[Kamen Rider Die]

DRIVE SAGA: KAMEN RIDER CHASER



Self-improvement is laudable; self-actualization is necessary.

That’s the premise of this Chase Becomes A Real Boy story, and it’s a good one. There’s a messiness to it (it’s a very messy film!), but that’s probably in keeping with how difficult it can be to disentangle who you are with how others see you.

A lot of what Chase goes through in this movie is what every human being goes through: seeing the ways you don’t fit in, don’t measure up, and working to change yourself into something that does fit, does measure up. It’s not some edict from outside, it’s a lack of contentment and a sense of personal dissatisfaction. It’s a pressure Chase places on himself.

So when Angel shows up with a quick fix (delivered via an incredibly suggestive Chase Becomes A Real Man sequence), it’s natural for Chase to view this as solving his essential problem. He’s fixed, he’s happy, everything is great forever.

But self-improvement… it’s not a thing that ever really ends, which means it’s not a fix that can be bestowed. Angel can provide contentment, but it’s a contentment that relies on Chase’s feelings of outside judgment. It’s not really solving Chase’s problem, because Chase still looks to others for validation, still measures himself up against his imagined failings. Self-improvement isn’t the same thing as finding happiness, even if it’s still something to strive for.

Heart’s there to remind us of that. It isn’t wrong to try and become a better person, so long as you’re doing it because it makes you happy to do it. Heart wants his friends to become more themselves, not become someone else. (Well, except for the ones he reprograms into executioners…?) Twisting yourself into someone other people like better might provide a small burst of happiness - it’s nice to be liked! - but it doesn’t change who you are inside. Fixing the things you don’t like about yourself can bring about happiness, but real contentment only comes from accepting yourself as a valid person who deserves to be happy.

It’s nice to see this movie play around with these sorts of themes. Angel’s initial pitch is all quick-fix life-coaching and haphazard pharmacology: Follow these steps, take this medicine, and everything’s great. But it’s not, because there isn’t some one-size-fits-all path to happiness. Chase and Heart and Brain and Medic and Angel all need different things to be at peace. Flattening personal growth and contentment into An Easy Path is bullshit, and it reduces people’s needs into obstacles along a road they shouldn’t be on. Getting better is hard work, and it starts with understanding what Getting Better means to you as an individual. Being able to recognize things that are broken, and things that you think are broken, is the first step to really being happy.

So, yeah, a movie that ends with Chase being okay with himself (as demonstrated in an incredibly bloody monologue on Feelings Beach) and realizing he doesn’t need to be anything more than a Chase who’s okay with himself? Absolutely.



And then there’s also this ridiculous team-up between Drive and Mach and Accel! For some reason!

It’s hilarious, which is the likely reason. I laughed a bunch, so mission accomplished. Terui showing up for some weird Office Politics subplot was delightful, and it’s neat to see Shinnosuke have to wrangle a disrespectful Go while trying to solve a case. Having a little story with two Cop Riders is clever, especially when they could not be more dissimilar as men. (I mean, up until the Mach movie, when Shinnosuke will also be a dad.) Just the Very Official Terui having to work with/against a Very Friendly Shinnosuke, it’s a good idea!

The whole thing’s almost bizarrely dropped into this movie, though, in a way that seems like it’s just Legend Rider plus Some Reason For The Main Cast To Not Be Around. Thematically, it’s got nothing to do with Chase’s story. It’s also… I mean, the Accel stuff isn’t really about anything? It’s a cameo gag that somehow blows up into 15 minutes of screentime (or, at least, that’s what it seemed like), and it feels too half-boiled, I guess. It either needed to be a shorter segment, or its own film. It needed a deeper plot, something that says anything about Terui and/or Shinnosuke. There’s some fun writing with the character interactions, but there isn’t a ton that’s interesting about their story. (I also love Go’s incredulous anger at the cheap turn of there being two identical Roidmudes. He’s right, it is confusing!)

But that’s okay, because the Chase part of this movie is more than interesting enough. The Roidmudes as a species were always entertaining, what with their Humanity In Miniature thing going on, and Team Roidmude was the shining example of that. They were monsters that could’ve existed completely separate from the title character’s storyline, and it’s the same way here. It’s not a Kamen Rider story about defeating monsters; it’s a human story about defeating our own self-loathing.

That’s maybe a better story to tell?