[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER ZI-O: OVER QUARTZER



I like stories that end up being about something, but not at the expense of actually being stories.

This movie was like someone made a screenplay out of one of my posts, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. It’s a movie so hellbent on Talking About Heisei Kamen Rider that it mostly forgets to tell a story using the Kamen Riders of the Heisei era. It’s almost a spiritual sequel to Heisei Generations Forever, in its attempt to make the bonds of Heisei literal in its storytelling. It just never manages to say anything of substance?

It’s all over the place, this thing. We start with a Mach guest-appearance, then spend some time in the Sengoku Period for some slapstick comedy, then find out that Everything We’ve Ever Known About Sougo Is Wrong (in a development that looks at the stupidity of Swartz’z plot from Episode 43 and says “hold my beer”), then have a battle over Heisei’s sloppiness (???), then look at the aftereffects of the film’s plot and go Ha Ha WHO CARES. Tonally, it’s disorienting and unpleasant. It’s swinging wildly between insane extremes, never letting the audience get a handle on if the movie should be taken seriously or not. The only way to make it work would be to either ground it in character, or have a theme so transcendent that any plot defects are irrelevant.

So, spoiler, we’re 0 for 2 on that front.

The villains are brand-new, their organization is brand-new, and the main dude’s claim to being the Real Tokiwa Sougo makes absolutely zero sense, given the 43 episodes of TV we’ve already watched. There’s no real character to speak of, for any of them. They’re riffs on Showa Riders and pre-Kuuga Heisei Riders, which is cute but insubstantial. Barclkxs (I am never looking that up) is all unbelievable claims and Thematically-Relevant Platitudes. He never ever ever feels like anything other than the writer’s weird Anti-Heisei strawman, a character dedicated to destroying a thing we love to replace it with I don’t even know what. At least the dude in HeiGen Forever wanted to be the only one to smile! This guy’s just remaking history because he doesn’t like 21st-century Kamen Rider shows?

Our heroes don’t fare a whole lot better. The only members of Team Zi-O who get any real arcs are Woz and Sougo, and neither of them make a ton of sense. Woz’z plot depends heavily on his devotion to a character we’ve never seen before, fulfilling a nonsensical scheme that contradicts vast swaths of a show we’ve spent a year watching, before rejecting those dumb things to once again be the guy we’ve spent a year watching. It’s all ridiculous.

Sougo’s story is… god, I’m not even sure what it is? It’s more wrapped up in this movie’s central thesis than anything else, so maybe by untangling that, we can untangle Sougo’s story.

There are two plots in this movie where characters find out that the history they believed was really just a story they were being told. In the process of discovering the truth behind the fiction, they discover that the purpose of fiction is to provide a way to hope for a better world; we rewrite flaws as nobility, and selfishness as sacrifice. But inside those fictions are people making choices, and it’s wrong to stifle freedom to create a more ordered narrative. We’re allowed to be messy as people, because those messes help us learn who we really are.

As a theme, it’s not bad. The problem is that Barcklsx and the Quartzers won’t stop talking about Heisei’s disorder as though it’s a commonly-held opinion, rather than something pretty random that the movie never tries to provide any context for. He’s just like Your World Doesn’t Make Sense and starts hoovering people up into the sky; his argument is nowhere. If you’re going to make your entire film subservient to a particular thesis, it needs to be more than just some disconnected Sougo speeches. It needs to feel like a point-of-view, and it never does here.

This movie… it wants to be some sort of stirring defense of Heisei Kamen Rider, but I’ve got zero clue who or what it’s defending Heisei Kamen Rider from. I like Heisei Kamen Rider! Zi-O as a series is all about how great Heisei Kamen Rider is! I don’t understand what argument this movie thinks it’s winning, and I’m not sure why it moved heaven and earth to win it. No one in this movie does anything for reasons other than serving the metaphor. It tries to do roughly six hours worth of story in about 63 minutes. Its central theme feels incredibly personal to the writer, yet conveyed so unconvincingly that I’m not sure they even believe it themselves.

A surprisingly misbegotten film. It’s maybe the first Kamen Rider project I’ve ever seen where I wished it was about less?



BONUS! WE ARE TALKING OVER OVER QUARTZER!

Because Androzani84 demanded it, here’s another commentary track for a Zi-O movie, brought to you by the same folks who did HeiGen Forever and a big chunk of the TN Plays Memory Of Heroez thread. (As always, special thanks to DreamSword for handling the recording and editing!) If you’ve ever wanted to hear my head explode in real time, here’s your chance!