Super Hero Taisen GP: Kamen Rider 3 [2015]

"Win and you are just, lose and you are evil."

 SUPER HERO TAISEN GP: KAMEN RIDER 3

 SYNOPSIS
 In 1973, Kamen Rider 1 and 2 fought and destroyed the Great Leader of Shocker, their long struggle at an end. As they rode off in triumph to new adventures . . .they were ambushed and destroyed by Shocker's final Rider, Kamen Rider 3, who destroyed the 2 Riders. As a result. . .Shocker conquered the world, and the Riders that came after are agents who enforce Shocker's authority.

 This is obviously not how things went in the proper timeline, but thanks to Shocker developing the History Modifying Machine and was able to alter the past and turn their greatest defeat into their greatest victory.

 There are a few that resist--Kamen Riders Black, Mach, Faiz, and Zeronos (who, being a Singularity Point, is immune to changes in the timeline) but the main one, surprisingly is Kamen Rider 3 The Rider Who Shouldn't Exist, who rebelled against his masters and wages a one-man war against Shocker. Eventually, these rebels persuade Kamen Rider Drive that this timeline isn't right and combine their efforts to reach Rider Town, where the resistance against Shocker is massing for a strike . . .

 . . .only it's a great big trap. Kamen Rider 3 was actually working for Shocker the whole time, the Great Leader survives as a giant robot in the form of a Kamen Rider (the remains of Kamen Riders 1 and 2 incorporated into his machinery) and everything's looks like it's about to go down the drain.

 Thinking quickly, Drive challenges Kamen Rider 3 to a race to determine who's the fastest. Kamen Rider 3, consumed by his need to compete agrees, but with the help of the other Kamen Riders cheats to win against Drive, but, rallied on by the people (and the timely intervention of Kamen Rider Black RX), Drive actually manages to win. But the Great Leader never really intended this to make a difference, so he turns into Rider Robo and attacks the Riders, who've undone their brainwashing (even Kamen Rider 3, who fights beside 1 and 2 in the final clash against the Great Leader) their ranks bolstered by this year's Super Sentai, the Ninningers, who fortunately have a giant robot of their own that can match Rider Robo's power.

 Eventually, everything turns out all right, mostly. The History Modifying Machine is critically damaged and the timeline resets. As such, the Riders won against the Great Leader and Kamen Rider 3 never existed, resetting back to his life as a F1 racer. There's only three problems:

 -Kamen Rider Mach was killed in the final battle and didn't return to life when the timeline reset

 -Shocker cobbled together enough functioning remains of the History Modification Machine to lock reality in a Groundhog Day-style time loop where Mach dies over and over again.

 -Shocker has also built a new Rider to deal with their enemies: Kamen Rider 4.

 But that's a tale for another day . . .
 
 ANALYSIS
 (A word before we begin: Kamen Rider 3 is not the same thing as Kamen Rider V3. For one thing, V3's name sounds exactly how it's spelt, whereas Kamen Rider 3's name is pronounced "Sango," mirroring the way Kamen Riders 1 and 2 were named. It's rather confusing, I know)

 After last year's Heisei Vs. Showa Rider War, there was a lot of pressure to try and top what they'd done, and since last year's featured a movie-long battle between the two Rider eras, it was a tall order, and to do it twice in a row would have probably led to diminishing returns. So rather than just trade on the history that everyone knows, they decided to explore one of the most obscure backwaters of Kamen Rider history: the curious case of Kamen Rider 3.

 Before Kamen Rider V3 was to be a separate series, it was mooted that Kamen Rider would just continue on. There would be a new Rider built by Shocker, Gel Shocker would become Ghost Shocker, and they'd play out the string a little longer. A manga chapter was released covering this, but they then changed their minds and decided to start a new series with a new Rider created by the two Riders, and Kamen Rider 3 was quietly forgotten about.

 But Toei decided to resurrect him for this movie (and have his vehicle be the TriCyclone, based on a toy released during Kamen Rider's run to better counter Kamen Rider Drive having the Tridoron car) and here we are.

 I spend a lot of time on this because this movie really pivots on Kamen Rider 3, and whether you enjoy it or not depends on how much you buy Kamen Rider 3, who really is a walking continuity point, character wise. Fortunately, the writers give him a personality and character arc of his own--3's obsessed with competition (to the point of brutally beating down his enemies to prove his superiority) and has something to prove, and that drive led him to effectively destroy the Riders, and leads him to challenge Drive at the end of the movie. Balanced against that is his guilt at killing the Riders and ensuring Shocker's conquest. It's as though he knows he's not supposed to exist and is determined to carve a place for himself in history.

 So his journey is really the one we're watching here, which is good because the plot of this movie makes less sense the more you think about it. Some of that's to be expected--really, with a timeline rewrite that's inevitable, but layer that on the amount of plot finessing you have to do to have a Rider crossover in the first place, and that leads to a lot of things that happen just to get to the next thing (The Ninningers, like the ToQgers and the Shadow Line last year, just pop outta nowhere because we gotta have a giant robot fight), which you just have to accept to get on with things, because past the novelty of Kamen Rider 3, and the "dark present" gimmick, the main thing that these movies have going for them is "which Riders return and get folded into the story?"

 And there's a lot of that: The Riders from Kamen Rider Blade show up and play a major role in the movie, Faiz returns from last week, and Zeronos pops back up. Tetsuo Kurata returns and gets to be both Kamen Rider Black and Black RX (which also gives him a chance to roll out the Ridoron to make the Tridoron/Ridoron homage explicit, even though since we've seen Black and RX in the previous movie as separate Riders, none of this makes a lotta sense) and it's all very exciting in the moment, even if it falls apart under closer examination.

 It's also not helped by the fact that the plot is virtually the same as Kamen Rider OOO: Let's Go Kamen Riders, (which also featured Shocker screwing up the timeline) only not quite as coherent because GP has so much more to jam in (all the Riders, the time travel, Super Sentai, et. al.)

 But at the end of the day, the main question is "is it a good movie?" Kind of, in that it's diverting and exciting, and Kamen Rider 3 is a pretty interesting character to follow. But is a better movie than last year's? Probably not. The weight that last year's movie had of eras colliding isn't on display here, but then, you can't really do that again after the first time and expect it to have the same gravity. If you want the best possible version of this movie, watch Let's Go Kamen Riders. If you want to see Toei grappling with its own canon and getting a fun romp out of it, watch this movie.

 NEXT TIME
 In the wake of Shocker's alteration of the timeline, things are a little stuck. Mach keeps dying, Shocker has a tenuous hold on world conquest and are just about to deploy their newest Rider, the fully robotic Kamen Rider 4. Only Faiz, Zeronos, and Drive had break the time loop and finally stop Shocker from messing with the timeline. Next time, we'll look at the special web series that ran in conjunction with this film, Kamen Rider 4: