Where Shin Ultraman looked at superheroes as an ideal, tapping into the loftiness tied to a lot of DC superheroes and even some of the cosmic areas of Marvel’s continuity, Shin Kamen Rider is a more street-level affair. It’s just as indebted to the styles of its predecessors, from the high-flying low-angle shots to the often-jarring scene transitions mid-fight scene, but with a much darker tone. Well, that and a much bloodier presentation; the first major fight scene involves a lot of goons being punched and expelling clouds of gore, and the fights to follow are just as visceral.
I’ll admit that I have little to no experience with Kamen Rider beyond its reputation. The only reason why I recognise this film’s stylistic touches as being inspired by the original shows is because Super Sentai shows used the same tricks and I watched a lot of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers as a kid. But as an introduction to the franchise, this wastes no time in bringing the audience up to speed. In the first ten minutes, we get an efficient explanation for who Kamen Rider is, why he is, who his enemies are, and the larger shady organisations that set everything up before we jumped in. It also introduces Shinya Tsukamoto of Tetsuo The Iron Man fame as the scientist who created Kamen Rider, which is fitting given the body horror approach to the costumed superhero.
Speaking of which, I’ll admit that I was a bit taken aback when, after praising Shin Ultraman for going for superhero deconstruction without going full grimdark, we get this film which emphatically is that. A lot of the melodramatic philosophising found here breaks down the underlying power fantasy of the crimefighting superhero, where individuals take it upon themselves to decide how the world should or shouldn’t be, and links it to the more authoritarian attitudes that, for example, would uncritically consider Rorschach from Watchmen as an inspirational hero.
From there, the film taps into more ambiguous displays of morality, with its throughline being a pun on Japanese kanji about the characters for 'happy' and 'pain' being only one line apart from each other. Indeed, the antagonist Augs that Kamen Rider has to fight do a lot of monologuing about their own pursuits of happiness, often delving into nihilism and various forms of population control as a way to achieve happiness ‘for the majority’. This is personified by the main Kamen Rider, Hongo, who had his humanity ripped from him in pursuit of the violent power that he lacked in an earlier traumatic incident. He embodies the notion of the superhero as ultraviolent because ordinary people couldn’t (and by all accounts shouldn't have to) shoulder the burden that taking a life carries with it. For as goretastic as the fight scenes can get, they’re all tinged with this out-of-body sense of terror.
The production values here, with Hideaki Anno going it without Shinji Higuchi this time around, are more-or-less just as good as in Ultraman. The unorthodox GoPro-assisted camera angles make a welcome return, and with the more morally ambiguous depiction of government agencies, they take on a more sinister tone here. Part of that is personal, with the use of POV shots furthering the terror Hongo goes through in realising his own capacity for violence. While most of it is more subtle but ever-present and encompassing, with the oddball locations of camera shots reinforcing the idea of a surveillance state where cameras are everywhere. Taku Iwasaki’s soundtrack is pretty great too, leaning into rock guitars to punch up the action beats.
I do have a bit of a problem with how the story is paced, though, which is funny because that part is also reminiscent of how Ultraman was structured. It has a similar compression to its storytelling, squeezing several different villains and their evil schemes into around two hours. However, where Ultraman’s trinity of foes showed a decent progression and flow that helped carry the larger story, the collection we get here are more scattershot and make the plot feel wayward at times. Don’t get me wrong, they’re all quite entertaining (I particularly like the crazy-sexy Scorpion-Aug as played by Masami Nagasawa), but they’re held back somewhat by the more episodic narrative. To say nothing of the introduction of a second Kamen Rider, a move that officially pushes things from compressed into ‘okay, you definitely needed a second movie to make this fit’.
As much as I feel some mild disappointment about this, since it didn’t hit me nearly as hard as Shin Ultraman did, I do want to stress the mildness of that reaction because this is still quite good. It’s a bloody and gritty anti-hero story that delves into how our collective inability to properly cope with trauma, and seek everlasting ‘happiness’, can lead to even greater tragedy, and how truly caring about others is the only real superpower out there. It hits on similar points to Smoking Causes Coughing in pointing out the absurdity of violence as a means of stopping violence. I may not be totally on-board with the more nihilistic perspective on humanity offered here (as I’ve mentioned before, the closest thing I have to a religious text has a whole section devoted to dunking on nihilists), but as a flipside to the grandness of Ultraman and an expansion of the Shin Japan Heroes Universe, it’s the kind of high-flying fun I can get behind.
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