[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER W RETURNS: KAMEN RIDER ETERNAL



This movie works incredibly hard to make Daido’s story a tragedy. The whole arc of it is a man with dwindling principles – mostly that human beings shouldn’t be subject to experimentation by Foundation X subsidiaries – having what little humanity he’d managed to cling to burned out of him by the relentless and unflinching inhumanity of his opponents, until all that’s left is vengeance at any cost. That’s the story of this film, and the morally ambivalent coda from Shotaro and Philip stresses the duality of Daido. He’s an apocalyptic supervillain that was maybe a break or two away from being an admired superhero. That’s a great idea to use on a guy who’s one of the most famous Heisei movie villains, specifically because it isn’t necessarily undoing what worked in his original appearance. He was once almost good, to some folks, before becoming a movie supervillain.

So why is this film so goddamn boring?

A lot of it is because the arc of Daido isn’t exactly A Good Man Brought Low By Tragic Circumstances. He’s a motivated psychopath, and what little heroism he manages to exhibit in this film is really just a cocktail of resentment, disgust, bloodlust, and egotism that becomes a lifeline for a bunch of psychokinetic test subjects. Daido’s main opponent in the film is a Foundation X researcher, and the liberation of the test subjects starts off as just a way to ruin that guy’s day. Daido doesn’t really care about the Quarks, he just a) resents any lab rat that acquiesces to its fate, and b) SUPER wants to screw up Foundation X’s strategies. Watching Daido go on an emotional journey here is mostly just watching a remorseless killer briefly and unintentionally help out some people with a similar backstory. It’s not… it is not a very compelling 70-odd minutes of narrative.

There’s also the Sakamoto of it all, which… I mean, how tight would this movie have been if the action sequences didn’t last the average length of an HBV? He really goes all out here, and it’s almost always to the detriment of the pacing. Where Accel made sure there was enough meat on the bone to keep the jaw-dropping fight scenes to a supporting level, this one makes whatever story is going on with Mina and the NEVER team into an infrequent digression from wall-to-wall explosions and slow-mo wirework. There’s maybe a single episode worth of story here, stretched out to an almost interminable hour-plus. I’m not blaming Sakamoto for a lack of dialogue or story content, but I’m not sure the solution was to make this into a war movie co-starring a couple costumed superpeople.

This one was a real slog for me. I’m not mad at the decision to try and give Daido a little extra dimensionality – god knows this would’ve been even worse if it was just non-stop the guy from the first third of A To Z – but the attempt at making his story a tragedy required more than what we got here. Maybe a more soulful performance from Daido, or a more intricate plot than the Quarks and Mina, or a villain that had more to offer than Dr. Prospect. (There is nothing to that guy.) There’s 20 minutes of a good movie here. Shame it ran for another 50 minutes.

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DIE-A MEMORIES



-I remembered pretty much nothing of this film. When it kicked off with Double fighting a Dopant, I was genuinely surprised to learn they were in this!

-Speaking of amnesia: I cannot believe they close the loophole of Mina never tracking down Daido by saying she got Narratively Convenient Amnesia, and then it just wore off recently. LAZY! So lazy! I groaned so loud at her quick explanation of forgetfulness!

-Also, it doesn’t really make sense for how she starts this film? She’s like I Wanted Katsumi’s Killer To Know He Was A Good Guy As Well As A Villain, but she starts off by ambushing Team Double and immediately trying to murder them? That… doesn’t make any sense? It’s not like she thinks Daido was a saint; she specifically says that she learned he tried to destroy Fuuto, and Daido went on TV to tell everyone in Fuuto that he was going to be sending them to hell. If Mina learned that Double killed Eternal, she must’ve learned that he went out trying to kill an entire town. The whole point is that Daido wasn’t all the way evil, but he was evil at the end. Why is she instantly trying to kill Double and Akiko?

-Forgot Kazu was in this! So, was it ever even hinted at in the show that Kazu was a psychokinetic zombie? (I honestly don’t remember. I think it wasn’t?) Feels like weird new information for a prequel that also doesn’t add to the later story.