Shin Kamen Rider

The first thing you see isn't a hero; it’s a mask. It’s a giant, compound-eyed grasshopper face, and it’s currently splattered with an alarming amount of arterial spray. For anyone who grew up on the campy, rubber-suited charm of 1970s Japanese superhero TV, this is a bit of a localized earthquake. Hideaki Anno, the man who spent decades deconstructing giant robots in Neon Genesis Evangelion, has finally been given the keys to the Kamen Rider kingdom, and he’s decided to turn the lights way, way down.

I watched this while nursing a cup of lukewarm green tea that I’d forgotten to finish, and honestly, the bitterness of the tea matched the film’s mood perfectly. This isn’t the polished, focus-grouped sheen of a Marvel movie. It’s something much stranger, more jagged, and deeply personal.

A Masterpiece of Low-Fi High-Tech

If you’ve seen Anno’s other "Shin" entries—Shin Godzilla or Shin Ultraman—you know the drill. He loves bureaucracy, long-winded technical jargon, and camera angles that look like they were filmed by a GoPro strapped to a ceiling fan. In Shin Kamen Rider, he takes Sosuke Ikematsu (whom you might recognize from The Last Samurai or the more recent The Tokyo Night Sky Is Always the Densest Shade of Blue) and turns him into Takeshi Hongo, a man forcibly turned into a cyborg "Augment" by a cult called SHOCKER.

Hongo doesn’t want to be a hero. He spends a good chunk of the first act vibrating with existential dread because he realizes his new "grasshopper" powers mean he can accidentally punch a man’s head into a fine mist. Ikematsu plays Hongo with a persistent, twitchy melancholy that makes the eventual superhero poses feel earned rather than cheesy. He’s joined by Minami Hamabe as Ruriko, the daughter of a rogue scientist, who delivers her lines with a deadpan precision that acts as the film's emotional anchor. Their chemistry isn't romantic; it’s two traumatized people trying to figure out how to be human in a world that wants to turn them into living weapons.

The Chaos of the Edit

The action here is... a choice. Anno and his editor go for a style I’d describe as someone throwing a reel of film into a blender and taping it back together in the dark. One second you’re watching a beautifully framed practical stunt on a rocky cliffside—a direct homage to the 1971 original—and the next, it’s a blur of hyper-kinetic CGI that looks like a high-end PlayStation 5 cutscene.

It’s jarring, and honestly, it’s frequently ugly in a way that I kind of loved. There’s a raw, punk-rock energy to the choreography. When Hongo fights the Spider Augment or the Bat Augment, the sound design is punishing. Every punch sounds like a car crash. It captures that specific "Shin" feeling: taking a childhood toy and treating its internal logic with the gravity of a Shakespearean tragedy.

Turns out, Anno actually used multiple iPhones to film certain sequences, aiming for angles that traditional cinema cameras simply couldn't reach. This gives the movie a frantic, "you are there" intimacy that contrasts wildly with the moments where the characters stand perfectly still and explain their philosophical motivations for twenty minutes.

Meaning in the Machine

In our current era of "franchise fatigue," where every superhero movie feels like a two-hour commercial for the next three movies, Shin Kamen Rider feels remarkably singular. It’s a legacy sequel that actually gives a damn about the legacy. It isn't just checking boxes; it's an obsession on screen.

The film grapples with the idea of happiness—specifically, the SHOCKER organization’s warped view that the only way to achieve world peace is to digitize human souls and eliminate conflict. It’s a very 2023 concern, isn't it? The fear that our technology and our desire for "order" might actually strip away the very things that make us worth saving. Tasuku Emoto eventually shows up as Hayato Ichimonji (Kamen Rider No. 2), and he brings a much-needed swagger to the proceedings, acting as the light to Hongo’s darkness.

Is it for everyone? Absolutely not. If you don't have a soft spot for scarves flapping in the wind, dramatic "henshin" transformations, or the specific aesthetic of 70s tokusatsu, you might find the whole thing baffling. But for me, it was a reminder that big-budget genre filmmaking can still be weird, prickly, and uncomfortably earnest.

Shin Kamen Rider is a fever dream of bug-eyes and bone-crunching motorcycle stunts. It’s a movie that knows exactly what it is: a love letter to a specific era of Japanese TV, filtered through the brain of a director who can’t help but find the tragedy in the triumph. It’s messy, it’s loud, and it’s got more heart than any three modern blockbusters combined. If you're tired of the assembly-line approach to heroes, put on the mask and give this one a spin.