REVIEW: Amazons 09
Heya! So for those who are curious as to why there wasn’t a review for episode 8, it was because I was busy doing my end of year project for university and I wanted to focus on that and finish it off well. Will I ever review episode 8? Maybe, but it all depends on my schedule and if it’s even worth covering it.
As for this episode, yeah I really enjoyed it! With an interesting premise that makes sense in the universe, muddies the waters of the morality of the show a bit and furthers some characters stories and personalities, I’d say it was quite successful! A quick warning however, I’ve added a gory-ish image about 4 paragraphs below, so please be careful if gore isn’t your thing!
So let’s start off with the premise of the episode shall we? So the idea of having a secret restaurant for Amazons (which let’s face it isn’t spelt with a Z and I’m sorry I ever did) is really interesting because of how much sense it makes. Surely there are enough in the city where some of them are perfectly aware of their status as Amazons and want to keep the peace right? Well that’s exactly what happened with this group of Amazons: one of them made a restaurant where these Amazons could dine on human flesh, but if they awoke they would be kicked out. It’s a reasonable solution to their problem, but at the same time they are murdering people to get the meat for their meals.
And this is where the morality of the whole situation becomes really interesting since yes this is a peaceful method for the Amazons to live, but they are still murdering innocent people. Are these few deaths justifiable since they help more people and maintain an overall peace? Or is it completely immoral since these Amazons are monsters just waiting to kill? These are all questions that are brought up by the programme, but cleverly they aren’t answered within the episode. They are left in the air for the viewer to answer for themselves because, well, there isn’t any one right answer. That I think is a very mature approach to such situations and a depth that I think benefits the Kamen Rider franchise as a whole.
THE KINDA GORY IMAGE IS THE ONE AFTER THIS LOVELY PHOTO OF HARUKA
What’s even better about this whole moral question is that it also directly affects the main characters of the show. Once the extermination team have taken care of the monster of the week, they begin to hunt down the remaining Amazons; but instead of helping them Haruka prevents from killing these maybe peaceful Amazons. This leads them to running away, but they are all slaughtered, for a lack of a better word, by new automated extermination drones newly created by the Nozoma pharmaceutical company.
This leads to furthering Haruka’s character since he is now developing a sense of morality towards his fellow Amazons. He does say he wants to protect everyone, but there are issues with that as mentioned earlier since these Amazons do sometimes end up killing people. I feel that this shows, again, a sense of genuine maturity as Haruka isn’t a cut and dry hero with easy morals; he is complex, means well but also deeply flawed. It’s times like these I think that Amazons isn’t just a 2 edgy , dark for the sake of shock programme.
But there definitely cases of this within the show, let alone in this episode. With this week, there is this sense of maturity, but at the same time there were moments of gore that looked really cheesy and was obviously just used for shock value, which didn’t work because it was so obviously fake ( for reference see the image above). To extrapolate this further to the rest of the show, we see this in every fight scene with silly CGI gore. It’s a bit disappointing that Amazons is going for shock value and gore since it has this genuine maturity and complexity right there that surely satisfies the ‘dark’ quota enough; it does for me at least and this silly gore and ‘shock’ feels extremely immature and detracts from the programme as a whole.
One thing that I can say for sure is quite disappointing is the monster designs for the Amazons. They don’t really have any unifying style to them and can vary wildly from silly (the Butterfly Amazon) to generic looking (the Dragonfly Amazon). On top of that none of them are particularly good looking or stand out much. They look like generic left overs of all the neo-heisei era monsters and aren’t that particularly interesting. They just simply exist as fodder for the riders and the extermination service. This is a bit disappointing since with the previous few rider series, even if the designs weren’t always fantastic; they at least were unique, had a singular style and looked different. Here they just look extremely generic and boring, which is quite a shame and also disappointing.
This episode acts as a really nice companion piece to Kamen Rider Ghost episode 33 I think. I say this since Amazons episode 9 shows one end of the spectrum, how mature Kamen Rider could be, while also showing that it could become edgy; while Ghost 33 is at the other end of the spectrum by showing how cheesy and hokey the franchise could be, while showing how much heart and joy it has. I do like Amazons, but I certainly hope it doesn’t become too edgy and ‘shocking’.
