In Review: 'Shin Kamen Rider' (2023) & 'The Plains' (2022)
A look at Hideaki Anno's superhero extravaganza and David Easteal's unusual road movie
Shin Kamen Rider (2023)
It’s been seven years since Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi first breathed new life into a beloved Japanese character with Shin Godzilla (2016), the first entry in the creative duo’s Shin Japan Heroes Universe. Then, after multiple delays, Anno’s most famous creation, Neon Genesis Evangelion, got the SJHU treatment as well with 2021’s Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time (released as Shin Evangelion in Japan), yet another retelling of the iconic series’ equally iconic ending. Last year’s Shin Ultraman (which I covered for In Review Online) navigated the pair’s sensibilities into campier waters as they sought to pay tribute to and reinvigorate the perennial Ultraman franchise — without stooping to the tired self-referentiality that has plagued American genre films for the better part of two decades.
Shin Kamen Rider, based on the 1971 tokusatsu superhero series Kamen Rider, continues this campy trajectory, playing its out-there premise and extravagant formal flourishes completely straight. The film, the first in the SJHU series to be written and directed solely by Anno, begins in media res as Takeshi Hongo (Sosuke Ikematsu) and Ruriko Midorikawa (Minami Hamabe) are pursued by members of a sinister organization called the Sustainable Happiness Organization with Computational Knowledge Embedded Remodeling — or SHOCKER for short. Ruriko is briefly captured by the beret-wearing goons but Takeshi, sporting a dark trench coat and bug-eyed mask, lays waste to them in spectacular fashion, flipping through the air at ludicrous heights and spilling gallons of blood by dishing out head-bursting punches and kicks.
The two make it to a safe house where Ruriko and her father, Dr. Hiroshi Midorikawa (Shinya Tsukamoto, director of the 1989 Japanese cyberpunk ur-text, Tetsuo: The Iron Man), a scientist previously employed by SHOCKER alongside his daughter, explain to Takeshi that he has been turned into a superpowered man-grasshopper hybrid (referred to as an “Aug”) by the evil org but was rescued by Ruriko before he could be brainwashed into doing their bidding. Ruriko and her father hope that Takeshi will aid them in their quest to bring their former employers down. When Spider-Aug (Nao Ômori), one of SHOCKER’s many supervillanous agents, appears and kills Dr. Midorikawa, it falls on Takeshi and Ruriko to bring the organization down by themselves.
If this all sounds like a lot, that’s because it is. Like previous Shin entries, Shin Kamen Rider doesn’t bother with easing the audience into its bonkers whirlpool of critter-themed superhumans, mad scientists, and dead bodies that disintegrate like defeated enemies in fifth-generation console games. Anno hits the ground running and crams every scene with either exposition, comic-book violence, or pathos-laden monologues. Given the source material, the film, like Shin Ultraman before it, is episodic in structure, with the two leads essentially being ushered from set piece to set piece as they take on SHOCKER’s gallery of overpowered foes, each with their own deranged vision of bringing about world peace. (Not incidentally, SHOCKER’s name and objectives deliberately echo SEELE’s Human Instrumentality Project in Evangelion.)
Contrasted with the previous live-action SJHU films, there isn’t much in the way of Anno’s satirical fixation on bureaucracy here, however. Rather, the cult filmmaker gives himself over to comic-book melodrama completely, occasionally using his weirder touches to great dramatic effect — the dead bodies dissolving into foam goes from weird, to funny, to heartbreaking throughout the two-hour runtime — but mainly reveling in the anarchic possibilities the material affords him. Shin Kamen Rider is superhero filmmaking at its giddiest, exploding with a nervous energy that, yes, steps into the juvenile on occasion but is also irresistible for its batshit, fan-film-with-a-budget idiosyncrasies.
