Mini-Review: Kamen Rider Gotchard & Geats Winter Movie an Awkward, Unenjoyable Experience

TYPE OF REVIEW : GOOD OL’ REVIEW
Major spoilers.

Kamen Rider The Winter Movie: Gotchard & Geats Strongest Chemy★Great Gotcha Operation is an interesting movie. While its main conflict is okay, the way it treats the characters from each season leaves such an odd taste in my mouth. At some parts I cringed. At other parts I rolled my eyes. And that is unfortunately too big of a negative for me to enjoy this particular Movie War.

The film takes place in a post-Geats world where Ace and the Gang run into Houtarou and the Gang when Jyamato stragglers intersect with the continuing search for Chemies. They soon encounter X Wizard, a Level 10 Chemy who transforms Keiwa, Michinaga and Neon into Chemies. To get them back to normal, they all have to participate in a DGP-like game to capture Chemies.

The film continues with the typical Movie Wars format of splitting up the casts of characters of each season into pairs and then featuring them in their own little vignettes. After that is settled, Keiwa, Michinaga and Neon are back in human bodies, X Wizard willingly gets Carded and things seemingly return to normal.

But after a couple of months, they discover that they have been manipulated by X Wizard who then gets taken and used by the main villain of the story, the always-been sketchy Investigator Kugimiya.

That seems like a solid plot for a movie. But if only it were that simple.

Instead of delivering an easy action-adventure crossover story, the film somehow takes the story and characters of Geats and passes it through a Gotchard filter or lens. The vice versa is the same with Gotchard‘s story and characters being written as if they were in Geats. And neither ever compliment each other.

That ends up having many of our familiar faces acting completely out of character. Most especially our two title heroes, Ace and Houtarou.

For Houtarou, he inexplicably acts like an asshole to his mother after she finds out he’s flunking in school. Obviously, after now 47 episodes of the series, we’ve never even seen him have negative feelings for his mother. Let alone him actually raising his voice at her for something he did wrong. Houtarou’s entire story in this film involves him wanting to get back to her to apologize for being a jerk. Really a contrived scenario. And one that might seemingly be more suited to a character on Geats and its more combative and competitive narrative.

Perhaps the film wrote Houtarou this way to match Ace’s cockier, more confident personality. But then the film’s central plot involves him mourning his dear (and only?) friend, a dog.

That would be fine. But it seems completely created just for the movie and draws on nothing from the series. So it feels more like an alternate reality version of Ace rather than someone we watched for 50 episodes. And again, it feels more like an Ace if he was written into Gotchard with a more emotional and sentimental backstory instead. Ace as a caring and lonely guy longing for his dog? I don’t know.

Nothing wrong with offering up a different side of a character or an untold story of theirs post-season. But with Ace and Houtarou, the way the film’s version of their characters is so the opposite of who they were just feels so off.

Oh and we get the passive debut of Rinne as Kamen Rider Majade too which, when watching just the series at the time, felt awkward as well.

That said, the story of Ace and his dog actually is in line with Houtarou’s Gotcha of human and Chemies living in peace together as friends. As well as the explanation of X Wizard’s action. So again, this is a Gotchard version of Ace and a… well, I dunno what kind of version of Houtarou.

Anyway, the awkward, opposite characterizations of both Houtarou and Ace really just make this whole film an experience I really did not enjoy. Not even the excellent ending theme “All For Love” by blank paper can leave with good feelings like Koda Kumi’s “Change My Future” did at the end of Geats.

Oh well!