[Kamen Rider Die]

TOKUMEI SENTAI GO-BUSTERS VS KAIZOKU SENTAI GOKAIGER: THE MOVIE



Nnnnnnnot for me, on a bunch of different levels.

The main one is how much this film is – by necessity and audience preference! – a gigantic celebration of a pile of different Sentai shows I’ve never watched, and have very little interest in watching. (Kyoryuger! No thanks!) Beyond the Gokaiger of it all, and the Special Preview Sentai, there’s a million GokaiChanges and Megazord GokaiChanges, referencing an additional 34 series of Sentai. It’s all celebratory and nostalgic for most fans, I’m sure, but it was all just noise to me. Didn’t care, beyond the most surface-level bright colors and explosions stuff. It was like watching a trailer for a film I had no interest in. (I swear, if I’ve got to watch that goddamn Wicked trailer in front of one more movie…!) I liked it fine as a rousing conclusion to a big crossover movie, but I didn’t really care which robot was blowing up which other robot.

(I will confess to really loving the use of Shinkenger to ferry a message across several centuries. That was super clever, and had me rooting for this film for about eight minutes.)

And then there’s the Gokaiger of it all… I don’t like Marvelous? I am unbelievably tired of films having a Marvelous plot that’s all about pretending to be a bad guy so he can defeat different bad guys! (I know this one came first, but I still really hate it as a plot.) It’s a needlessly confusing start to this story, where the entire Gokaiger team gets their Pirates Of The Caribbean makeover before trying to murder the Go-Busters, all for a scheme that… gives the villains exactly what they wanted in the first place, plus murdering Nick, Gorisaki, and Usada for good measure. Your returning Sentai heroes, everybody! It’s aggravating as a premise, and it innately makes me resent the Gokaigers showing up. (Gai continues to be a dog-brained nuisance, but he’s not exactly a focal point of this film.) I don’t know their villains, and I don’t like their main guy, and I don’t get most of their references, and I can’t invest in their half of the narrative.

(I also love that their ship/Zord was destroyed, so Bird Robot was just like I Went Back In Time And Grabbed It so it could be there for the finale, and like… grabbed it from when?! Is there a past Gokaiger team that doesn’t have their ship anymore? It is the most regrettable form of discourse to crab about causality in a toku story, but this is a pretty big deal for their backstory in the film! Losing their ship to the bad guys is directly referenced as a major problem!)

But the Go-Busters stuff is still pretty good, if massively telegraphed. (Like, I’m surprised Nick didn’t just say What Would You Do If We Died Twenty-Five And A Half Minutes From Now during the first Go-Busters scene of the film.) I am a sucker for any story that centers the Buster/Buddyroid relationship, and this one was a pretty fun version of it. It’s as much about the emotional impact that the Buddyroids have on the Busters, as it about the lessons the Busters have learned from the Buddyroids that made them the heroes they are. Convoluted sentence – apropos for this dumb film – so lemme take another run at it: I liked that the loss of the Buddyroids wasn’t just about losing friends and/or partners, it was about honoring the people who taught the Busters how to be heroes. They keep fighting to honor the sacrifice of the Buddyroids, and Hiromu’s ability to get on-side with Marvelous is completely down to Nick’s worldview. The idea of earning trust by trusting others… pretty great message for a crossover film between a government Sentai group and a bunch of space pirates who got three of your friends killed for no good reason!

That thread, all of the Busters stuff that concludes with them using their vaccine program to reanimate the Buddyroids, I liked it. It’s solid. But everything else! All of the dumb Gokaigers stuff and trips down memory lanes! Not for me!

IT’S TIME FOR the Toei Edo set!



Man, if there’s a way for a movie to toss in a brief trip back to Japan in the 18th Century, you can bet Toei’s gonna grab it. You could probably do an entire fanfic series of every Rider or Sentai who spent twenty or so minutes in one square block of Japan in 1770-whatever teaming up, but only if you’re okay with a cast in the hundreds. This is the nostalgia I care about, not the Magiranger Zord or whatever. (Cute Beet Buster gag, though.)