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Of all the things W might've inaugurated, the whole Rescued Collectibles thing is the most franchise-defining. (Decade had this sort of, but it wasn't like there was a random Kuuga card that was wreaking havoc or anything.) Quote:
Also, thanks for posting those previous A to Z thoughts! Seems like we both had a good time with a well-crafted summer movie. Quote:
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Ah the W movie, it's been so long, despite being a couple years since I saw it.
As with everyone else, Eternal is one of the most impressive Rider designs out there, simple yet with a powerful presence that it stands out, even among the more visually interesting villain designs. Also a pretty solid character (at least for this movie, I've heard they don't do him justice in later appearances), and his team felt like a fitting addition, especially how they all have W's Gaia Memories as their powers, giving us a glimpse of how they'd look as monsters. I also really like seeing Joker in action, much like with the Begins Night portion of the crossover movie with Decade. As stated earlier, the Riders' designs for W are just so good, in how they're so simple yet still unique (unless you count W's forms minus Extreme, which are just color swaps, though I like them) that I can't dislike them. The movie itself (going off memory, which may or may not be pun in this case) is certainly reminiscent of a Hollywood Blockbuster in the sense of it being such an action-packed film from start to finish, or at least, that's how I saw it. Overall, it's a lot of fun, and even if it introduced what some consider the lazy Golden Extra Final Form Power-Ups, I still enjoyed it (yes, I also liked Wizard's Gold Dragon) and may consider this as one of my favorite Summer Rider Movies. As for this Thread, I might drop in for the pieces I have seen, but I've yet to watch a good chunk of Rider Movies and V-Cinemas which I'm planning to get around to (now that I finally found some), but I'm also planning to watch more Toku shows. Of course, I'll probably be going off memory for these, it's still fun to catch up with these movies. |
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I honestly feel like that W and Wizard were the best at keeping the full arsenal with just their midseason upgrades (FangJoker and All Dragon) getting shafted for various reasons
Granted I feel like OOO had the best integration of the collectible gimmicks into the plot with both sides after them and swapping who has what medals and thus limiting what forms Eiji has access to. |
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I remember liking this movie, but I generally liked everything W-related.
As is my wont, I have casting trivia. This time it?s centered on my favorite member of Eternal?s crew, the Heat Dopant (because I can be shallow and those shorts). She was played by actress Minase Yashiro, who was the lead actress in The Machine Girl, a minor cult classic about a schoolgirl who replaces her severed arm with a gatling gun to get revenge on her attackers. It?s one of those ridiculously silly and gory low budget films that were popular around the late ?00s. Some of my friends and I were briefly obsessed with the movie?s absurd trailer, so it was really surprising to me when Yashiro turned up in a Kamen Rider project (for the first, but not final time). |
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Oh, tried to got around this when my laptop is in need of fixing, which means it's unusable currently until it's fixed and made me think I should wait even longer to watch this (only finished W the series, the TV didn't air movies), but I got reminded that there are still my older laptop that I can salvage, outdated but usable enough for this. But good that I'm not left out here.
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Otherwise, this movie explains that the defeated NEVER members turn into dust, which was why Kazu disintegrates in what I think a similar way as people in Ryuki's Mirror World. Metal Dopant's weapon also reminds me of Imperer's Gazellestab (Spin Vent), and he too was a mercenary Rider in said series. Shotaro's a flirt and casanova, but I hope he didn't show sympathy for the victimized Reika only because she's a (hot) girl, as there'd be more NEVER members turned into dust later, or if not W accepts that NEVER members would become that. I find it wrong though for the part that Hardboilder gets sandwiched... if W slams the Hardboilder to the right one... why also kick the left one with right leg... Quote:
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KAMEN RIDER X KAMEN RIDER OOO & W FEAT. SKULL: MOVIE WAR CORE
https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/...iewarcore1.png Not my favorite movie. I didn’t really love it the first time around, and I don’t love it now. The thing is, my opinion on the two sections/portions of this film – OOO and W – have sort of completely flipped around? I really disliked the W portion on this viewing. Like, a lot. Setting aside the incredibly weird Daddy Issue stuff of having Akiko’s actress play Melissa, a woman who is in love with Skull (HER DAD), it’s a story that traffics in one of my least-favorite Kamen Rider tropes: Heroic Abandonment. Skull’s portrayed as a stoic, suffering hero. He’s betrayed by his closest friend, called a monster by a woman he gave up everything to save, and unable to ever touch his daughter again. It’s a story all about the lengths Kamen Riders have to go to in order to protect the people they love, even if it means they have to cut those people out of their lives. It’s horseshit. Even before he became Kamen Rider Skull, Sokichi wasn’t answering his daughter’s phone calls. (He totally forgot about her birthday!) He lives in a completely different city for reasons that aren’t established in this