tokusatsu

Rodan (1956)

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Most children grow up with innate knowledge of the main-cast monsters in the Godzilla series, regardless of whether they’ve ever seen a Godzilla film.  Names like Mothra, Ghidorah, Mechagodzilla, and Jet Jaguar really mean something to children, who extend their fascination with real-world dinosaurs to the fantastic monsters of classic Toho tokusatsu as if they were interchangeable.  It isn’t until you’re older and learn the names of second-tier kaiju that the absurdity of that knowledge becomes apparent.  The names Dogora, Atragon, Matango, Varan, and Gorath sound like AI-generated nonsense to anyone not obsessed enough with the genre to collect those lesser monsters’ action figures, but it’s only their general unfamiliarity that makes them ridiculous.  Or that was at least my thought when I sat down to watch 1964’s Ghidorah, the Three Headed Monster for the first time and had to back away because I didn’t recognize one of the monsters billed on the poster.  Godzilla, Mothra, Ghidorah . . . these names all mean something to me, but Rodan the Pteranodon (speaking of the fuzzy border between fictional kaiju and real-world dinosaurs) was entirely foreign.  So, I took the time to get to know the winged beast before watching his official entry into the Godzilla canon.

Appropriately enough, the introduction of Rodan is as an Unidentified Flying Object that attacks jet fighter pilots who have no idea who he is either.  The flying dinosaur travels at supersonic speeds and leaves sky trails in his path, playing into 1950s sci-fi audiences’ fascination with contemporary reports of UFOs.  The answer to the mystery of his body is fairly straightforward; he’s an unearthed pterosaur who’s mutated to kaiju scale through radiation exposure – Godzilla-style.  His mutant abilities can be surprisingly devastating, though, as he can flap his wings with enough force to create shockwaves & wind gusts that level entire cities in a manner of minutes.  Since the monster design is a little unimaginative, it’s clear he needs help to carry the film along, so he’s joined in his debut by a race of giant bug larva with sword-sharp claws that slice people to death on the ground while Rodan attacks from the sky.  The bugs are identified as mutated dragonfly larvae and assigned their own official kaiju name Meganulon, which is well-earned, given than they carry the first half of the movie on their exoskeletal backs before the mystery of Rodan is fully revealed to the audience.  It turns out that even in his titular debut, Rodan was already presented as a second-tier monster and no threat to Godzilla’s reign as King to them all.

You obviously don’t need to know Rodan or Meganulon’s names to fully enjoy the Godzilla series.  Only hopelessly nerdy completists would feel compelled to Do The Homework for a genre that’s mostly just pro wrestling matches in novelty rubber costumes.  The only name you really need to know is Ishirō Honda, Toho’s go-to director for most of its tokusatsu classics.  From the sincere post-war devastation of the original Godzilla to the groovy psychedelia of Space Amoeba, Honda was central to the invention & evolution of kaiju filmmaking in his three decades as a director.  With Rodan, he hit the milestone of directing Toho’s first in-color kaiju picture, which makes for beautiful vintage pop art in its modern HD presentations, especially as the tactile monster costumes clash against the matte-painting vistas of the background.  More importantly, Rodan is interesting as a tonal middle ground in Honda’s kaiju oeuvre.  If you put aside the giant-bug attacks in the first hour, it’s a surprisingly grounded mining labor drama that’s just as grim as the original Godzilla.  Mining-town workers are drowned, crushed, and sliced while their widows wail in agony, making the movie just as much of a political piece about working conditions as it is a pollution allegory.  That dramatic sincerity can slow down the monster-action payoffs in the first hour, but it does make for a fascinating contrast with the screen presence of Rodan and his insect frenemies, who are too goofy to take 100% seriously. 

