[Ok, going to be more intentional in writing, and if I’m going to have opinions about the media I consume, then might as well use that to work on my writing skills]

(spoilers for all the Shin Japan Heroes movies to date, except for the Eva one. sry babes)

It’s interesting watching this back-to-back with Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning (Part One). They represent such different viewpoints on how to handle a story outing that is based on years of canon baggage, even as they fundamentally agree that the movie in question should be a self-contained narrative. (oh and also that the AI as the villain)

Shin Kamen Rider begins in media res, much like the rest of the Shin Japan Heroes movies to date (I assume; I haven’t yet watched the Evangelion one), but even more so, and in very short order, it seemed to me that with every installment, Hideaki Anno and team’s main objective is to pare down as much as possible the worldbuilding details, counting on the viewer familiarity on the genre or the specific IP in question. There’s something avant garde about the treatment – I’m not sure if this elegance is served well when each movie still needed to explain their respective premise and concept: the less the unspoken or visual details are utilized for the textual storytelling the more the script itself had to depend on exposition delivered in dialogue.

At this point Shin Godzilla is the most traditional of the SJHU movies in filmic storytelling imo, and I’m pretty sure this is also my personal preference but I do genuinely have a low tolerance for expositionary monologues especially for genre or high-concept stuff — much of it is just nouns of concepts that don’t quite exist in reality (so my monkey brain doesn’t know what moral or emotive value I’m supposed to attach to them) supported by hyperbolic adjectives, and in lieu of actually communicating emotions on film through the staging, directing, and acting, I’m being instructed on what to feel by the talking. This isn’t a radio drama, or a black box theatre production. Expository scenes are a necessary evil, but when there’s no other purpose to them but to overwhelm me with pages of dialogue, it takes little for them to become a movie’s boner killer for me. Staged in a one-shot, two-shot, close-up-then-medium-wide, they’re dead spaces of movie flow, what more when it’s basically two people speaking in an empty space, for all the props that were present since it’s not like the performers were interacting with their setting. 

Shin Godzilla remains my personal favourite but to be fair, it’s also the only movie with a clear single antagonist. It’s easy to break a story around that. Shin Ultraman and now Shin Kamen Rider have Japanese pop culture icons shaped by the nature of their original episodic incarnation – tokusatsu ronins wandering the Japanese landscape. This is a genuine handicap especially when the brief is apparently to present a callback to the array of villains without being bothered to organize them in any sensical way in the runtime. With Shin Ultraman they resolved it by presenting each bout as justification for why the Ultras should just simply remove Earth from alien temptation by vaporizing it entirely. Shin Ultraman was about a superpowered foreign entity whose moral calculations are at the galactic level, where being human isn’t any great achievement, to learn to care about that level of existence. To use an Eastern framing, he was an avatar who learned to live with the simple beings who are his charge. Shin Kamen Rider otoh is almost like those demons in Buddhist stories who are long-living animal spirits who managed to live long enough to be human-like but unable to transcend their nature to get to the next cycle. 

There’s something to that thought. With Shin Kamen Rider, they set out to do one more interesting thing: to recede the hero character to the point that not only he doesn’t drive the plot nor the antagonist, the big bad in SKR is patently uninterested in Hongo Takeshi. The story is entirely Midorikawa Ruriko’s – born via artificial womb and herself augmented to be practically a cyborg, she’s still the character more like the human Tripitaka and Hongo is like the demon spirits whose purpose in the story is varyingly, to be tempted by his base nature or to save Ruriko as she pursues her quest. He wasn’t even a unique grasshopper augment or even the best – the movie speeds along in its rummaging of establishing canon by introducing Ichimonji Hayato in the back half of the movie.

I must have noticed the pared down worldbuilding because the Kamen Rider I grew up with, being Southeast Asian, is Kamen Rider Black. So my only point of reference is the tragedy of Minami Kotaro and his stepbrother Nobuhiko. Hongo and Ichimonji were from the original/first series, which itself was based on a manga. So I don’t know how much of this movie are callbacks, though I get the main points (the Double Riders etc). What that means is that I’m the audience member who couldn’t relate deeper because they were references I didn’t get. I have a counterfactual: myself last year when the anniversary reboot with Kamen Rider Black Sun. Whatever my issues were with that one, I had prebuilt buttons that were mashed when certain elements were brought into the series. 

So, I could only engage with SKR as a movie with no established history. What I did know enough kept me going: SJHU movies to me feels like a dialogue with Japan’s generational concerns as delivered through its pop culture. That if any of them felt still current or contemporary feels more like an indictment of the society from which they originate (like how the BBC Sherlock version didn’t need to find another location for John Watson to return from the war from – Afghanistan was still appropriate). Shin Godzilla still dealt with the fear of nuclear – how unfortunate that the callback wasn’t the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima any longer, but instead the Tohoku region earthquake and the subsequent meltdown at Fukushima. Shin Ultraman was about the fear of unknown threats and being taken advantage of, even as the country is coming into its own as global player, and to realize that to overcome or even defeat these threats, is to come together as a community. A general sentiment made specific by the fact it was made during the height of COVID-19.

With Kamen Rider (both Shin and Black Sun) it was the distrust against corporate interests and the gravitational pull of wealth in making their agenda possible within society, though Black Sun was a lot more explicit about the complicity of the government of the day with corporate interests. While Shin is apparently developing a Tachibana-san Cinematic Universe, and thus the shadowy government agencies will be the bulwark between us and the oncoming darkness. You decide if that’s your cup of tea but you can’t deny it’s got a clear thesis. It’s also not very Kamen Rider but that’s just my opinion. Kamen Rider’s central nemesis for me, corporate power & private wealth, was set up, but the movie had precious little to say about them. Instead the usual pitfall when the FX temptation around creature design was not heeded, and so the movie spent more time around the same sort of themes you expect from Frankenstein or The Fly, but also not in any particular depth.

The trouble is the story is being led by Ruriko but the cultural norms and bias of the creative team saw her instead as a support character – while Hongo is the audience entrypoint, as the sidekick he was entirely a passive agent of the story. As such his interior life, scant as they were, and incredibly well-adjusted about being an unwilling science experiment, felt like detours from the main story at hand. I don’t enjoy saying this – Kamen Rider was the one SJHU I looked forward to the most, after discovering Shin Godzilla. Even Ichimonji came in with more energy and colour. 

Perhaps that was the point. I’m supposed to spend much of the movie in the dark over this living daytime nightmare I’m thrust into, while doing things and going places based on the instructions on someone who herself is motivated to keep her cards close to her chest. Still, in this one respect, this is better than Eternals, if I had to pick another superhero movie in recent times whose protagonist had precious little clue on what’s going on through most of her movie.

The point is, once Ruriko had to exit per her assigned character trope, the story had little thrust left. Any movement was just plain inertia, even if Ichimonji’s arrival did provide some boost to the characterizations. And so, from an explosive (and gory) opening, the movie cycled to its ending by rote: here is a hero newly reborn, here is his support system, this is his mission. Evil never sleeps, hope never dies, and as long as some dude is willing to ride a bike, a Kamen Rider lives on.