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reddishkirby
Reviews
Kamen Rider Black Sun (2022)
Great Effects, Bad Plot
To get what I liked out of the way, the suit designs and special effects were really good for the most part. Black Sun easily has some of the highest quality suits in the Kamen Rider franchise. The fights are really well choreographed and have a very visceral feeling about them. The actors all also do a good job with their roles.
However, the plot for Black Sun is full of holes and not very well thought out. The problem with it should be obvious, the series tries to a racism allegory using mutant monsters who need to drink a serum made from dead humans in order to continue living. Taking the transhuman Nazi monsters of the original Kamen Rider and flipping them to be a superpowered oppressed underclass creates a number of issues, namely in that the show tries to explore the realistic ramifications of the world it portrays whilst also forcing it to parallel the civil rights movement. This leads to things like our hero Kotaro and the over-the-top racist anti-kaijin human character having similar goals of wanting to see kaijins eradicated, just by different means (Kotaro wants to prevent any future kaijins from being made, while the human racist wants to kill them all). While Kotaro's actions are perfectly justified in universe, since kaijins began as humans who were forcibly experimented on, it doesn't jive with the civil rights analogy the show portrays.
If the show kept itself divorced from the real world and had a plotline with its own self-contained politics this wouldn't be as a big an issue, but the various explicit parallels to real-life events and movements strewn throughout only serve to mask the fact that this show has no real consistent theme or message on the issues it purports to critique.
Kamen Raidâ Ôzu 10th: Fukkatsu no Coa Medaru (2022)
Waste of potential
This is a movie I was very excited for, but unfortunately what we got was something that subverts every chance it has to be good along the way. There's lots of plot holes in this movie and things that should be explained that aren't, but the most egregious issue this movie however has is its handling of Eiji and Ankh's reunion. Before watching I had seen some of the spoilers and was fine with Eiji dying as long as it was handled well, but the way the film went about it is incredibly poor. Rather than a movie which gives Eiji and Ankh one last go together and has them interacting throughout, Eiji is effectively barred from his own movie by being possessed by new character Goda.
Goda is a concept that could have been interesting if executed well but was instead handled poorly. With a large cast of returning characters and a comparatively short runtime of less than an hour, introducing a new character was already risky and Goda is unfortunately handled in such a way where instead of adding to the setting he saps time that could have been spent developing some of the returning characters more. Fans had literally been waiting for a decade for an Eiji and Ankh reunion, yet instead we get Goda possessing Eiji for about 90% of the movie and Eiji only getting a few minutes of interaction with Ankh at the end before dying, something that comes across as an cruel bait-and-switch rather than the swan song that was likely intended. Had the film had Eiji and Ankh together for most of it, rather than Ankh and Goda, then Eiji's death would have likely been received much better as we would have at least gotten plenty of Eiji and Ankh beforehand.
Besides Eiji, the rest of the cast is also handled poorly. The side characters barely contribute anything. Goto gets a new form that's immediately wasted. Akira, Hina, and Chiyoko don't do anything of note. Kougami is just as fun as ever, but barely gets to do anything. The four Greeed are brought back but don't do anything for the most part other than stand around Ancient King OOO. Ancient King OOO also deserved better. The movie doesn't even explain how he came back to life, and he's killed before we get a chance for a proper Eiji on Ancient King OOO fight, so the movie can pull yet another pointless twist and make Goda the final boss.
I definitely recommend skipping this film. It's an insulting punch to fans of OOO.