Quick, name one constant relevant with the western portrayal of superheroes.
Okay, obviously there’s a large chance that your answer might not line up with mine seeing as there are so many answers to this question. So let’s backtrack a little.
Do you get the feeling that superhero stories always end up personal in relevance to the main hero? In a quote on quote good superhero story, it’s always followed by the structure of the hero’s journey, how a villain relates to the hero, and a grand moment where the hero comes to a philosophical understanding which helps them make the best decision possible.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. We’ve seen from films such as 2022’s The Batman as well as older interpretations of Spider-Man and Superman that these stories manage to be epic while inspiring you to do good. They’re intentionally feeding you philosophical questions in the context of the characters. I know there are always going to be debates on whether Thanos was right in killing half the Universe or whether Batman should kill the Joker, but most arguments within those topics focus more on Batman, Joker, and Thanos, and less about the questions themselves. Throughout films such as infinity war and The Batman filmmakers and directors make the conscious choice to let us see through the lens of characters like Batman, and then through Riddler or Thanos. We come to understand both the villain and the hero.
Ultraman, especially the Showa — era series and the recent remake Shin Ultraman, takes this concept and shoots it dead. While more recent Reiwa series have been more focused towards this idea of humanizing the villains, the original few Ultraman series mostly have giant Godzilla — like creatures(Kaiju) as the quote on quote villains. While the series does introduce speaking alien creatures, the aliens act, well, aliens. Instead of a representation of humanity and morality like basically every other science fiction film ever, the speaking aliens play more as a role of God, spewing out so much philosophical exposition that enlightenment philosophers would have blushed. If you’ve heard of the sentiment that “Villains don’t have to be characters” echoed around in the filmmaking community, know that Ultraman takes it, and says, ``If they don’t have to be characters, we don’t have to make them human either.’ Instead of a conflicted or just flat out terrifying person as a villain, Ultraman instead opts to make the aliens a machine tasked to make the best possible decision.
Ultraman has evolved since its inception in 1966, and it definitely has become more westernized in its storytelling. But in 2018, the duo of Hideaki Anno(best known for his Ultraman fan film he made back in 1983) and Shinji Higuchi(known for the groundbreaking Gamera trilogy) revealed that he had wrote a proposal to Tsuburaya Productions, Ultraman’s parent company on a pitch for a remake of the original Ultraman series, Ultraseven, as well as Return of Ultraman.
One of the most interesting things about Anno(who’s more of a cult director in Japan), is his obsession with Ultraman and perhaps wider tokusatsu media. But it’s a well kept secret that he was so obsessed with Ultraman that he would make something that was heavily inspired from it which would influence the way he made films as well as the people he collaborated with in his journey to the top.
Of course, I’m talking about his Return of Ultraman fan film released in 1983. It was here in the film festival his team submitted his project to Anno was able to first meet the yet-to-be-famous Shinji Higuchi, who would later go on to make the Giant Turtle trilogy that raised a middle finger to Godzilla.
The point is that these two men are basically Showa era Tokusatsu elitists, and it shows. In an era where the Ultraman series, while still deep, has become more of a standard superhero showcase, Higuchi and Anno set out to return Ultraman to its roots, just like they did with Godzilla.
Which brings us, finally, to Shin Ultraman. Me, being the excited fuck that I am, wasted no time in showing every single conceivable Shin Ultraman trailers to my friends. To Soul, I am so sorry(not sorry).
I did notice a general consensus with the trailers I showed, though. In the first teaser trailer, Ultraman shoots out his iconic Spacium beam. While I thought it looked absolutely stunning, a technical marvel that paid homage to the original 1960s effects while being modernized for the year, my friends all said the same thing:
“This looks like shit.”
It would be a sentiment that would echo throughout all the clips I showed them, from the spinning Ultraman kick to the fight with mefilas. And while it’s not something that I thought was completely unexpected, I also didn’t think that people understood that it was completely intentional.
Yes, I’m pulling the “bad on purpose card” here, but I feel that especially for such an abstract series like Ultraman, this is very important. Reiwa Ultraman has changed a lot, and probably for the better, but there’s a jarring awe to seeing the original effects being used while implemented in the modern CG landscape.
This is a sentiment that I retained during the 2 hour runtime of Shin Ultraman. The film itself gets quite cheesy, bogged down in a sciency mess that didn’t make sense, and has numerous pacing issues and plot holes that are unresolved, yet it feels so alien, so uniquely weird that the charm never fails to keep you watching. If there’s a word that I could use to describe the film and perhaps by extension the original 1966 series, it would be alien. Whereas many major blockbusters force you to view the argument from the lens of characters, Shin Ultraman forces you to look at it from the lens of an outsider.
My Rating: 9/10
