Director/Screenplay – Hideaki Anno, Based on the Manga Created by Shotaro Ishinomori, Producers – Daiki Koide & Kazutoshi Wadakura, Photography – Osamu Ichikawa & Keizō Suzuki, Music – Taku Iwasaki, Visual Effects Supervisor – Atsuki Sato, Production Design – Ikuto Yamashita. Production Company – Toei/Cine Bazaar/Shin Kamen Rider Partners/Ishimori Productions.
Takeshi Hongo discovers that Professor Hiroshi Midorikawa has outfitted him with a suit that runs on prana energy and can transform him into a grasshopper being when he puts on a helmet. He has also been given a hi-tech motorcycle to go into action. However, he is upset to find how much he enjoys using violence against opponents when he wears the suit. Agents from S.H.O.C.K.E.R. burst in and kill the professor. In his dying breath, the professor tells Takeshi to protect his daughter Ruriko. The two of them are recruited by government agents in the fight against S.H.O.C.K.E.R., which is run by a rogue A.I. that is programmed with a mission to make humanity happy. To this purpose, the A.I. has created a variety of Augs – augmented insect human. Takeshi was originally created as part of the Aug program. As the masked Kamen Rider, he must take on and defeat the other Augs and their plans to subjugate humanity.
Kamen Rider is the name given to a long-running Japanese franchise. It started as a live-action tv series Kamen Rider (1971-3) that ran for 98 episodes. This was very loosely based on a manga Skull Man (1970) that only produced one issue. Originally, the Kamen Rider was Takeshi Hongo, a university student who was abducted by S.H.O.C.K.E.R. and transformed into a cyborg who would go into action aboard his motorcycle the Cyclone. When the original actor Hiroshi Fujioka was injured during a motorcycle stunt, his character was temporarily written out of the show and a replacement created in Hayato Ichimonji, a photographer who became the second Kamen Rider. There have been a phenomenal number of Kamen Rider reboots and offshoots. Wikipedia lists no less than 35 tv series, 76 theatrical releases (some of which are repackagings of episodes of the tv series) and 23 direct-to-video films, even a poorly received adaptation for US tv Masked Rider (1995-6). Shin Kamen Rider is a big screen reboot.
Hideaki Anno is best known as creator of the classic anime tv series Neon Genesis Evangelion (1992-6), which he recently rebooted as a series of films – Evangelion 1.0: You Are (Not) Alone (2007), Evangelion 2.0: You Can (Not) Advance (2009), Evangelion 3.0: You Can (Not) Redo (2012) and Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time (2021). Anno had previously directed the live-action films Love & Pop (1998), Ritual (2000) and Cutie Honey (2004). He had considerable international success in rebooting the Godzilla series with Shin Godzilla (2016). This marked his move to specialise in big screen revivals of popular franchise and was followed by his writing/producing the big-screen reboot of Shin Ultraman (2022) and Shin Kamen Rider here.
Hideaki Anno delivers some entertaining battles between Sosuke Ikematsu and the various Augs. He borrows something of the Spider-Man films to show figures conducting mid-air acrobatics, or Kamen Rider and the Grasshopper Aug jumping like insects as they pursue each other across an industrial plant. There’s a very entertaining sequence with Kamen Rider being pursued by dozens of copies of himself on motorcycles in a high-speed CGI chase through a tunnel. The action is so outrightly fantastical it enters into a realm of unrealism.
Sosuke Ikematsu as the Kamen Rider
The film creates a highly entertaining line-up of villains. There’s a rather entertaining battle with the Spider-Aug who remonstrates Hongo on the pleasures of killing humans and being a superior being while the two are bouncing around and clinging to the side of a dam. There’s the marvellously mad Bat Aug who hangs upside down while releasing pheromones that take over Ruriko’s mind, before he reveals an auditorium filled with similarly controlled people that die and are dissolved to dust on his command.
I enjoyed Shin Kamen Rider somewhat less so than Shin Godzilla and Shin Ultraman. The complaint would be that in between the set-pieces of Sosuke Ikematsu’s battles with the various Augs, the plot is thin and tends to drag. There is initially no real explanation for how Takeshi ended up as the Kamen Rider – we see him go into attack in the suit before it is ever made clear what has happened to him. Even then any explanations are brushed off as being “something he wanted”, but you are not sure why he has no memory of the change. Also [PLOT SPOILERS], despite being the film’s identification characters, both Takeshi and Ruriko end up being killed off near the end of the film and the stage left to be inherited by Tasuku Emoto as the second Kamen Rider, who is only introduced in the last quarter of the film. This is following the way the tv series swapped its lead but is dramatically ungainly.
What kind of takes you aback is the amount of splatter we get as Sosuke Ikematsu goes into action in the Kamen Rider suit. Quite a bit more than the average action film. All of which leaves you wondering who the audience for Shin Kamen Rider was thought to be – in English-speaking territories at least, you would imagine that the film be pitched predominantly for children’s and teen audiences.