Anno definitely isn’t the repressed, insecure nerd he was when Neon Genesis Evangelion premiered in 1995 — while making Shin Evangelion, Anno felt that he could no longer understand Shinji which played a big part in it being delayed multiple times — but somewhat surprisingly, his recent work contains more of the tokusatsu geek that made Daicon Film's Return of Ultraman on a shoestring budget back in 1983 than the auteur whose first forays into live-action filmmaking (1998’s Love & Pop, 2000’s Shiki-Jitsu a.k.a. Ritual) trended towards the loopy and experimental. Some Anno aficionados will likely find it disappointing that this is what he prefers to focus his efforts on these days but his flair for this brand of eccentric pop filmmaking is, to this writer (and admirer of Anno’s work) at least, undeniable and highly infectious.
The Plains (2022)
Andrew (Andrew Rakowski) is a middle-aged lawyer who makes his way home from work at 5 p.m. every day, occasionally giving his colleague David (David Easteal) a lift. Over time, their shared commute sees friendly small talk give way to honest, vulnerable conversation and the two men gradually begin revealing themselves to each other. On the days where Andrew makes his way home alone, phone calls with his mother — who is suffering from dementia in a care facility many miles away — and his wife paint a picture of a man who, in spite of the apparent stability in his life (and partly because of it), finds himself at a crossroads, unsure of what to do next, worried about his advancing age, and struggling to come to terms with his own mortality.
Shown in long, unbroken takes; taking place almost exclusively in a car; and running for three hours, David Easteal’s docudrama The Plains (his feature film debut) has all the markings of a tough sell. But the film is neither an indulgent arthouse experiment — not that there’d be anything wrong with that — nor a sentimentalist “celebration” of the mundane. Instead, Easteal reconstructs reality: the two men did, in fact, frequently commute together when they both worked at a community legal center in Melbourne. This proximity, born out of a combination of convenience and kindness, eventually developed into a friendship as Easteal and Rakowski got to know more about each other and their lives with every shared trip.
With The Plains, Easteal turns this camaraderie into a tremendous cinematic achievement, one that treats its minimalist form neither as a gimmick nor a shallow critique of white-collar malaise but as a way to highlight both the repetitiveness and the subtle, continuous changes Andrew and his sometimes-passenger David go through over the course of a year. Unlike other (mostly) single-location films, The Plains is stubbornly committed to its pared-down approach, never once deviating from the fixed backseat camera angle that allows the audience to peer into the intimate and often solitary space of Andrew’s car.
Easteal only ever interrupts his central formal constraint when he cuts to drone footage of the titular plains, shot by Andrew and his wife, Cheri (Cheri LeCornu). These intermezzos not only offer a breather from the drudgery of the daily car rides but feel comparatively grand in scale — a stark contrast to the film’s otherwise cramped quarters — as well as infusing it with a startlingly ethereal quality. Whenever The Plains cuts back from these moments, the car can feel stifling, suffocating even — but also familiar and not entirely unpleasant in its dull comfort.
However, it’s the interplay between the talkative, frequently philosophizing Andrew and the more reserved David that is most fascinating. The evolving nature of their relationship isn’t marked by dramatic revelations or big, capital “G” gestures of appreciation and trust. What Easteal is really after are the tiny deviations from and shifts in the characters’ routines, habits, and mannerisms. These small moments — Andrew’s chatty disposition rubbing up against his discomfort with certain topics and painful memories, David’s taciturn demeanor giving way to curiosity about his colleague’s private life and history — are what truly propel the film.
This accumulation of details and nuances, gathered over the course of three hours, represents the polar opposite of contemporary filmmaking trends which spoon-feed the audience every last bit of character development, narrative, and subtext. Indeed, The Plains couldn’t be further removed from the spectacle-driven fare — middlebrow and lowbrow alike — that has come to dominate theaters all over the globe. (It’s worth mentioning that my hometown’s arthouse theater is currently showing Barbie five times a day.) Easteal’s hypnotic blend of truth and fiction sadly won’t turn the tide but in a cinematic landscape as desiccated as ours its mere existence feels like a small miracle. The fact that it also happens to be profoundly moving is just icing on the cake.