I am choosing to accept Rodan‘s self-conflicting tone as a feature and not a, uh, bug.  If it were made a decade later, it would’ve been pushed to a more cartoonish extreme to fully appeal to children, which might have robbed it of its interest as a volatile battleground for the sincere vs. silly sensibilities of early kaiju movies.  Arriving just a couple years after the 1954 Godzilla, it’s an early sign of the goofier direction Honda and the rest of the genre would go while still maintaining the brutality and harsh political messaging of that original text.  The least interesting aspect of Rodan, then, is likely Rodan himself, who only earns top bill by default.  I doubt the film would’ve lost all that much if it were just about miners being attacked on the job by Meganulon, so it’s somewhat a shame that their name was pushed to the back pages kaiju history books alongside the likes of Ebirah, Baragon, Destroyah, etc.  I’m never going to complain about getting a chance to see a flying dinosaur attack a miniature city, though, so count me among the dozens of nerds who are glad that Rodan was given his momentary spotlight.

-Brandon Ledet

King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962)

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There’s a new Godzilla & King Kong wrestling match in multiplexes right now: a tag team formation of the legendary monsters just three years after their last onscreen battle in the American production Godzilla vs Kong.  Do you know what’s never reached American theaters, though?  The original 1962 crossover film King Kong vs Godzilla – at least not in any wholly intact, wholly legal form.  It wasn’t until the mid-2000s that the 1954 Japanese cut of the original Godzilla officially reached American audiences, with the only widely available version being a warped American edit featuring awkward post-production inserts of actor Raymond Burr.  Twenty years later, that film’s second sequel, King Kong vs Godzilla, has still not yet been made wholly available for American audiences … but we’ve gotten damn close.  In 2019, The Criterion Collection released a gorgeous box set of digitally restored Showa Era Godzilla films, with every title dutifully de-Americanized except for King Kong vs Godzilla.  The original Japanese edit of that film is included in the set, but it’s stashed away among the supplementary Bonus Features on the final disc, not listed in sequence.  It’s also not fully restored to the image quality standards of the rest of the set; only the scenes left untouched by the American edit are in Blu-ray quality, while the reintegrated Japanese-only scenes switch to a jarring standard-definition DVD scan.  The reason for this choppy, half-complete restoration is somewhat mysterious to anyone who’s not an employee of Criterion, Toho, or Warner Bros, but I can at least say I’m grateful that it was included in the set at all, compromised or not.

The only reason King Kong vs Godzilla‘s muddled distribution history is worth noting in the first place is that the film was a significant creative swerve for both of its overlapping franchises.  If nothing else, it marks the first time either Kong or Godzilla were featured in color or in widescreen, three entries into both respective series.  The monsters’ onscreen crossover match being billed like a boxing PPV was a big deal, as it set the template for dozens of sequels to come: Godzilla vs. Hedorah, Godzilla vs. Mothra, Mothra vs. Godzilla, Godzilla vs. Megalon, Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla … all the way to the aforementioned Godzilla vs. Kong.  More importantly, it was a major change in course for its titular monsters in terms of its intent & tone.  The original Godzilla film has obvious, deep roots in the cultural & historical contexts of 1950s Japan, but it also pulled a lot of narrative influence from the monster-movie template established by the 1930s American classic King Kong.  Kong’s second outing in 1933’s Son of Kong and Godzilla’s second outing in 1955’s Godzilla Raids Again—both rushed to market mere months after the success of their predecessors—were mostly just pathetic cash-in imitators of former glories.  Of the pair, Godzilla Raids Again feels especially superfluous, since it can only offer the novelty of seeing the pro-wrestling style kaiju battles of later Godzilla sequels filtered through the relatively elegant aesthetics of the original (through Godzilla’s fights with the dinosaur-like Anguirus, again recalling plot details from the original King Kong) with no other notable deviations.  Son of Kong is likewise shameless in its willingness to repeat the exact tones & events of its predecessor, but it at least introduces the adorably useless Little Kong of its title to keep the rote proceedings novel.  Together, they make for convincing evidence that both series would have to get goofy to keep going, which is where King Kong vs. Godzilla comes to the rescue.

