Kamen Rider Saber, Movie + Episodes 34
Okay, so before I watch episode 34, turns out that something that happened in last year's winter film is relevant here, so have a sneaky little extra review here where I talk about the movie as well!
Kamen Rider Saber: The Phoenix Swordsman and the Book of Ruin
My original review for this movie was standalone and was very... vitriolic. I guess I was just feeling particularly grumpy when I woke up to review this the first time around? I didn't post it on this blog, and deleted it. The thing is, though... most of my opinions about this movie more or less still stands.
The thing is, most anime movies or standalone movies for franchises aimed at children tend to have a very bland formula that you can basically apply and swap out the specific pronouns with the characters from the show. A new villain shows up, and he wants to bring ruin and devastation with the world with a spooky plot device! Usually the villain has some vague connection to the lore, but nothing too deep! The good guys show up, find out the villain's backstory, the side characters fight the villain's lieutenants while the main character deliver a big inspirational speech and take down the big bad. New movie-exclusive forms tend to also show up.
The thing is, "Phoenix Swordsman and the Book of Ruin" is billed as a 'short film', and it has a runtime of 20 minutes. I'm too lazy to count how long the opening song runs, but I think this episode might be barely longer than a regular episode of Saber? And I know -- this is because of the pandemic. 'Phoenix Swordsman' basically replaces the 20-minute Super Sentai movie that tends to get double-billed with the longer one-hour Kamen Rider movie (we'll eventually cover the Zero-One movie), presumably because the cast of Saber is easier to film with in a corona-safe environment or something?
Still, it really feels like this was put together at the last minute. The movie starts off with Bacht (sometimes translated as Bahato, played by Kamen Rider Amazon Alpha) showing up out of nowhere and talking about how everything will return to the void. We get literally three or four lines from Tassel yelling at how "Bacht was sealed in a book, he's a forbidden swordsman, we're doomed if he's not stopped!" and that off-handed remark is basically all we get about Bacht's backstory in the movie.
And the rest of the 15 minute runtime of the short movie is basically showing all the Swordsmen (the wiki identifies this movie as taking place between episodes 10 and 11) show up and fight against generic goons. Saber at least has a pretty diverse cast, and it's nice to see Espada again, but ultimately it's just Touma fighting Bacht and yelling at him a lot about how humanity is good and stuff, while Bacht says generic 'the world deserves to be destroyed because power is the root of conflict' stuff. The action scenes are pretty all-right when it's not a CGI fest like the finale, and Bacht has the more-interesting-on-paper ability to revive. Ultimately Touma's great emotions summons a couple extra dragons and transforms him into Emotional Dragon, the movie-exclusive form, and the dragons seal Bacht back into the book.
And honestly... again, I don't want to be too harsh on this. It's hard to quickly make a movie during a pandemic, and from the sounds of it, it seems like the Saber movie was pretty last-minute. But it also does end up feeling like they did the bare bones of what's required for them to call it a full story, and there's honestly nothing interesting about Kamen Rider Falchion other than the casting gag that he's basically an egg-less PG-13 version of Takayama Jin from Amazons. Ultimately, this movie is kind of skippable.
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Episode 34: Wake Up, Immortal Swordsman
Of course, things change with episode 34, when Bacht actually shows up in the show! Not as a guest-star like the many different Gaim movie villain or as a flashback like the Build movie villain, but, it seems, as a recurring secondary character that'll be with us for more or less the long haul. And with more time to flesh out Bacht's character, I actually end up finding that I like him a fair bit more than I did in the movie!
Master Logos sends Durendal and Sabela out to hunt down Touma and his friends as per usual, but then he pulls out a book and summons Bacht. And unlike the movie, it seems that Bacht's resurrection or unsealing or whatever is complete since he doesn't have the weird fish-scale tattoos that he has in the movie. Master Logos talks about how he seeks the world's destruction, and Bacht, being the fight-happy lunatic that he is, eagerly accepts.
Meanwhile, continuing the trend of Touma fighting everyone he's buddies with at least once, Touma fights Yuuri on the side of the street in an attempt to trigger the same book-glowing reaction that breached the universes and showed Luna to him last episode. This is just something that gets them isolated so Bacht can show up and fight them. We get a brief flashback to the movie and honestly, people who didn't watch the movie really didn't miss anything about Bacht's backstory. This episode alone brings a bit more depth to Bacht beyond 'the world is fucked, time to blow up the world' generic rantings by revealing that Bacht knows Yuuri from the past, and he's pretty pissed off at him.
