[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER 1




A while back, during the Decade thread, I’d ask people about how they came to TokuNation. What made them seek out a fan-site? What made them stop lurking, and start posting? I’d given bits of my origin story before: TFW2005, browsing Ex-Aid figure reviews, started watching Ex-Aid, eventually started posting for Ghost. But there’s a part that I’ve maybe never mentioned, even though it’s sort of obvious via the timeline. The first Ghost episode I posted about was Episode 24, which means the thing I watched right before I decided to start talking about Kamen Rider on TokuNation was this movie.

And it wasn’t because I loved it. It was because it made me so angry that I needed somewhere to put that anger. I need to exorcise the demons it put inside of me. I needed to reach out to other fans and go Are You Seeing This Too?

The only reason I’m posting on TokuNation is because I hated this movie.

Of course, it turns out to be an Inoue movie.

There’s something fitting in that, I think. Inoue making me so angry that I found a fandom, found a hobby, found friends, found a love for Inoue’s work. That’s really funny to me. Inoue led to me writing about Kamen Rider - forever - and it’s all because of this mediocre film.

On a rewatch, I don’t know what it was I hated so much that I needed to spend 2+ years writing about Kamen Rider. There’s plenty wrong with this movie, but it’s still inarguably better than the Ghost/Drive movie. There’s an emotional throughline, at the very least. The action’s great. I like the new Ichigou “Dark Knight Returns” suit. It’s a massive celebration of the themes of Kamen Rider Ghost, if nothing else. There’re positives.

Plenty of negatives, though!

It’s not really a Ghost movie, despite the presence of Takeru (and, to a lesser extent, Makoto, Onari, and Akari). It’s an Ichigou movie, from bell to bell. While I don’t truck with Showa, I’m not really opposed to a story that’s this focused on Takeshi Hongo. The idea of getting a One Last Battle story with the original Kamen Rider, with him having to grapple with the cost of his war on Shocker, the toll of justice, the people he’s let down, that’s all interesting stuff to explore. A story where Takeshi Hongo has to atone for his past has a lot of possibilities.

This isn’t that, though. It’s not really a movie where Takeshi learns anything, and that’s its main flaw. He exists as the platonic ideals of Heroism and Masculinity and Fatherhood. He’s challenged by multiple characters, but they all learn that Takeshi Is Always Right. His failing is that he hasn’t brought enough people up to his level, to understand his wisdom, and that’s all. He’s in this movie to be a stalwart and unerring example of How To Be. The arc of his story starts at Takeshi Is Awesome, and ends at Takeshi Is Awesome.

As a story, I can’t love it. I’ll concede that Takeshi Is, in fact, Awesome, but this movie literally never proposes an alternate viewpoint. Mayu has the strongest case against Takeshi’s awesomeness - what with him abandoning a teenage girl, both emotionally and financially - but the movie barely spends an entire scene with that rebuttal before Akari’s just like Sure, But What If You Forgave Him Right Now Instead. After that, it’s all Takeshi Is Awesome, all the time.

It’s one of those things where the movie is so adamant about celebrating the legend of Ichigou that it loses track of the narrative; any narrative. There’s a lot of setup for Nova Shocker, how they’re not just the same old world domination-obsessed lunatics as Shocker. Nova Shocker’s a business! Like, that’s a neat idea, making the Heisei version of fascism "Steve Jobs". (They even put the main villain in a turtleneck and jeans!) But then they’re blowing up Japan, and then there’s an all-powerful collectible, and then there’s nothing memorable.

The absolute best part of this movie is how Inoue wants to talk about Ghost’s themes of community and connection, but it ends up being a story where Takeru is just the rapt audience. He’s told a lesson, but he doesn’t… he doesn’t really learn it? He overhears it, and then he’s like Wow Takeshi Was Right. That lesson - that all life matters because we’re all intertwined - is huge for Takeru, and it sucks that this movie treats it less as something he fights to understand, and more a pearl of wisdom that’s been dispensed. It’s hollow.

And that’s my problem with this whole movie, really. It’s not doing anything for Takeru, beyond letting him bask in Takeshi’s awesomeness. The villains are all Showa guys, or Showa offshoots. The Eyecon is a MacGuffin, and there’s nothing tying it into the Ganma or the Royal Family or any of the plots from the Ghost series. Ichigou’s lesson is 1000% a Ghost lesson, but Ghost barely needed to be there for it. It’s a Ghost story that doesn’t have time for Kamen Rider Ghost.

Still, it got me to join this site, so I can’t be too mad at it.

Inoue Forever.