1962’s King Kong vs. Godzilla is a wonderfully goofy corporate satire that feels like it has less in common with previous Kong or Godzilla pictures than it has in common with more cartoonish titles like Giants & Toys and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?.  A lot of the early stirrings of my beloved Godzilla vs Hedorah seem to have originated here, from the psychedelic pop-art color palette to the tangential indulgences in Looney Tunes goofballery.  Our two skyscraper combatants are unleashed upon the modern world in ways that feel true to their origin stories but are heightened for comedic effect.  When an American nuclear submarine gets wedged on an iceberg in Japanese waters, a slumbering Godzilla explodes out of the ice to attack the crew onboard.  Meanwhile, Kong is once again collected from his island home to participate in low-brow vaudevillian entertainment, but this time it’s to boost the ratings for a television program that promotes the Japanese company Pacific Pharmaceuticals.  Shockingly, the island extraction sequence that sets Kong loose somehow feels even more racist than the 1930s film that inspired it (a sequence the original Godzilla copied with much more tact & grace), but if you can stomach the blackface humor long enough to get past it, the rewards are worthwhile.  Pacific Pharmaceuticals quickly establishes itself as the villain of the piece, exploiting their bungled extraction of Kong and the simultaneous emergence of Godzilla to craft the ultimate ratings booster: the world’s first televised kaiju battle.  Instead of nuclear proliferation or the exploitation of Nature, a novelty television program advertising Big Pharma drives the horror of the plot, damning capitalistic greed and bloodthirsty quests for increased ratings.  That theme can’t help but feel a little silly by comparison, and the movie smartly leans into the humor of its villains being incompetently evil in their selfishness instead of being knowingly evil in some grand mastermind scheme.  The world suffers for their folly regardless.

Of course, all of this plot detail and background context ceases to matter during the final act, when Godzilla & Kong finally start going at it in earnest.  I won’t spoil who wins that fight, but I will say that the result is bullshit.  There’s some great monster action throughout, though, including a sequence where a lightning-powered Kong fights an especially slimy octopus and one where Godzilla survives miniature missile fire from an army of toy tanks.  The most notable dynamic to the monsters’ one-on-one match-up is the difference in the care put into their respective looks.  Godzilla looks just as great as ever here, while Kong looks like his costume was left to melt on some forgetful production assistant’s dashboard on a summer afternoon.  I could not get over the bizarre, lumpy proportions of Kong’s hairy, apish body; it felt like I was standing naked in front of a full-length mirror, my exact body type finally represented onscreen.  The half-SD, half-HD lumpiness of the movie’s presentation had a similar kind of misshapen charm to it as well.  In truth, it was no worse than watching a movie on a streaming platform that frequently buffered down to a lower quality due to internet bandwidth constraints, which isn’t ideal for a Blu-ray purchase but also isn’t a total deal breaker.  However, it did have the unintended benefit of highlighting just how much of the original Japanese version of the film had been removed from its American cut, denoted by alternatingly crisped & blurred visual details.  It’s obviously a wonderful thing that Criterion was able to officially present King Kong vs Godzilla to an American audience for the first time in the half-century since it premiered in Japan, regardless of lumpiness.  It’s been so long since the film first came out that its titular combatants have since become tag team partners in fights against other, lesser monsters, so it’s somewhat embarrassing that their original outing together is still partially stuck in a distribution limbo.  King Kong vs. Godzilla is a deeply silly film, but it’s also a historically important one, and it should be treated as such.

