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Faiz was the fourth of the Heisei era Kamen Rider shows, airing in '03. It's a Toshiki Inoue directed series (he also wrote nearly every episode). I'm not super familiar with him personally, but he has a reputation for melodrama that Faiz does nothing to dispute. Its plot is frequently driven by the character's refusal to talk openly, which is in fact the point. The show openly lampshades this by having the henshin gimmick be cellphones and having the heroes work a day job airing dirty laundry at a dry cleaner. It's one of the few Kamen Rider shows I've seen in full and while I have my complaints I do think it's a good show. It doesn't hurt that it's choreography is excellent and that it has some of the sleekest suit designs of the Heisei era.

Paradise Lost is an alternate universe movie featuring the same characters wherein the orphnochs (human's who have come back from the dead as transforming monsters) succeed in conquering the planet and the remaining non-orphnoch humans live in hiding. It's kind of a mess, but if you can get on board with it then its not a bad time.

Faiz (the series) mostly does the work to have its "no one communicates openly" conceit play well, but with only 90 minutes of runtime, Paradise Lost has to compress things. As a result, its characters are reduced to their shallowest attributes and the story is constructed almost entirely of cliches. Beyond the more expected tokusatsu and kamen rider cliches, these also include:

• Anguished deathbed declarations of love.
• Bad boy pseudo love interest who's way too possessive. (He gets his entertainingly, don't worry.)
• An accidental death in an absurdly improbably fashion that gets mistaken for deliberate.
• A doppelganger disguising itself as a good guy to sow discord.
• An amnesiac character kept in the dark (for years!) by a would be love interest.
• ...who's finally rescued through honest-to-god Cinderella OTP magic.

And for the cherry on top, its final set piece is straight out of Attack of the Clones. If any film is going to make you think the TV Tropes folk have a point, it's this one.

But while Paradise Lost's piecemeal story can be difficult to parse as a narrative all the cliche (or even fandom-ish) content does means that there's always something happening. And the monsters and be-suited heroes mean that the pay off for whatever ludicrous he-said-she-said bullshit is frequently someone getting disintegrated. The film can hold your attention.

Beyond the plot there is also some awkward baggage from being a continuation (of sorts) of a TV show. The film does a good job establishing character relationships but the details of orphnochs connection to humanity is glossed over. The different kamen rider suits also have their own abilities and sometimes you're going to just have to take it on faith that, yes, they can do that — whatever the hell it was they just did.

The choreograph is very good and there's a decent amount of it. A highlight is when a suit actor acts out fighting badly as a mousy guy filling in as a backup hero. The final set piece in the stadium is also terrific.

That said, by the end of 90 minutes its varied flaws catch up with it. This may be a movie you laugh with rather than laugh at, but ultimately having a good attitude isn't a replacement for actually telling a good story. If you want a really good post-apocalyptic henshin hero movie, consider the '95 Hakaider.

I had a fun time revisiting this but I might not have bothered ... if it hadn't just gotten a sequel, 20 years later.