak.

I don’t understand why you’d make that your story? Why you’d not only spend an entire film with Showa Riders trying to murder Heisei Riders, but then after you’ve given a little bit of cover to the possibility that the Showa Riders actually respect the Heisei Riders… to then double-down on the Showa Riders looking down their masks at the Heisei Riders? Why? Why?!

And, sure, Gaim saves a flower, because he’d rather die than let the beauty of nature be destroyed (I guess him riding a motorcycle through Helheim Forest didn’t harm the botany?), and now the Showa Riders can see that the Heisei Riders are real heroes, but it’s as borderline inexplicable as everything else in the film.

(I have a headache, so I really don’t want to spend another couple pages complaining about this movie, but I zero percent understand how Fifteen works. How did he get to the land of the dead? Was he dead already? Then why didn’t he disappear at the end when Shu did? Did he just abandon his family at some point? How did he get a Sengoku Driver? Where did the other Rider Lockseeds come from? How did he find the Badan Empire?)

There’s some stuff in here that I actually liked. The themes of how to move on from your grief were smart, in that it’s not a choice between Wallowing or Ignoring; there’s nuance to it, there’s the ability to harness your grief for a better future, to honor someone’s loss by living the life they couldn’t. But the way it’s articulated through Fifteen and Takumi just doesn’t work for me. They’re both stretched so far out of a recognizably human shape that they lose all emotional power. Fifteen’s a deranged madman with limitless power who wants his son to be alive so that he won’t be dead, a scenario that’s so devoid of human connection that I actually had to keep reminding myself that Fifteen had a son. Takumi’s bound up in paralyzing survivor’s guilt for someone who was The Worst, the kind of guy who comes back from the dead to heckle Takumi’s pity. The hooks a story like this needs to draw in a viewer, it’s too absurd to have them. No one here makes a lot of sense.

But the fights are really good!