-Brandon Ledet

Godzilla Minus One (2023)

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As I’m piecing together my personal Best Films of 2023 list in these last few weeks of the year, I’m becoming increasingly self-conscious of how many of my favorite new releases are shamelessly nostalgic for the toys & kitsch collectibles of my youth.  Even without a new Godzilla film juicing the numbers, it’s been a great year for films about Furbies, Barbie dolls, Ninja Turtles, and tokusatsu superheroes like Ultraman, Kamen Rider, and The Power Rangers.  My Best of the Year list is starting to look like a 1998 Toys”R”Us TV commercial, which is somewhat embarrassing for a man of my age.  I am approaching 40 years old, and I still don’t wanna grow up.  Thankfully, Godzilla Minus One‘s inclusion in this year’s throwback-toy-commercial canon is at least helping to class up the list a little, as it’s a much more sincere, severe drama than most movies that have excited me lately.  It’s just as openly nostalgic for vintage tokusatsu media as Shin Ultraman, Shin Kamen Rider, and Smoking Causes Coughing, announcing itself as an official 70th anniversary celebration of the original 1954 Godzilla film that started it all.  However, it’s the only film in this year’s crop to hit the same notes of deep communal hurt as the ’54 Godzilla, which is a much more ambitious aim than reviving the goofball slapstick antics of the child-friendly kaiju & superhero media that followed in its wake.  Godzilla Minus One‘s sincerity is incredibly rewarding in that contrast, to the point where it’s the only Godzilla movie I can remember making me cry.

To commemorate that 70th anniversary, Godzilla Minus One dials the clock back to the widescale destruction of post-WWII Japan, covering the first few years of national rebuilding after nuclear devastation.  The giant primordial lizard of the title is once again shaken awake by the human folly of the atomic bomb, a great sin against Nature echoed in the creature’s flamethrower-style “atomic breath.”  The film’s limited budget means that Godzilla gets limited screentime, but the monster is deployed wisely as an unstoppable, unfathomable horror whose atomic power is so great that it burns away the flesh of its own towering body.  Godzilla is scary again, more of a harrowing extension of war survivors’ PTSD than a rollicking hero to children everywhere.  The cleverest move the movie makes, then, is by limiting the scope of its drama to match the limited scope of its monster attacks.  We feel the fear Godzilla stirs in just a few cowering citizens’ lives, even though both the monster and its victims represent large-scale national grief in metaphor.  It’s a small-cast wartime melodrama that’s occasionally interrupted by kaiju-scale mayhem, the same way a soldier who survives war is supposed to go through the motions of normal life in peacetime despite frequent, violent reminders & memories of the atrocities they’ve witnessed or participated in.  The “Minus One” of the title refers to people struggling to rebuild their lives from Ground Zero, only to be reset even further back by the grand-scale cruelties of life & Nature, through the monster.  It’s tough to watch.

The drama gets even more intimate & insular from there.  Most Godzilla movies dwell on the city-wide chaos of the monster attacks, depicting thousands of victims scattering away from Godzilla’s path like helpless insects.  In contrast, Godzilla Minus One zooms in to assess the value of just one, individual life in that mayhem.  Its mournful protagonist (Ryunosuke Kamiki) is a kamikaze pilot who dodged his suicidal mission during the war and now suffers intense survivor’s guilt, convinced that he morally failed in his duty to serve his nation.  The sudden appearance of Godzilla offers the self-hating young man a second attempt at wartime valor, to the point where he’s disturbingly excited by the prospect of facing off against the monster instead of experiencing healthier responses like fear & grief.  In a more proudly nationalistic action thriller, this sentiment would go unchallenged, and his self-assigned self-sacrifice would be celebrated as traditional macho heroism.  Instead, Godzilla Minus One is about the community of people around the pilot—each having survived their own war atrocities & personal shortcomings—convincing him that his life is worth living, that he has value beyond the damage he can cause as a lone soldier in a war that’s officially over.  The honor of serving his country through death is no nobler than risking his life de-activating leftover explosive mines to put food on his family’s table; it’s sad & disgraceful, and it should be treated as a worst-case scenario.

