I want to like this movie. But man, I'm afraid I'm going to nitpick it to death.
First off, I can't help but be very irked by the lack of a mecha fight. Not only is that a staple of the series - and this is a theatrical movie, no less(!) - but the entire plot of this episode was the Ryusoulgers getting their mecha back. It's practically breaking the Chekhov's Gun principle by bringing up the mecha right away and then not using them. I want giant robots in my Super Sentai!
Second, I feel like this movie did the Lupinrangers dirty. While we got the character appearances, the story itself pretty much undid the series finale. Now the Lupins are back together, and are hiding from their loved ones - people who in turn went through great lengths to get them out of the Don's safe. It rather forcefully rolls back the Lupins' plot, and the thing is that I don't understand why the writers even did it. Nothing about this movie needed the Lupins to be loners again.
And while I wasn't seriously expecting this movie to bring closure to the Arsene Lupin plot, as the final LvP production I'm none the less bothered by it. The entire series was about the Lupins trying to recover all of the collection pieces in order to bring back Arsene (among others). This isn't something they accomplished in the series proper, and they missed their last chance to bring closure to the plot in the VS movie. The series made such a big deal about what might happen if all the pieces were collected; I really wanted to see how that would turn out.
Also, what's in the box? Noel goes through so much effort through the entire movie to get that treasure chest back, and then we never actually get to see what was inside. Lame!
At any rate, now that I've gotten that out of my system, there were a bunch of other parts I enjoyed. For example, Bamba is fantastic, and he needs to be in more things! Meanwhile, like Takenoko already pointed out, this was more a LvP movie guest-starring the Ryusoulgers. And despite how uneven that sounds, I'm okay with it. The writers generally focused on the strongest characters, and even if that included Noel, the movie was all the better for it. Also, the pinks totally don't get along.
I have to say, I didn't see the Status Gold thing coming. It's rare that Sentai throws out a good twist - so many things are telegraphed way in advance, or are arbitrary. That uped the stakes in a very believable way. Though a lot of that good will gets wasted when the Big Bad decides to wait an extra day to take over the world...
I think someone else mentioned this as well, but they brought back LvP's style of dynamic camerawork for some of those shots, and it was as fantastic as ever. I've really missed that kind of shooting. Kiramager has been incredibly conventional in that respect, so seeing LvP's style again really highlights the difference.
Finally, for as well as the movie was going, I do feel like they kind of dropped the ball at the climax. Needing more dial fighters to unlock the safes was an interesting conundrum. However solving it by cloning the Lupins was incredibly anti-climatic. There's nothing really clever about it, and it just sort of
happens.
takenoko wrote: ↑Fri Jul 24, 2020 5:06 am
Is Ganima made up of preivous monster suits?
It's nothing I immediately recognize, at least.
Like the random pairing offs at the end. Tooma and Asuna just randomly getting along is such a clash of personalities
It really is. Asuna is almost exactly opposite Touma's personality. I feel like the writers were just stuck with that one. They had better pairings for everyone else, which meant the foodies became the leftovers.
Phoenix512 wrote: ↑Fri Jul 31, 2020 6:52 am
I didn't expect the new Ryusoul was going to be a Gokaiger change.
One could argue that Toei hasn't stopped doing Gokai changes since 2010, given all the nostalgia projects and other throwbacks they do...
CheetahLynx wrote: ↑Fri Jul 31, 2020 3:10 pm
My god, I forgot how much of a showoff Noel was with all those flips.
When you've got it, flaunt it! It's always impressive looking, but they kind of overdid it by having him show off so much in a 50 minute movie.
takenoko wrote: ↑Sat Aug 01, 2020 8:08 am
In QC I suggested releasing Episode Zero/Precure dance separately since we had released it two times before already. Figured people didn't want to download it again since it has zero connections with the Ryusoul VS LVSP plot
It'll make it easier to archive later too since we can have the first part in the Ryusoul batch and the latter in the Kiramager batch
For what it's worth, that's what I was going to suggest as well even before reading this post. It should have been 3 parts: the VS movie, Episode Zero, and then the dance. Now I'm stuck with a movie file that simultaneously belongs in my LvP folder, my Ryusoulger folder, and my Kiramager folder.
