Post by Yuri Petrovitch on May 3, 2014 22:29:36 GMT -5
KAMEN RIDER THE FIRST
SYNOPSIS
A secret organisation known as Shocker (Sacred Hegemony Of Cycle Kindred Evolution Realm) is kidnapping innocent people and turning them into cyborg soldiers, one of whom is college student Takeshi hongo. Abducted by Shocker's bat agent, Hongo, is mind-wiped forced to undergo painful surgery and is turned into a cyborg agent of Shocker, codenamed "Hopper." His initial mission is, at first, to eliminate any possible witnesses of Shocker's operations. The two witnesses, however, Asuka, a journalist that had just interviewed him and her fiancee. Backed up by Shocker operative Spider, Hongo is able to stop himself and remember who he is and rebels against Shocker, though not in time to stop the Asuka's fiancee from being killed by Spider. Blaming Hongo for his death, she begins to track him, to determine why Hongo killed her fiancee.
Hongo is declared a traitor by Shocker and is marked for death, even though he has a unique variation among all of Shocker's cyborgs--unlike the rest, which require periodic blood transfusions to keep their bodies from rejecting their cybernetics. Shocker's lead scientists, Dr. Shinigami, decides to create a second Hopper cyborg to hunt down Hongo. The man chosen is Hayato Ichimonji, who is a dead ringer for Asuka's fiancee, not least because he's been resurrected as the second Hopper cyborg and is following Asuka in an effort to find Hongo.
Meanwhile, Hongo receives a motorcycle called the Cyclone from his mentor, Tobei Tachibana. With it, he destroys Spider, avenging Asuka's fiancee, at least as far as he knows. In-between all of that via the magic of flashbacks, a pair of terminally ill patients fall in love and are taken to Shocker's island base (because of course they have one) and it is soon revealed that they were rebuilt into Snake and Cobra, two more Shocker agents, so completely under the sway of Shocker, that they commit themselves to killing Hongo.
Ichimonji and Hongo finally battle, but when Asuka is taken by Shocker and is nearly converted into a cyborg, Ichimonji rebels and teams up with Hongo to launch an assault on Shocker's island base . . .finally triumphing over Bat, Snake, and Cobra, the day seems saved, but Shinigami and Shocker have survived, and are already plotting revenge . . .
ANALYSIS
Kamen Rider: The First is, to put it simply, an attempt to do a Batman Begins for Kamen Rider. For all that it's a seminal moment in the history of Japanese superheroes, it's a kid's show from 1971 and quite a bit of it (as we'll get into when we finally review Kamen Rider) was made up on the fly to solve certain problems that cropped up during the course of that series. The First generally streamlines the rough edges and darkens the proceedings considerably, but then, given that the writer of this is Toshiki Inoue, the man who brought us the baffling Kamen Rider Agito and the so grim it's nearly suffocating Kamen Rider 555. To his credit, he keeps the proceedings relatively lucid and straightforward, even if the extended flashback with Snake and Cobra doesn't quite integrate with the main plot as much as it should, partly because the flashback is rather clumsily worked into the movie, and also because it's a bit much to expect the audience to get attached to two characters who are really just there to get killed dead by the two Riders.
The First keeps the proceedings low-key as a rule. The transformations are understated and the classic cries of "RIDER KICK!" are absent, and in general, if you're looking for the frenetic action that Kamen Rider is typically known for you'll be disappointed--this being more of a "serious" take on the material (whatever that might be said to mean) the fights are short, swift, and brutal.
I should say however, that the re-imagined designs for the two Riders are exceptional--keeping the original concept intact while making them significantly more sleek (and, merficully, making some immediate differentiation between the two Riders, which is something the original series never quite did) and they generally look pretty fantastic, as do the redesigned Cyclones.
It may sound like I'm turning my nose up at The First, but really I'm not. It's not quite the Kamen Rider stuff I personally enjoy (generally, as we'll see when we finally address the ball of awfulness that is Shin Kamen Rider: Prologue, when Kamen Rider gets serious it's usually unbearably stupid) but as a kind of bridge between the way that American superhero movies are approach and how Japanese superheroes are presented it's certainly an interesting riff on the classics, and something that's worth watching at least once. The look of the film is superb, the revamped Riders look amazing, and the story is generally straightforward and keeps the stakes small enough to where this is a genuine impact. I certainly think it's worth your time.
NEXT WEEK
Two years after the destruction of Shocker's island base, Hongo is living undercover, and Ichimonji is growing weaker as his body begins to fatally reject his cyborg implants. But Shocker has returned for revenge with a series of mass-produced Kamen Riders and a third version of the Hopper cyborg. Will the Rider's survive a renewed assault from their hated enemy? And can anyone solve the mystery of the people who are being murdered every time they hear a certain song? All of these questions may or may not get a satisfactory answer as we wrap up our look at the re-imagined Kamen Rider movie series when we look at Kamen Rider: The Next