The dramatic beats of Godzilla Minus One are just as predictable as the rhythm of its monster attacks, and just as devastatingly effective.  I cried with surprising frequency during the final twenty-minute stretch, even though I saw each dramatic reveal coming from a nautical mile away.  Maybe it’s because I vaguely related to the communal struggle to rebuild after multiple unfathomable catastrophes, having remained in New Orleans through a series of floods & hurricanes.  Maybe it’s because I more personally related to the pilot’s struggle to learn a foundational sense of self-worth, the toughest aspect of adult life.  Maybe it’s because composer Naoki Satō’s gargantuan score drummed those sentimental feelings out of me through intense physical vibration.  Who’s to say?  All I can confidently report is that the drama is just thunderously affecting as Godzilla’s roars, which is a rarity in the series.

-Brandon Ledet

Cutie Honey (2004)

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I’ve been talking a lot of shit this year about the exhausting routine of superhero media.  It’s just been non-stop whining, to the point where I couldn’t even praise the ecstatic animation style of the universally beloved Across the Spider-Verse without also citing its narrative contributions to our growing, culture-wide superhero fatigue.  I should probably take time to note, then, that I am a total hypocrite on this exact subject.  While I’ve been mostly avoiding the ongoing deluge of major-studio superhero sequels (the new Guardians, the new Shazam, the new Justice League spinoff, etc.), two of my favorite trips to the theater so far this year were specialty screenings of two Japanese superhero films: Shin Ultraman & Shin Kamen Rider.  Hideaki Anno’s post-Evangelion career pivot to lovingly remaking the vintage tokusatsu media of his youth has been hugely rewarding lately, with the wholesome humanism of his Ultraman film and the earnest inner-turmoil of his take on Kamen Rider reviving the otherwise artistically dead medium of live-action superhero filmmaking.  It turns out there’s still plenty novelty & enthusiasm to be found in the tokusatsu end of superhero media, at least for Western audiences whose only major exposure to the subgenre was decades-old broadcasts of The Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers.  So, even though I’m supposedly fatigued by the Hollywood assembly line of live-action comic book adaptations, I recently found myself looking back to the first time Anno dipped his toe in the genre two decades ago with his take on the bubbly kawaii superhero Cutie Honey.

Reviving source material originally published as manga and animated series in the 1970s, Anno’s live-action Cutie Honey film is the clear bridge between his early anime career and his recent swerve into retro live-action tokusatsu reboots.  All of the absurd, anime-style shot compositions of his recent “Shin” films were already part of his established visual style in 2004, complete with his needlessly stylistic depictions of bureaucratic desk work.  He even incorporates hand-drawn animated sequences into Cutie Honey‘s opening credits & action set pieces, both as a nod to the character’s comic book origins and as a shrewd cost-saving tactic.  For all of its stylistic connections to Anno’s other work, it’s the first time I’ve seen him participate in the “magical girl” anime trope, which helps separate the film’s familiar Anno-isms from the macho, Batman-style brooding of Shin Kamen Rider and the gee-willickers Space Age awe of Shin Ultraman.  Cutie Honey approximates what it might be like if Anno produced a Shin Sailor Moon movie next; or at least that’s what came to mind for an anime-newb like me who’s only been exposed to the medium’s most iconic “magical girl” titles. He does update the vintage anime’s visual sensibilities with a little ironic kitsch and mid-aughts fashion choices (including an amusing amount of attention to flip phone bling), but for the most part the highlights of his Cutie Honey film are in the same register as his recent Ultraman & Kamen Rider films.  He approaches this kind of material with the goofy exuberance of a Looney Tunes short or an episode of Adam West’s 1960s Batman series, except amped up with the psychedelic visuals & self-hating sleaze he made a name for himself with in Neon Genesis Evangelion.

