Some thoughts on the CORE War

Now that it's out on DVD and Blu-Ray, let's take a little time to talk about last year's Kamen Rider x Kamen Rider - OOO & Double Featuring Skull: Movie War CORE, the follow-up of sorts to the 2009's 2010-dated Decade & Double feature (see what I did there? Did you? Well okay... it was technically a triple feature. Silence!) as well as being the third movie OOO has appeared in... and his own movie hasn't even come out yet!

Overall, it's pretty good, though if I had to miss seeing any recent Rider movie in theaters, I'm glad it was this one. It sort of felt like they did this more for the sake of starting up an annual tradition, which is commendable, but neither story had the same must-see quality of the previous one of these (which, say what you want about the quality, at least had a strong selling point: "Decade's real ending, Double's real beginning!") This was more along the lines of "Inoue-san demanded we let him write something Kamen Rider this year, and we still have all of those Double actors around, so why not?"

Kamen Rider Skull: Message For Double

Skull's portion was pretty cool, with some good action and clever allusions back to the TV series (the library scene complete with a suspects board!) Plus 'lil Shôtarô!

The villains are particularly nifty. I did think it was a bit weird that the bat lady already looks rather villainous even before she becomes a monster, but that's Futo for you. The Spider Dopant was especially cool, with his visible stunt man eye! Nasty powers too. I don't entirely get how Bat's "control any machine" extends to "create giant CGI tentacles out of a truck", but hey, why not. They're good bad guys and a nice throwback to the age-old "Spider & Bat" thing. Spider's human alter-ego was pretty easy to figure out in advance, but that's not a bad thing: it was nice seeing my suspicions confirmed rather than a total 180 (Surprise! It was that guy walking down the street in the title card shot!)

Diving into the pre-history of Double is a lot of fun. The Gaia Memory experiments were kind of strange: I was expecting deranged scientific testing as opposed to what appears to be a Gaia Memory cocaine party, but it's decidedly weird and evil when you think about it enough.

And yet, it all feels oddly abridged, like this is what would have been a Skull DTV had they waited a few months, but instead they stuck it in here because Toei wanted a winter movie. A lot of stuff I thought we'd see the origins of was already around, some stuff I thought would be important was absent, and Akiko's pseudo-Dickensian trip back in time was a kind of strange framing device. The whole thing felt more like the bridge between the series and some as-of-yet-unseen story rather than the tell-all origin of how Sôkichi hardboiled his first egg (or case.) Perhaps a director's cut will flesh things out a bit more.

Still, there's plenty of great bits (Bat & Spider Dopant's demises, Melissa's revulsion at what's now happened to Sôkichi) and the use of the fan blades towards the end was stellar. Skull's enjoyable as a once-in-a-while kind of hero and works well in these half-movies. Good flick.

Although I'm still not sure about Melissa. Was she just a case of inexplicable reused actress, or is the implication that she's Akiko's secret biological mom?

Kamen Rider OOO: Nobunaga's Desire

OOO's part of the movie feels pretty weird, though I'll chalk it up to Eiji and friends being stuck in the Inoueverse.

The whole Nobunaga thing was bizarre, like doing a story where someone resurrects George Washington, then has him make a killing as a software designer, but it turns out he's also a werewolf! It's a cool idea in principal, but the execution is strange. It doesn't really feel like an OOO story, despite all the talk about rebirth and desires and all that. It's like Kôgami just needed something to do over a weekend so he strung together a bunch of TV Tropes pages and said "We'll do that."

There's also not nearly enough Ankh, though I'm happy to say the next movie (chronologically) will rectify that. Ankh is seriously one of the best parts of OOO; you want to keep him in the action as much as possible.

The fights are pretty good and it's cool to see some of those old combos again. I do find it funny how a really big deal is made out of SaGoZou, who at that point was the big new thing (well, until the end of the movie.) The new movie-original monster is different, and I liked that those black core medals have a monstrous counterpart to them now.

Birth's involvement is mixed. Being so used to Date on the show, he's sorely missed here, and Birth feels more like one of those anybody-can-use-it pieces 'o tech rather than the full character he is on TV. Given that the big B was still pretty new at this point, this is one of those things which I think probably worked best in context at the time of the movie's release. See also: Double's cameo in All Riders, back in August 2009, was exciting stuff. It didn't matter that he stops the movie cold and beats the stuffing out of Shadow Moon. He was new! Shiny! Exciting! Then a month later he's become old hat and is getting beat up by a giant walking dinosaur head. S'how it is.

As for the continuity, all I can say is, who cares? I'm going to just start counting everything from now on and blame inconsistencies on how messed-up Ryuki/Kabuto/Den-O/Kiva/Decade have made the timeline and it all fits in somewhere via hypertime. But don't even try to work out the specifics of that because it only leads to madness. Kamen Rider movies have been taking a crowbar to the continuity trash can ever since Gilgaras showed up in Kamen Rider vs. Shocker despite Zanjio then appearing in the TV series as revived monster (and as one in a movie which also featured Kamakiri-Kid, who has TWO first appearances), so I see no reason to start worrying about it now.

If nothing else, just blame the inconsistencies on 1) how early this was made in OOO's run and 2) a writer unfamiliar with the material. That's really the only way you can explain this one. Trying to fit it into the series timeline will make your head explode, and yet the idea that there exists a whole deviant version of the OOO universe just so Eiji and a resurrected Oda Nobunaga can wear matching underwear is too depressing to think about. So I say it happened, but they were all high at the time, and Doctor Maki forgot what side he was on for a while. Also Date was in space or something.

Overall, not terrible, but not OOO firing on all cylinders like the TV show routinely does.

Movie War CORE

Tons 'o fun. Core is a big silly CGI villain with the personality of a doormat, but he still kicks Ultimate D down the stairs with a broken bottle in his eye, douses him in gasoline, and lights a match. And mission success: I want that EX Medal set now with the Memory Memory (which ties with Blade Blade for greatest name ever.)

The Riders have great chemistry and Shôtarô's reaction to Ankh is why crossovers like this are worth doing. Being a Chiyoko fan, I approve of that ending too. And Akiko's wedding was actually pretty sweet with ghost Sôkichi, although that must have looked weird as hell from everyone else's point of view. And it was nice that she learned something from this whole fiasco: Kamen Riders are necessary because otherwise, we'd all die. Hurray!

And oh yeah, nice to see how Terui finally tied the knot, since many of us have seen the poor guy facing a marital crisis before we even saw him get married!

Doubtless there will be another of these, though I have to say I think it'd be interesting if they ditched the multi-act thing and just had a full-on crossover. An entire movie of two Rider show casts hanging out and fighting bad guys? Sounds good to me. Either that, or in the next one, the Toei logo is somehow involved in the final battle.

All in all, not the best Rider movie, but still pretty fun. Once again, like Den-O, I always enjoy Double in the movies, and despite being saddled with some strange writing, OOO pulls through as best it can. Don't worry, they made it up to Eiji and Ankh with the next one.