Monday, January 9, 2017

God Neros: from beginning to end

God Neros is one of the most well written characters of toku history.
Inspired, by the antiwar antiarmy antigovernment themes of Shotaro Ishinomori's Kikaider, Metalder's nemesis is a war profiteer. Neros has very little to be liked about him. Spoilers alert:he kills Koga, he has multiple opportunities to create the destruction of Earth to favor him in situations. He mindcontrols Mai's father into fighting Metalder in one of the darkest moments of the series.
He became powerful through the power of United States gangsters.
Also, note that the United States takes over Japan.
Singapore is brought along to the mix a well.

And I would even consider Metalder to be less in canon with the canon-less Metal Heroes, because of Metalder's references to real life sittuations.

Yet, in the end, despite the fact that God Neros has ruined the world and possibly destroyed it, there are a lot of interesting notes in his production. Like what Rob Ager said about making the Germans in Saving Private Ryan absolutely evil people and not suffer during their deaths, Metalder does the exact oppoisite. God Neros has one of the most gruesome deaths in toku history, despite being one of the worst possible villains. First, Metalder throws a sword, and first off, it hits him, and he reacts to it. It doesn't look bad ass or cool, as if he was like the Terminator or Rambo: This is the 80s, and he's a bad guy, who exploits charity's so that he can make money off the weapons and suffering of the world, and he grunts. It's a human grunt. He isn't played off as superhuman or I dunno! He's vulnerabile. He's no devil after all. And he already has the upperhand on a cyborg who's life is fading before his eyes and shouldn't have anymore.
God Neros' Clark Kent is an actual human persona.
Now, there's a bit of interesting stuff in the final blow on Neros. My first reaction was that the ending wasn't dark enough, because it wasn't clear what happened to both Metalder or Neros. Was Metalder truly lobotimized? What's Metalder's fate? Where will he hide? Will Ryusei live on?
And Neros' death is interesting as well. Neros' death is censored, so I sorta first reacted as a guy in my 80s, why'd they censor that for such a dark moment? He's decapitated. First off, the decapitation is barely seen. 1) it censors it. 2) there's no moment where you're like wow, that's huge ass Death Star explosion Ho-shit. Like there's really no time for you to react to that death before we get to Neros' aftermath of possibly destroying the Earth. Now it sorta dehumanizes him as we don't see his body or give him a funeral, or figure out what happens to the rest of his army and generals and crime syndicate-
But we can fill in the blanks.
Also, his decapitation is sort of like that as if you had witnessed a Guillotine during the French revolution. You don't see the head, and we hope it's painless especially after he makes a rather sympathetic humanizing grunt full of vulnerability.

This is unlike most tokusatsu, where explosions are edited in with bad guy fights or they do something really awesome like pull out an organ and make it explode.


Metalder kills off a human being in the end. This is opposed to a God, although what Metalder wants to be is a human.

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