The titular Cutie Honey is a cute, sweet-as-honey office worker who loves taking bubble baths and playing dress-up.  She’s also a cyborg superhero who can “transform” into any conceivable disguise by pressing the heart-shaped pendant on her magical choker and shouting “Honey flash!” into the cosmic void. Her disguises mostly amount to her playing Gene Parmesan style dress-up games to fool her enemies, but when the situation at hand calls for violence she does change into hot pink body armor, going full kawaii superhero.  Anno takes a lot of obvious delight in filming the Sailor Moon-style magical girl transformation sequences in those battle scenes, as well as staging her fights with legions of faceless goons that she kicks into the air like limp mannequins.  The details of Cutie Honey’s global espionage sidekicks or her gender-ambiguous arch-enemies—known collectively as Panther Claw—don’t matter as much as the sugary joy of her cutesy quips & superheroic costume changes.  The film is simultaneously goofier and sleazier than Anno’s recent “Shin” movies, constantly ogling its bouncy superhero in her underwear between costumes and trapping her in damsel-in-distress lesbian kink scenarios.  Despite all that old-man leering, it’s aggressively girly for a superhero film, which pushes it even further into a campy, gay sensibility than the Batman ’66 vibes of Anno’s recent works.  It’s especially amusing that Cutie Honey fuels up for her superhero transformations by eating ungodly piles of junk food, which makes her the perfect hero for little girls and overgrown gay stoners everywhere.

Although Cutie Honey is an early rough-draft sketch of what he would later achieve in his “Shin Japan Heroes Universe” projects, I don’t know that I would as readily recommend it to Hideaki Anno die-hards as I would to fans of Girl Power superhero media like Tank Girl, Birds of Prey, Josie and the Pussycats, and Spice World.  It neatly belongs in that hyperactive, hyperfemme superhero canon, even with the thick male-gaze lens strapped to Anno’s camera.  In either case, it’s refreshing in the context of our modern MCU/DCEU sponsored hellscape, which 2008’s Iron Man kicked off just a few years after this seemingly ancient early-aughts novelty.  I highly recommend checking it out while Anno’s perspective on the superhero genre still feels fresh & exciting, even though the legal means of doing so is a little shaky.  YouTube has it dubbed; Internet Archive has it subbed.  Neither transfer is in especially great shape but, hey, at least you won’t be watching Uncle Ben’s corpse or Mrs. Batman’s pearls hit the pavement for the thousandth time.

-Brandon Ledet

Shin Kamen Rider (2023)

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As omnipresent as superhero media feels in pop culture right now, I honestly don’t think it’s much more prevalent than it was when I was a child in the 80s & 90s.  It may be more aggressively marketed to adults now, but it’s always been around. The major difference between post-MCU, post-Dark Knight comic book adaptations and the Saturday morning superhero schlock I grew up with is that adults are now expected to take them seriously as meaningful art, each with their own decades of backstory worthy of literary study.  As a child I was aware that characters like Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, and the X-Men had long-running, epic scale stories that stretched beyond the thirty-minute episodes of their respective animated series.  I would tune into those episodes sporadically, though, and I didn’t really need to know their larger stories to enjoy the simple pleasures of their violent Good Guys vs. Bad Guys morality tales.  In contrast, now you have to watch Batman learn ninja skills for an entire origin saga before he can start Batmanning in earnest.  You have to watch 30 feature films, several streaming series, and a non-denominational holiday special to fully appreciate a talking raccoon whooping ass in space.  Context & lore used to matter way less in our long-running superhero epics, or at least they used to be secondary to novelty & iconography.  That’s why it was so thrilling to return to that vintage style of Saturday morning superhero storytelling in Hideaki Anno’s Shin Kamen Rider, which hurls you directly into the continued adventures of its titular cyborg superhero without any expectation that you’ll have done your decades of televised homework before arriving at the theater.  Its approach to lore is confusing the same way the subtextual meanings of an abstract art film can be; you’re not expected to know the answer, and it’s freeing to admit you’re lost and just enjoy the ride.

