[Fish Sandwich]

Fish Sandwich also watched Kamen Rider Saber - Theatrical Special: The Phoenix Swordsman and the Book of Ruin

It's worth noting that since I was watching this film when it was released on home video, much later into the show's run, there's a bit of blatant hinting I do in that post about what are still future events to Die. That being the case, for Die's sake, I'm going to go ahead and quote that post with the possibly spoiler-y bit removed, as well:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fish Sandwich

One way I've heard this movie described I really liked is that it's as though they decided to release just the last 20 minutes of a 60 minute film. A description I thought of myself that I like even more is that it's a movie pulled from the same dimension as Ghost's Legend Rider shorts. The similarities begin with the fact that I adore them both.

There's just something so utterly endearing to me about the way they go above and beyond the call of duty. It's only a simple short film to fill space before REALxTIME starts, right? No need to get fancy -- no room to get fancy -- and yet here comes Falchion laying the hypocrisy of stopping force with more force on Saber within like a minute of meeting the guy. It's great. It's madness, but it's great. There's this real sense that they tried to cram as much in here as possible in a way that is extremely on-brand for early Saber. Good intentions, and an execution that I don't think most people will enjoy as much as I do.

It's almost brutally efficient in how it accomplishes that goal of having a proper story. The heroic Riders get to sum up their entire personalities in tidy single lines of dialogue before they all transform. There's no room for separate scenes of people talking and people fighting, so people simply talk while fighting. It's very conscious of that limited runtime, and I honestly think it's making the best of it to where the few moments that are allowed to slow down even a bit are in just the right spots to be impactful, like letting Touma have the luxury of a whole extra scene the other Riders don't get to transform into Emotional Dragon.

The movie also makes a pretty smart choice in realizing that no matter how philosophical the angry bird man decides to get, the plot is still going to boil down to "watching Kamen Riders fighting bad guys for 20 minutes", so the central theme is instead literally about watching Kamen Rider, and how seeing those fantastic heroes struggle against impossible odds can inspire us in our ordinary daily lives. It's something appropriately simple for the length, communicated very clearly through the bookending scenes with the kid, and, small as it may be, it's a nice extra layer to a film that, again, really did not need to try this hard to begin with.

The emphasis is ultimately on that action, of course, and it's a joy to behold in a completely different way from its double-bill partner, impressing less with the cinematography, but arguably more with the special effects. There is an insane amount of digital spectacle going on here, and I'm kind of shocked how welcoming I felt of it all? It all just looks so nice for whatever reason, which is not always something I can always say about Toei's VFX work.

So yeah, needless to say, I love this movie. I mean, it's a shame Saber didn't get a big bombastic solo movie, or the usual winter crossover with Zero-One, of course, but what we got instead was like, an absolute peak representation of the insanity of Q1 Saber, making it a perfect sort of sendoff to 2020's stretch of the show. It's one of those movies where I was excited for it right away just because the bad guy looked cool (I mean, it's Jin in a heavily retooled Ghost suit, how can you go wrong?), and when I finally had the chance to see it, it didn't disappoint.