MrX867

This was....interesting. I'm not going to call this a bad movie but my god does it know how to drag on and on and on. I'd also like to bring up the fact that this time complaint is coming from someone who's favorite live-action movie is The Shawshank Redemption which runs for 142 mins. Some parts are exceedingly long for seemingly no reason, did we really need around 10 mins just to see someone fix a piece of equipment? Or 2 instances of a pure black screen that runs for about 3 mins? (Which actually made me think the streaming service I used was glitching.) Having so many scenes drag on just ended up making the rest of the film boring to me.

In my honest opinion the only thing that saves this movie is its use of visuals, it really feels as if it was simply meant to just be eye-candy. Nothing will change my mind when I say that I honestly believe you could bring this movie's length from 149 mins. To just 90 mins. Without missing much, it was clearly dragged on just to show off the effects as much as possible. It has groundbreaking special effects and it is incredibly easy to see how much influence it ended up having on future media.

While I found it boring I will give the movie props for actually making me think heavily about the themes it tries to convey such as humanity's heavy dependence on machines and the eternal "Thou shall not mess with creating A. I" rule, along with other themes that I'm still thinking about as I type this out. I suppose this is meant to be seen as interpretive art instead of a regular run of the mill movie. The most interesting thing to me was HAL 9000, which left me with a bunch of questions that ended up unanswered.

This animated adaptation really falls short in a lot of parts, the worst being the animation itself; it tends to become choppier in some moments and appears very stiff in others, it really ends up looking outdated even for its time. The folks that made this seemed to just not care about certain details, seeing as how Bohan's damaged eye seems to switch sides multiple times or how Nariko's sleeve would suddenly be on the opposite side for 1 scene.

It may have been better if this movie was a little bit longer because believe it or not, I truly believe that this movie suffers from too much action and not very good action at that. All the action left barely any room to build up the story or its characters, it really felt like nothing but action scene after action scene. Unfortunately this led to the characters just becoming bland, due to a severe lack of character development, when they were much more interesting in the video game. Bohan felt like an exceedingly bland character compared to his video game counterpart who was quite sarcastic and funny in some moments. Some changes they made to the story actually ended up ruining some very good character development that occurred in the video game, especially changes made around the character named Shen. They also added a new subplot which ultimately went nowhere and changed nothing at all. The majority of the acting performances also felt quite wooden compared to the game's, even Nariko's VA who did a much better job in the game than she did here.

I really think you'd be better off watching the cutscenes of the video game, which should be just about 2 hours.

I gotta be honest I don't even know where to start on this lol. For the most part this series was exactly what I expected, campy/cheesy fun. I couldn't help but be reminded about the 60s Adam West Batman series and the 70s Lou Ferrigno Hulk series while watching this. It has the same charm that those old comic hero shows had. The action, the villains and the plots all have a campy charm to it. I had a blast laughing at how silly some of the villainous schemes were, though I'll admit some of them were surprisingly dark plots.

I really liked that Hongo Takeshi is a calm, tough, intimidating looking guy and at the same time was arguably the most intelligent character in the show. He practically solved about 80% of the issues he faced by himself. Hayato Ichimonji was more of a hothead with a more playful demeanor than Hongo and he took a more simpler approach to things, he wasn't as smart as Hongo but I actually liked that since it ended up with Hayato receiving help from the side characters a lot of the time. Their suits look great in my opinion, I love how alien-like their helmets are (really gives off a great reminder that they were supposed to be Shocker cyborgs), I like how the material of it looks like leather just like what a stereotypical tough biker would be wearing.

While I found some villains bland, a couple of them always had me laughing with how over the top they were, their hammy acting made them very entertaining. As much as I tried I couldn't take the enemy mooks and some monsters seriously thanks to the ridiculous sound that they all make, what the hell is that sound even supposed to be? Lmao.

The show is definitely outdated but that contributes to the fun charm that it retains to this day. It is also very episodic with practically no sub plots going around, it got quite repetitive at some points and left me wondering how many enemy bases ended up being found and destroyed in every episode. Some might dislike the fact that the fights in this series aren't as complex and fast as the ones you see in modern day Tokusatsu shows but I wasn't really bothered by it since I thought the slow heavy combat gave the fights a bit more realistic feel (minus the 20 feet high jump kicks and flips you always see lol). As it goes along you can definitely see an improvement in fight choreography though. It is also longer than it should be in my opinion, by the time Hongo returns I wouldn't blame you if you're tired out, I actually had to take 3 breaks to finish this show. But despite the cons it has I still think it was worth watching and you should try to look past the fact that it is a very old show. It was quite an experience and it's interesting to see how far back some Tokusatsu aspects and formulas go.