Yes, Shin Kamen Rider is technically connected to a network of other Anno-revived tokusatsu franchises—Shin Godzilla, Shin Ultraman, and the latest Neon Genesis Evangelion reboot—all bundled under the banner of the “Shin Japan Heroes Universe.”  Unlike with the MCU, however, each title in the SJHU is designed to work as a standalone project, only crossing over in action figure toy commercials instead of Cultural Event double features like Infinity War & Endgame.  Shin Kamen Rider‘s connection to Anno’s other two “Shin” tokusatsu titles is more one of method than one of narrative.  It carries over all of the retro kitsch of Shin Ultraman and the volatile brutality of Shin Godzilla, now streamlined into one unfathomably efficient superhero saga.  All you really need to know is that our titular hero is a grasshopper-hybrid cyborg man who escapes the evil laboratory that augmented his body and vows to destroy it before they augment the rest of humanity.  Anno doesn’t bother with Kamen Rider’s origin story, nor even his escape from the lab.  He invites the audience to join in three or four episodes into a Kamen Rider TV series, then zips through the next half-century’s weekly storylines so quickly there’s no time to care whether you have any idea what’s going on. You just do your best to tag along for the high-speed motorcycle rides & insectoid hyperviolence or you miss a season’s worth of plot reveals in a single blink.  And if you blink, so what?  There’s still plenty for-its-own-sake pleasure in watching the heroic grasshopper cyborg man beat up the evil cyborg spider man, the evil cyborg bat man, the evil cyborg mantis man, and so on, regardless of why he’s doing it.  I didn’t grow up with the Kamen Rider TV series as a kid, but I did have a very similar experience watching the Americanized tokusatsu series Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, where I would enjoy whatever random, out-of-order episodes I happened to catch on a schedule I was too young to control, continuity be damned.

The paradox here is that while Anno is not taking the longform lore of superhero storytelling all that seriously, his SJHU movies are much more emotionally earnest than the jokey, sarcastic heroes of The MCU.  While all modern Marvel heroes have borrowed a touch of self-satirical Deadpool snark, Anno takes the emotional stakes of his outlandish superhero premises 100% seriously.  Shin Godzilla is a scathing political satire about the inefficiency of bureaucratic government in the face of genuine public crisis.  Shin Ultraman is a loving tribute to humanity’s go-getter resiliency despite that governmental failure to unite & protect.  Shin Kamen Rider is more of a brooding, Upgrade-style tale of a hero horrified by the violence he’s capable of, isolated & alienated by the biological weaponry of his augmented body.  Despite its jabs of soulful remorse between fight scenes, though, it still indulges in the retro kitsch of reviving a 1970s children’s TV show for its 50th anniversary – mimicking the cheap-o action cinema style of its source material for modern audiences’ semi-ironic amusement.  Anno frames every establishing shot and character movement with the attention to visual detail he brought to anime, so that a leather glove casually falling to the floor is afforded the same heft of a building crumbling or a world ending.  He carries over the extreme wide-angle camera work of Shin Ultraman but frees it from that film’s drab office spaces, so it feels less like Soderbergh doing anime and more like the first-person-POV of a bug.  There’s an inherent visual absurdity to following a cyborg grasshopper man on a motorcycle from one insectoid enemy to another that Anno never shies away from, but he also takes that heroic bug man’s self-conflicted emotions seriously as he stares at the blood dripping from his leather-gloved hands.  It’s a tricky tonal balance to achieve, no matter how easy Anno makes it look.

You do not have to be specifically nostalgic for the original Kamen Rider TV series to enjoy the Shin Kamen Rider film.  It does help to be generally nostalgic for the episodic superhero media of yesteryear, though, assuming you’re old enough to remember a time when you were only expected to vaguely know what Batman’s deal was to enjoy a Batman film.  Before the streaming era, it took a lot of effort, time, and money to be a nerd-culture completist, and it was okay to dip your toe into this kind of thing mid-adventure – encouraged, even.  All that really mattered was whether you were enticed to buy the action figures.

-Brandon Ledet