Bacht transforms into Kamen Rider Falchion in a frankly far, far cooler shot than he had in the movie, and we get a fight between Falchion and the duo of Saber and Saikou. In the distance, Reika watches the master's 'hunting dog' and all these episodes have really been building up that Reika's starting to question what Master Logos's logic is in all this. Falchion shows off his power to nullify the powers of other sacred swords with his Unsigned Blade -- I legitimately don't remember if this was something we know from the movie or not, because frankly I'm a bit too tired to go back and rewatch the movie again. But the book Mei is holding glows, and Saber suddenly gets the power to knock Falchion back, and he walks off laughing about how Touma is 'the chosen one'. Oh, and another rift showing Luna shows up again, but once more Touma can't get his old friend out.
Yuuri gives us the backstory about Bacht, and, well, this really makes me be interested in Bacht more than Tassel's thirty-second exposition dump! Not just because we take the time to see his backstory, but because it ties into one of our protagonists as well. Turns out that Yuuri and Bacht are in the same ancient order of knights a thousand years in the past. There was a third member of their group, but the third member got seduced with power, killed Bacht's family and drove Bacht into despair. Pretty simple and frankly generic backstory, but that bit alone suddenly adds so much more depth to why Bacht is so hell-bent on his view that 'power corrupts, humans desire power, therefore humans are corrupt and the world must be destroyed' credo. We also get the revelation that Yuuri is the one who sealed Bacht up in the past after seeing his friend go absolutely lunatic. And suddenly the upcoming buildup to a confrontation ends up making this so much more interesting than 'hey, let's get the movie villain back in the show'.
And, hey, Yuuri himself, who has been driven by this vague, vapid sense of 'humanity is interesting' also suddenly gains a bit more emotional and thematic depth. He has been through the same thing, being part of a group of friends who fell apart due to treachery. This even explains his lack of hope for humanity when he first shows up, and gives so much more weight when he tells Touma to 'trust your friends'.
Underneath the toku bridge, Rintarou is looking for Ren, but ends up finding Durendal. Rintarou turns into his brand new final form and faces off against Durendal and for his credit, Rintarou's actually winning the fight, it seems, using a backwards ice blast to counter Durendal's one-note Kaiji Erasure tricks. Falchion shows up and starts fighting everyone, going for Durendal first because he has calls him 'master's rabid hunting dog'. Durendal runs away while Blades fights Falchion in the toku warehouse. Blades actually beats him, too, blowing Falchion up with a finisher... but Falchion just uses his phoenix powers to re-manifest behind Blades and beat him down.
Touma, Mei and Yuuri show up to stop Bacht from killing Rintarou. Kento also shows up, and both Kento and Bacht tell Touma that he can't save the world. Yuuri gets angry at Kento for not believing in his comrade, and Bacht gets angry at Yuuri for talking about comradeship after cutting him down in the past, to which Yuuri counters that he is now putting his faith in humanity once more. I do like this sequence -- Bacht and Yuuri's relationship isn't exactly a parallel to Touma and Kento's, but the fact that it's not a direct parallel actually makes it like it so much more. Everyone transforms and fights each other, and in the process Yuuri gets hit by both Falchion and Calibur's finishing moves and gets sealed up by Kento, disappearing into his sword.
And then Falchion unleashes yet another finishing phoenix blast thing at the stunned Touma, but Kento jumps in and tanks the blow. He really doesn't want Touma to die, but fuck everyone else, I guess? They chase Falchion off while Reika uses her smoke powers to steal Yuuri's sword and books. I'm not the biggest fan of Kento's emo phase, but at least I have a bit more faith that the writers are doing something with him. The episode ends with Falchion leaving after Touma and Kento team up... and then Luna shows up in the flesh! Cliffhanger!
Honestly, I found myself really not caring for the Luna storyline, which I felt has been dragged on for too long and my feeling is mostly just indifference at this point. But it's also pretty neat to finally get some payoff and conclusions, and bringing Bacht back went from me going 'oh, man, this is just going to be yet another character tossed into an overcrowded show' into 'they took the one-note flat movie villain and suddenly made him and a secondary protagonist so much more intriguing'. Pretty cool that they did that!
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