[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER OOO 10TH - THE CORE MEDALS OF RESURRECTION



So, three things.

First, it’s strange to me that OOO, like Den-O before it, eventually ceded the story to the mascot. Den-O tried a few post-Ryotaro pivots, but eventually gave up in light of the unstoppable, ageless dominance of Momotaros. There’s really no need to design a successor, when the partner has overshadowed the lead. It’s the same thing with Eiji and Ankh. This whole movie’s about Ankh – his return, his motivation, his loss, his everything. Eiji exists as both goal and lesson, but never anything more than that. OOO as a brand was maybe always Ankh’s (I definitely called it that), but this movie made it official in a very funny way. Weird that it keeps happening for Kobayashi shows!

Second, I honestly don’t think Ankh should have come back.

It’s a problem with all good endings, the desire (wink) to go back to them, push them a little farther, see what could happen next. OOO practically demands it, with Eiji vowing to one day bring his partner back to life. But, like, no. No, you can’t ever actually deliver that. Ankh’s sacrifice is beautiful because it’s not a loss – to him, it’s a victory. He can only give his life because his friends gave him a life. Bringing him back inevitably diminishes that, and misses what was so amazing about Ankh’s victory over his own reckless desires.

Further, Eiji’s goal shouldn’t ever get fulfilled, because a lot of that story’s brilliance is in how it becomes a quest that re-engages Eiji with the world. Putting an endpoint on that feels like the journey means less than the destination, and that seems antithetical to Eiji’s worldview. OOO was a show about these drives within us, and how we manage them daily. It wasn’t ever about a thing you can get, or have, so creating a success state that requires Eiji to complete an objective is just, like… wrong. It’s a wrong choice.

Third and finally, I don’t think this movie worked, sort of at all.

I liked Goda. I think he’s a funny addition to a nostalgia project like this – villain as fanboy, eternally misunderstanding the source text to just run through the greatest hits. I’d like him more if the movie weren’t constantly steering itself into those same callbacks and references, but I want to say something nice about this project. Eiji’s actor is clearly having a great time playing Parody Eiji, and he’s suitably menacing as Possessed Eiji. In a vacuum, it’s a good character to dig into a 10th anniversary story.

Buy, y’know, we’re not in a vacuum. Goda’s presence is ensconced in a series of baffling, destructive choices. I don’t know why you’d bring back King OOO. I don’t know why you’d make his resurrection just be Somehow King OOO Returned. I don’t know how any of this works with either the end of OOO or the OOO/Fourze movie. (Ankh can’t have a body! His Cell Medals were destroyed when Ankh Lost was killed! And all of the other Medals were in the goddamn future and/or a goddamn black hole!) I don’t know why anyone thought “post-apocalyptic” was the correct setting for an OOO anniversary project. I don’t know why Shingo is constantly unconscious through the bulk of the film, when he was completely fine at the time that Ankh first possessed him. I don’t know why you’d bring Chiyoko back, just to make her shoot an assault rifle. I don’t know why you’d kill Eiji offscreen at the beginning, and then kill him onscreen at the end. I don’t know why you’d make this movie, in this way.

If any of it works, even a little, it’s because of Ankh. The world he’s in is beneath him, but then, he’s always thought that, so maybe that’s why his arc in this movie is so coherent and compelling. Miura makes the 10 years of absence (give or take a HeiGen film) come across in the few, frustratingly brief scenes he has with Actual Eiji. The Ankh/Eiji scene in the Medal Realm or whatever, that’s it. That’s what this whole film orbits around, and that scene works. It’s just two friends passing by each other, one furious that they can’t be together again, one content that his friend gets another chance at life. The quality of that scene is, again, the sort of thing that in a vacuum is worth overcoming your reservations to just watch two actors nail their moment. The actors salvage the best scene from the dumbest story.

And it really is the dumbest story. I wish I could understand why this the way Mouri thought to revisit OOO from 10 years distance. Like the little Eiji/Hina prelude, I don’t think it really leverages the amount of time between the series finale and this. It’s not the Faiz anniversary film, where the weight of decisions and the slow curdling of hope become the way you know you’re getting older – everyone’s sort of the same here from where we left them, and the stakes of the world preclude additional things to risk. (Gotou’s TTFC-exclusive family, most prominently.) Ankh returns to a war-torn world that’s otherwise identical to the one he left. I mean, shit, this is basically a Phase 1 summer movie! Nothing here says Time Has Passed, up to and including how terrific most actors still look. It’s a strangely miserable, bafflingly unmotivated film, set in a world that doesn't even allow for the passage of time. So dumb.

Man, I hope things are better in another 8 years…