Shin Kamen Rider

Notable as an action adventure film that doesn't make any attempt to conceal that it was shot under Covid protocols, Hideaki Anno's Shin Kamen Rider (listed as Shin Masked Rider on Amazon's streaming service) is a film concerned with tiny human figures broadcasting their thoughts to vast, empty arenas. Sosuke Ikematsu stars as Hongo, a socially withdrawn motorcyclist inexplicably granted people pulping powers by a mad scientist, played by the grand seigneur of cyberpunk, Shinya Tsukamoto. Naturally, Hongo is alarmed by his sudden ability to tear faceless goons limb-from-limb, as well as an attendant physical transformation that has hardened his skin into a cracked carapace. This mental and physical unease doesn't last though. Hongo quickly learns from Minami Hamabe's robotic Ruriko, his creator's indifferent daughter, that he can temporarily dump his anxiety-inducing metamorphosis by venting over-accumulated life energies. 

Lumbered by a storytelling model that prioritises isolated individuals, locked centre frame and delivering excruciating recaps, Shin Kamen Rider's most entertaining elements are the strange low budget scaffolding inherited from its parent television show: super-fights that are staged on desolate industrial estates; armoured costumes that don't completely tidy away the sweating human animal underneath; and hard cuts between locations to show that our heroes are permanently in a state of having arrived somewhere. Unfortunately, the film's fights are drowned out by a deliberately simplistic approach to computer generated figures. Shin Kamen Rider completely failing to build on the kinetic fluidity evident in Anno's extremely similar live-action adaptation of Cutie Honey - another 'Shin' film in all but branding. The director's most distinctive contribution then is a germophobic affect, one exacerbated by real-life social distancing rules that have gutted this concrete canvas of normal, non-superpowered people. Hongo, at least initially, is fixated on inspecting his hands. He flexes and curls his filthy leather claws, studying the spilt blood of vanquished heavies.