Shin Kamen Rider: What Happens When a Superhero Reboot gets Personal

Posted in: Amazon, Movies, Review | Tagged: hideaki anno, ingmar bergman, Kamen Rider, neon genesis evangelion, shin godzilla, Shin Kamen Rider, shin ultraman, superhero movies, toei

Shin Kamen Rider is Evangelion creator Hideaki Anno’s personal and poignant reboot of a classic superhero into a dark and existential reboot.

Shin Kamen Rider is one of the major superhero movies of the year if you pay attention to major franchises, not just from Hollywood. It’s a better, more interesting movie than any of this year’s Marvel and DC superhero movies, and that’s down to its writer-director Hideaki Anno. In a genre that’s now obsessed with reboots, metaverses, and endless continuity fanfic callbacks, it’s also the most interesting example of how a personal story can be told through a superhero franchise.

Shin Kamen Rider, which directly means “New Masked Rider” in English, follows the first Kamen Rider TV series from 1974 that launched a franchise that never disappeared. There’s been a new Kamen Rider series with a new, redesigned hero and story every year ever since that follows the same basic premise: a man is transformed into a superhuman cyborg with bug-based powers. He sets out to fight the evil secret organization that created him. The format is endlessly malleable, with more storytellers bringing their own ideas and themes to it. Shin Kamen Rider is a major pop culture event from the usual annual new TV series that pops up on Japanese television every year. The writer-director is Hideaki Anno, the creator of Neon Genesis Evangelion. The new movie makes it the third of his trilogy of reboots of the three pillars of Japanese Science Fiction pop culture, after Shin Godzilla in 2016, last year’s Shin Ultraman, which he wrote and co-produced. Kamen Rider holds a special place in Anno’s heart, possibly his favourite superhero when he was growing up. He even shot amateur movies about Kamen Rider with his school friends.

Anno recreates the gleefully pulpy, campy low-budget feel of the original 1971 series, including the weird villains, and introduces weird and crazy images, ideas, and action every ten minutes. Shin Kamen Rider throws in crazy pseudoscience linked to the themes and subtexts of what the characters go through, which is the common Japanese theme of connection, empathy, and lack thereof. Anno also makes the familiar story deeper, more nuanced, personal, and even poignant. He’s more direct about the existential malaise many Japanese people, including him, suffer. The hero Hongo suffers from an existential crisis about his transformation into something no longer human. He is horrified that he can kill so easily when he puts on his mask. The villains, members of the evil cult S.H.O.C.K.E.R. have given in to nihilism. To Anno, the question is, “Do we surrender to nihilism and become evil, or do we keep fighting evil even if that taints us?” To the Japanese, the greatest evil is the lack of empathy.

The original version of Kamen Rider was about how the world is so dark that we have to fight fascism even if we don’t want to. Anno’s Shin Kamen Rider is about how to be good if we must be brutal to defeat evil and fascism. The bad guys are all in the same existential crisis as the hero but react by trying to impose their will on the world and force it into their version of “happiness.” Anno has admitted to suffering from crushing depression, which has informed his work for decades. He brings that perspective to his favourite superhero. He’s what you get if Ingmar Bergman was a massive geek. Shin Kamen Rider is not as deconstructionist as Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, but it’s no less personal for Anno. The characters may be filled with despair as they try to find hope, and Anno reportedly had an agonising time making the movie, but there’s joy and wonder in the filmmaking and the sheer craziness he wants to show you.

Shin Kamen Rider is streaming on Prime.

Shin Kamen Rider

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Review by Adi Tantimedh

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7.5/10

What happens when you take a classic pulpy superhero story and let an auteur like Hideaki Anno retell it? You get the same story that he and fans loved, but filtered through a deeply personal lens that makes it even darker, more violent and poignant as it tackles existential themes of despair, empathy, and how to fight evil without becoming tainted.

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Writer-Director

Hideaki Anno

Starring

Sosuke Ikematsu, Minami Hamabe, Tasuku Emoto, Nanase Nishino, Shinya TsukamotoWa

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