Post by Yuri Petrovitch on Jul 19, 2014 20:24:23 GMT -5
SHIN KAMEN RIDER: PROLOGUE
SYNOPSIS
Doctors Kazamatsuri and Onizuka work with but one goal in mind: Using genetic engineering to improve humanity and make them more resistant to diseases like cancer and AIDS. Doctor Kazamatsuri's son, Shin, a champion motorcycle rider, sacrifices everything to be the subject of their latest experiment--splicing the DNA of a grasshopper with his own to create a successful hybrid. Upon the experiment's completion, Shin learns some troubling things:
For one thing: The organisation bankrolling Onizuka and Kazamatsuri's experiments has no interest in curing disease. Their ambition is for an army of super-soldiers to enforce their will on the world, and have begun low-level tests of their own cyborg soldiers. For another, Onizuka has gone mad and has his own sinister ambition: He intends his genetic creations to rule the Earth, with himself at the head, ruling as their creator, their God--having already performed the same splicing operation on himself as he had on Shin.
As a series of strange murders plagues the city, Shin imagines himself to have committed them. He soon discovers that it is Onizuka who is committing them--he shares his experience with Shin thanks to their mental link (The movie asserts that grasshopers communicate telepathically, which is, of course, rubbish) and commits himself to stopping Onizuka.
Only it's not that easy. The syndicate also knows of Onizuka's plans and intends to imprison him, sending their own cyborg soldiers after him. To make matters worse, Shin is targeted by the CIA for termination. Everything soon becomes a race to uncover the conspiracies, stop the syndicate, and end Onizuka's ambitions before more people die.
ANALYSIS
Kamen Rider is a fairly dark show sometimes.
The basic concept generally revolves around a lone hero who sacrifices part of his humanity (often against his will, sometimes not) but who commits himself to selflessly defend humanity, even as this means he is fighting for a world he will have no place in. Whereas the Super Sentai shows teach that one is never alone in the fight against evil, rarely does a Kamen Rider have an ally for very long.
Shin Kamen Rider: Prologue was an attempt to carry the basic notions of Kamen Rider to their logical dark conclusion. Gone is the henshin belt, the motorcycle, the brightly coloured costume and vast organization with goofily costumed minions, and is replaced with a Guyver-esque organic transformation, hardly any motorcycle riding, multiple evil organisations which are all varying degrees of evil or untrustworthy, and a hero who is, in larger part, a victim of forces he can't affect or control, despite his amazing powers.
It's possibly the grimmest Kamen Rider show there has been or will ever be. Nearly every cast member apart from Shin dies, include his girlfriend and her unborn child. People are murdered in vivid explosions of blood and viscera. Shin even pulls someone's head and spinal column clean off, a la Sub Zero from Mortal Kombat. Shin very much wants to be Kamen Rider for adults, in much the same way that Identity Crisis-era DC Comics seemed to want to tell "grown-up" stories about superheroes.
Unfortunately, Shin, like all those awful comics trying so hard to be grown up, is also pretty juvenile when it isn't out and out unpleasant. Wallowing in misery the same way pigs lie in mud, everything downbeat and grim, culminating in the hideously tacky moment of Shin "feeling" his unborn child die (as he has a telepathic link with Onizuka, so he has with his baby-to-be) The whole thing is handled with a glum self-seriousness that borders on pomposity and there's very little fun to be had with it.
Things aren't helped by the fact that a gesture towards a more "realistic" milieu means that visually everything looks pretty much the same. Borrowing visually from the Hong Kong crime films of the time, only without the kinetic energy that keeps those films from bogging down. Apart from a few fights between monsters, the movie seems primarily to consist of people having opaque conversations in underlit rooms and sad people feeling sad about sad things. This has the curious effect of making a movie that is an hours and a half feel like two hours and a bit.
The idea of having a fully organic Kamen Rider transform on-screen must have seemed like a great idea--however, in practice, it's somewhat risible, featuring plenty of obvious fake prosthetics, and some insane overacting to fully capture that American Werewolf In London by way of David Cronenberg angle they seem to want to reach. Problem being, lacking the budget or skill to make it fully natural and not having enough around them to fully ground the movie in a slightly unrealistic milieu to get away with it, it just ends up looking silly.
It is a deeply unpleasant movie and I dreaded revisiting it, and upon watching it again, I wasn't disappointed or surprised that my reaction was still negative. I'm not alone in that--Shin had an incredible backlash against it when it came out (and this is from a fanbase that tolerates dark Rider shows like the original, Amazon, and Black before it was released. . .and Kuuga, Ryuki and 555/Faiz after) and for many years, when the time came to recount Kamen Rider history, it was swiftly acknowledge and glossed over. ZO, whose movie is half as long as Shin got more time on average than Shin. That says a lot. Additionally, thanks to some creative numbering, Shin is officially the thirteenth Kamen Rider, which is kind of perfect given that in his own movie, he can't catch a break.
Time heals all wounds (somewhat) and when Shin was brought back in later installments in the Heisei era for team-ups, apart from his usual standing in the background and saying nothing role (though they did give him a motorcycle) Shin is commonly brought back in the out of canon comedy-themed net movies, wherein his hard-luck story continues, whether it be getting Rider Fans to demand a sequel to the movie or, in the case below, trying to make friends with Kamen Rider Fourze:
I would love to tell you that there is something in Shin Kamen Rider: Prologue you would enjoy. Unfortunately, I can't really do that. The closest I come is that Shin Kamen Rider's Twitter account is pretty damn hilarious. Other than that, there's not much here even for die-hard fans. It's an odd backwater of Kamen Rider history this exists (if it exists for any purpose at all) to demonstrate that there's only so far down the dark well before it just becomes a grim, joyless slog.
NEXT WEEK
To become the ultimate astronaut, Kazuya Oki undergoes a process to make him a superhuman cyborg. Before he can actually go to space, however, the installation is attacked by the forces of the Dogma Kingdom. The sole survivor, Kazuya swears vengeance against his enemies and the battle against evil is joined once again. In seven, it's Kamen Rider Super-1