DOWNLOAD MOVIE: Shin Ultraman (2022) [Japanese]

The Japanese government sets up a special task force to fight the giant creatures suddenly appearing across the country. Soon, the squad unexpectedly meets a giant silver humanoid who starts appearing every time a space monster attacks.

no Ultraman expert but I’ve seen just enough of the original series and Ultraseven to recognize how reverent Higuchi and Anno are to the franchise’s roots. This is an entertaining and creative tokusatsu romp that features plenty of deliciously gaudy VFX (Tsuburaya’s aesthetic philosophy lives!) and some fun characters to follow.

I greatly enjoyed the little extraterrestrial with the hat. That guy rules.

Remember how Shin Godzilla was heartbreakingly poetic and horrifying and, at the same time, a chilling examination of a flawed government? Well, this most definitely isn’t that. I mean, sure, the governing class here is deeply flawed, bordering on being absolutely cretinous, but gone is the serious tone of the previous movie. Instead, we’ve slid into camp territory.  At least it’s camp with cool camera angles and alert editing. So, yay!?

The extremely weak script (which is shocking since it was the man Hideaki Anno himself that wrote it) brought down my enjoyability of Shin Ultraman a lot. The script is trite, disjointed, full of long stretches of completely useless dialogue and it feels like it was written for kids. Luckily, the battles and action scenes are very fun and punctuated by cool music, though unfortunately marred by a lot of wonky PS3-era CGI (though, I’ll give it that, there’s a bit at the end where this works really well).

Shin Ultraman is far from the masterpiece Shin Godzilla is and I’m not entirely sure that it fully wanted to commit to being a movie that bleak. I certainly wouldn’t have minded it, but at least there is some camp big monster entertainment to get out of this one. Maybe Shin Kamen Rider will be better. Please?

To go completely offtopic: I really think we need a Shin Sailor Moon movie. One that is super dark, obviously, and super pessimistic and violent. That would work very well.