film, and I don’t recall from the series. He’s making a choice to ignore his responsibilities as a parent, way before he’s forced to abandon his daughter for her own safety. (Which, two things. The No-Touching Spider in his body will only kill Akiko if he touches her. He could still, like, see her. Or call her. Like everything else in their screwed-up family, it 100% feels like Sokichi is looking for any excuse to bail on his parental commitment. The other thing… like, killing Matsu doesn’t kill the spiders? It dissolves the webbing immediately, but it doesn’t defuse the time bombs infecting everyone in the city? What… what did Sokichi even accomplish by killing Matsu, then? Everyone who didn’t already blow up is forced into a life of misery? This is what we’re calling a victory now?) This should be a story about sacrifice and duty, but everything in it reads like a story about deadbeat dads with poor work/life balance. Which, honestly, fine. I don’t need my Kamen Riders to be completely logical and emotionally healthy. I like Faiz, you know? But there’s basically no judgment on Sokichi’s actions in this movie. Akiko is furious about the ways her life has been negatively impacted due to Kamen Riders failing her as friends, family, and lovers, but the moral at the end is just Her Suffering Is A Small Price To Pay For Justice. It’s an entire story where Akiko’s theatrical-but-honest emotional turmoil is brushed aside in the face A Man’s Silent Suffering. Whatever. https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/...iewarcore2.png The even more galling failure of the W portion is that the OOO portion is specifically refuting that worldview. The W portion is about how Kamen Riders are solely focused on helping people, even if they have to give up on happiness as a result. But the OOO portion is about how hollow and unfulfilling it is to solely dedicate yourself to anything! The OOO portion – which I originally thought was laughably bizarre and generally irrelevant – pretty much ended up being the only part of this story I liked. It's Inoue, which was nice. Inoue Forever and all of that. (There's a bit where Eiji says that Nobu is still Nobu, which feels like a secret message between me and Inoue.) It does the Eternal thing of crafting a villain that reflects/inverts our hero’s shortcomings, but turned up to Evil. Nobunaga, a man whose name autocompletes with ‘s Ambition, is someone who is consumed by his need to attain, to control. He’s everything Eiji isn’t. Nobunaga sees the world around him as both a birthright and a banquet, all of it waiting for him to claim it. But in seeing the world that way, he misses the point of it all. Nobunaga can’t understand how Eiji can find joy in a life without taking. What Eiji points out to him is that the world exists outside of the ambitions of men. The sky is blue. Art is created. It doesn’t need people to control it, because it doesn’t bow to that control. It’s a pretty basic Stop To Smell The Roses moral, and it could probably only work when applied to the story of Oda Nobunaga. (It’s a bit like only being able to land a simplistic message like Don’t Bite People in a story with Dracula.) But I think it worked here due to its own bonkers commitment to the story of a cloned warlord who used his heretofore unrevealed healing powers to undo the damage he caused a woman he was stalking, as well as the proximity to a much less appealing story in Skull’s celebrated abandonment of his daughter. https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/...iewarcore3.png But at least Kamen Rider Birth shows up! I like Birth okay, but its introduction here is like nearly every other Fan Service thing in this story: missing the point entirely. It’s just the Birth suit, not either of the Birth characters. Date isn’t in this movie at all, and Goto’s turn as Birth is both noncanonical (pretty sure the series doesn’t let him be Birth for a good long while) and robbed of its significance. There’s a really great arc in the series about Goto becoming Birth, but here it just happens off-camera. Same thing with Tajador; awesome suit, fun to see it kick ass, but it’s almost unforgivable that it’s introduced with Ankh just showing up with the medals. And, man, I said how great it was that A To Z managed to find time for its entire TV series cast, so here’s a movie that Ankh’s human form is in for about forty-five seconds, and the full cast of W is almost entirely sidelined for a prequel story. It’s a bummer. It’s a movie celebrating two TV shows, and it’s compromised versions of both. Plus, not super crazy about the concluding section. The villain at the end, Kamen Rider Core, doesn’t make much sense, or have a defensible viewpoint. It’s just a monster that hates Kamen Riders, and thinks they make everything worse, all so Akiko can feel bad about holding the men in her life responsible for abandoning her. He’s a giant flaming Ghost Kamen Rider, and defeating him isn’t clever or anything. It’s just new power-ups and Early-Bird suit debuts. I had honestly completely forgotten about him, and now I know why. Yeah, man, did not dig this one! The OOO stuff is good enough, but it sucks to not really have any Eiji/Ankh scenes. (I mean, they literally never share a frame, so I’m just going to assume that Ankh’s couple scenes were filmed separately from the rest of the cast.) The W stuff features my least-favorite W plot – Akiko and Terui’s totally unconvincing romance – and one of my all-time least-favorite Kamen Rider tropes. It’s okay to say that Sokichi was a good Kamen Rider but a shitty dad! That would’ve made the movie so much better! Instead, we get a middle section that exposes the lie the first part is telling, and then a third part that ignores the exposure. Not one I liked rewatching! https://kamenriderdie.com/images/kr/...iewarcore4.png |
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