All told, that wasn't a bad movie. It was a loud, dumb action movie, but I wasn't expecting anything any different. Otherwise it was better than the average team-up movie. We've had much worse, and rarely have we had better. Now just remove half of the action scenes and replace them with plot, and you'd have a genuinely good movie.
takenoko wrote:Yeah, that movie felt padded as fuck. Did we really need two flashback scenes in a 90 minute movie? The whole thing feels like you could have cut half an hour and the experience would have been better for it.
Agreed. There was a lot of fighting. I mean a lot. The middle of the movie was an almost 30 minute unbroken fight scene. Beat up the riders untransformed, then beat up the riders transformed, and then finally they beat up the bad guys.
Meanwhile, is it me or was this movie especially brutal towards Emu? He got beat up heavily, even by KR standards. It got a bit ridiculous at points. They need to share the pain; for example, Ghost could use some more beating...
What was the deal with Poppy's voice in this movie? That was heck of weird. Could they not remove that?
Even if the movie is prepared well in advance - and what we're seeing is what they had originally planned for Poppy way back at the start - the echo is a post-process effect. I can't fathom any reason they couldn't quickly re-render the sound mix without her echo. I'm increasingly of the opinion that this was done solely for movie theater reasons.
xiiliea wrote:And of course, Takeru has to die for a while for an extra 3 minutes of movie.
At this point Takeru dying has turned into a running gag. Maybe we'll get lucky one of these days and it'll even stick!
xiiliea wrote:And yup, my poor ears during the music part. Some of the jingles were barely audible.
It seems like Toei can never get this right. Half the time the sound mix is 5 different jingles blaring away at once, drowning out everything else. In this case it was almost the opposite: the background music was drowning out the dialog and sound effects. I just don't get it. They need to be properly mastering this for home theaters.
Phoenix512 wrote:The Ghost and Pacman connection was both the silliest thing ever and the most clever thing ever at the same time.
I'm gong with brilliant. It just works so well with the riders at the core of this team-up. I'm thinking that they surely noticed this early on before selecting the game villain, which is why we got Pac-Man in the first place. Otherwise that's one hell of a coincidence.
I swear that burying the Drive's belt was the worst thing ever because Toei needs to come up with a reason to get it everytime Drive is now in a movie and already ran out of good reasons to get it. I swear that's why they needed Gaim because he's God and could easily get it. Maybe at some point, they can make a copy of the belt so they don't need to get the original everytime or just not have Drive in any future movies.
They didn't put it back at the end of this movie. So they could easily handwave that in the future, I suppose. Otherwise you're right, but I am of the mind that doing right by the series is better than leaving things open for the stupid movies. It was a powerful ending for Drive, and I don't think not burying the belt would have made any of these post-Drive movies any better.
Phoenix512 wrote:That's a terrible idea. It was basically two separate stories and coming up with some silly way to make the two stories connect together for a shallow team up at the end. At least the current way have more cast interaction. I would prefer this type of movie to be the summer movie so it would occurred more towards the end of the current Rider than at the beginning.
Agreed. This movie has problems (we didn't need 5 riders with all the fan service that comes with it), however it's still better than the old X/Y/X+Y format of the old movies. The isolated stories always resulted in a mess once it came time to smoosh the two together. This format at least has the
potential of delivering a good movie.
Monkeyjb1988 wrote:
takenoko wrote:Edit: Also, Akari looks like shit in this movie. What happened there?
I must be blind, I thought she looked the same as in Ghost. I know she got the movie strain of Bugster, but I'm assuming you meant before too. Yeah, I thought she looked fine and I don't just mean
FINE.
Akari did have a very distinct case of team-up hair. Otherwise she looked the same. Don't underestimate the power of a hair-do to completely change how one's face is interpreted.
Lunagel wrote:Can I just say how disappointed I am that they billed this as having 5 generations of Kamen Riders and Gaim doesn't even show up? I mean, it's clearly a random dude, so random, in fact, that they didn't even give him voice credit. Was there a point in even having Gaim then? Wouldn't it have been better to just give his (very limited) screentime to someone else? Or better yet, just make the movie shorter?
I'm sure the thought process was something like "wouldn't it be cool to get all the riders from the past half-decade into a single movie?!". And then it just spiraled out of control from there. The problem with that idea (besides eating time) is that it would be incredibly awkward if Wizard was there but Gaim was not. And since they could get Wizard, and 5 Riders is cooler than 3, they did exactly what you'd expect by forcing Gaim in via other methods.
And yet I would still watch it all over again for Wushu Girl because HOLY SHIT THAT WAS FUCKING AWESOME. DID YOU SEE HER KICK ALAIN IN THE FACE?! BACKWARDS?! DAYUM GIRL!
I had to look this one up in the Wiki. It's the same woman who played the not-quite purple Ninninger. She's listed as being a junior wushu champion, and I can believe it. Those were amazing moves, and it easily put everyone else to shame. Having actors that can do their own stunts is so much fun.
And while it would never happen, it would be nice if they could get her in as a regular in a toku series, as she'd clearly be good at it.
I have a new baby daddy and she is amazing.
That makes no sense. Also, that's incredibly disturbing.