Kamen Rider Zero-One: Others Vulcan & Valkyrie

 Kamen Rider Zero-One: Others: Vulcan & Valkyrie

Now the set-up of Kamen Rider Zero-One Others Metsubojinrai is an interesting one. All four members of the Metsubojinrai.net organization gets fused together into a berserking warrior that doesn't seem to be in control of themselves; while Yua is ordered to exterminate them by any means necessary. Which leads to this final confrontation between all the secondary characters in Zero-One, and, as far as I can tell, the final chapter for Kamen Rider Zero-One as a whole. 

Except... this movie is paced rather oddly. For all the faults about the oddities of reusing plot points and not building up the necessity of the 'ultimate uncontrollable berserk form' that is Kamen Rider Metsubojinrai, Others: Metsubojinrai at least utilizes most of its characters well. Horobi, Jin and the antagonist Arkland get a lot of decent screentime for them to monologue their viewpoints, while Yua, Fuwa and the two less-prominent Metsubojinrai characters at least show up enough to remind the audience of what they're doing. 

And this movie, for a movie titled "Vulcan and Valkyrie"... really doesn't feature Vulcan and Valkyrie a whole ton, does it? Or Valkyrie at all, because she just gets bedridden in a hospital for almost the entirety of the second act? It's kind of a huge, huge shame. A huge problem that I also have is that the movie dances around the fact that Metsubojinrai.net's members are kind of... not in their right mind and are forced into a gestalt entity by the Mass Brain system. And it's not like Zero-One as a show hasn't dealt with an out-of-control character not in their right mind with Aruto and Horobi in their respective tenures as Kamen Rider Ark-Zero. But everyone just handwaves Metsubojinrai as trying to commit suicide by becoming the 'evil to be eliminated' by the heroes that are Kamen Rider Vulcan and Valkyrie, and... and the fact that we don't really give Horobi, Jin, Naki and Ikazuchi screentime to explain themselves feel weird -- especially considering the values and the themes that Kamen Rider Zero-One as a show has been emphasizing. It's definitely a tragic and very interesting ending to the characters, but it's also one that feels unsatisfying, I feel. 

The movie itself... I have a bit less to talk about because it's kind of straightforward. Kamen Rider Metsubojinrai rampages around, and Yua ends up being caught in a conflict of having standing orders to kill Kamen Rider Metsubojinrai, or to try and talk them down. 

There's also the Sold subplot, which... yeah, it was interesting to see where it's going to go in the Mestubojinrai movie, and the actors they picked for the main Sold guy, the main Sold girl, and the burly Sold with a jacket are competent enough, but everyone in the Solds are pretty much one-dimensional about how they're either pro-murder-the-humans or pro-coexistence-with-the-humans. Again, there's an underlying message about how Mestubojinrai.net's cause can easily be interpreted into two different 'justices'. Or how 'just because the decision is the majority doesn't mean it's right'. but the movie doesn't really do enough to build up the Sold characters for me to care; and the conclusion ends up being kind of taken away from their hands since it's Fuwa and the Metsubojinrai entity doing most of the fighting. 

There's a lot of these talks -- Fuwa admonishing how justice can be used as an excuse to commit violence. Or Yua telling the girl Sold that doubts shouldn't be quashed, but rather discussed. We do get a bit of a motivation rant. Yua wants to protect all life. Fuwa plays by his own rules, protecting everything he likes and destroying everything he doesn't like. Both eventually lead to 'justice comes from the heart'. It's... again, this is all acted very well, but a lot of it feels like it's just repeating what we've already seen in the show. Maybe it's just because I'm not too invested in the Sold storyline?

Yua's Sold friend dies protecting her from Metsubojinrai, since she finds out that 'justice is protecting life', and her little gadget ends up giving Valkyrie her movie-exclusive Serval Tiger form. Yua spends the rest of the movie in a hospital, but not after a conversation with Fuwa where he interprets/realizes the fact that Metsubojinrai is specifically targeting Kamen Riders to make them 'extinct' is because of the prior conversation that Horobi had with him -- that it's a way for the humans to get rid of Metsubojinrai if they become out of control. 

Which leads to the second half of the movie. The Solds rampage and beat up the AIMS goons, because they think Metsubojinrai.net wants them to kill all humans. Fuwa runs up and gives a speech about how Metsubojinrai.net's real values is more along the lines of protection or coexistence, about what Metsubojinrai's true ideals of justice is. Again, all very well acted, but... I don't know. I kind of feel like the Sold characters are so shallow and Kamen Rider Metsubojinrai's basically a personality-less force of nature, and the movie's just relying on Fuwa to carry it on its back. He does so, leading up to his climactic fight with Kamen Rider Metsubojinrai next to Jin's garden, where Fuwa essentially mercy-kills the out-of-control Metsubojinrai entity. 

(Fuwa's death is also kind of ambiguous, we don't see him after he collapses with eyes bleeding after the epic final battle; the way he talks to Yua is about sacrificing a stray dog's life, and we see him later at the hospital framed in the same ghostly way that Horobi, Jin, Naki and Ikazuchi are walking)

Again, the conclusion of Fuwa-vs-Metsubojinrai is pretty well done, and I applaud the storywriters for doing something pretty daring. It's just that the pacing in the middle portion of the movie. There's also the argument made about how bleak this whole two-parter movie is in contrast to the rest of the more upbeat Zero-One series. Not to mention the fact that, well, it's kind of a terrible way to write off the four Metsubojinrai members without giving them a good sending-off before they're all transformed into a mindless being. The two movies are well-shot and well-written and most definitely well-acted. But ultimately I still feel that it doesn't quite gel with the vibe of the rest of the series particularly well. It's so different that it's worth checking out, but there's a lot of discussion to be had about how they handled the characters and the themes for sure.