Originally created by special effects master Eiji Tsuburaya in 1966, the superhero Ultraman has gone on to have one of the most iconic and prolific legacies in Japanese popular culture, variously reworked, reincarnated, and reimagined through 56 years of T.V. series, motion pictures, video games, and comic books. Shin Ultraman, a new movie that received a two-night only limited release this past week, following its original national release last May, is itself only one of ten official works of Ultra-media to coincide with the last two years. But, while I'm in no position to comment on the more insularly familiar reputations of the various directors, writers, stars, and special effects technicians working on all these other projects, Shin Ultraman is certainly being floated to both native and international fans as being of a higher pedigree by co-presenters Khara, Toho, and Tsuburaya Productions.
The writer and producer of Shin Ultraman is Hideaki Anno, a creator of Japanese fantasy whose acclaimed Neon Genesis Evangelion would already be more than enough to peak interest in this new project, particularly among those who are less familiar with or share less sentimentality for juvenile tokusatsu ("special effects") television. Except that Shin Ultraman also functions as something of a spiritual successor to Shin Godzilla, which Anno also wrote and co-directed with Shinji Higuchi, himself an experienced tokusatsu man, and who has also worked as a storyboard artist and screenwriter under Anno on Evangelion. Like its predecessor, Shin Ultraman is being pitched as a stylish, technically modern, better-budgeted, and thematically ambitious reinvigoration of a major figure in Japanese pop culture, at once seeking to pay homage to the very foundations of its entertainment legacy, while also implicitly veering sharply away from its rights-holders' programatic tendency to grind out yet another cheaply redundant incarnation. As such, both films straddle a fine line between functioning as contained fantasy works and self-aware meta-text, with Anno's influence remaining predominant (despite not directing the latter film) in both their visual execution, as well as in the wry, anti-subtle expression of their socio-political themes. The key difference, though, is that whereas Shin Godzilla aimed to finally recapture a sense of the tragedy, horror, and dramatic maturity of the original Godzilla that was progressively diluted by decades of cynical cashing-in, Shin Ultraman, with its roots in a much more expressly spectacular and kid-oriented fantasy work, more narrowly aims to replicate a now similarly diluted sense of the innocently bizarre and absurd. The irony then becomes that Shin Ultraman, while not as comprehensively well-executed as its spiritual predecessor, in some ways represents an all the more ambitious, challenging, and radical feat of pop art experiment and provocation.
Again, though Anno isn't in the director's chair on this one, his signature is everywhere, especially at the level of the film's idiosyncratic approach to narrative structure and pacing. This nearly two-hour superhero movie wastes virtually no time in setting up the plot, breezing through an expository montage that condenses an exponentially destructive series of giant monster attacks on Japanese soil and the establishment of a new government agency to repress these novel creatures into a blink-and-you-miss-it dossier. From there, we're right into the action as this agency, the SSSP, responds to yet another giant monster attack. Much to everyone's surprise, a silver extra-terrestrial giant appears from the sky and promptly obliterates the creature. One of the SSSP members, a national security officer named Shinji Kaminaga, is accidentally killed in the battle, prompting the sympathetic alien to assume his identity. Designated "Ultraman," our new hero undertakes a clandestine mission to help protect humanity from a progressively powerful rogues gallery of reimagined Ultra-nemeses, all the while finding his fascination with human beings growing, and the line between his alien and human sides increasingly blurred.
Though there is a discernible narrative arc to Shin Ultraman, the film does not follow a conventional three-act structure. Rather, Anno has written a film that feels more like a compilation of key moments from a much longer series. The pacing of the movie is at once summary, utilitarian, and accelerated in both the telling of its basic story and the rather didactic exploration of its themes; and yet it all but inevitably settles into a slower burn as the story becomes more about extraterrestrial intrigue than it does the rather brief, if spectacular action set-pieces. Anno's ability to replicate a certain style of fantasy writing, one that belongs to the more economically-limited and psychedelic groove of the '60s and '70s, is so exact that the novelty of Shin Ultraman as its own unique experience leans heavily on its contemporary anachronism. Basically five or six episodes of a non-existent T.V. series cut down and fused into a single extant film, there's no room for much character development outside of that of the titular hero. And even then, what ideas are expressed mostly boil down to some obligatory bits of oratory that, in and of themselves, are patterned on the sorts of blunt-force pabulum that was always inelegantly shoehorned into "B" fantasy media of the old days, quickly gesturing at some humanitarian or ecological ethos before getting back to the brass tax of servicing up some good visceral, surface-oriented hooey.
The result is a surprisingly challenging superhero movie from both a narrative and aesthetic perspective, which is not to say that it is erring in its approach. If anything, the "bugginess" of Shin Ultraman is its main feature, and essential to why it works as well as it does. Though Anno is not any less serious in his writing than with Shin Godzilla, the satiric bent of that previous collaboration with Higuchi here evolves into something much more generally tongue-in-cheek. The arch-camp absurdity of the barebones characterization, convoluted intrigue, and fantasy extravagance appeals to a notion of all that has been lost in the intervening decades of international "special effects" media, which too often approaches spectacle with the intention of creating something superficially modern, streamlined, and cool, and thus sacrifices most potential to generate something genuinely awe-inspiring or weird that can stimulate the imagination, rather than simply exciting neurons.
In the absence of Anno's directorial input, Higuchi proves capable enough of rising to the occasion in terms of managing a production that effectively compliments the hyper-specific tone of its writing. One would be hard-pressed to view his previous standalone efforts (whether we're talking Lorelei: The Witch of the Pacific Ocean or the two-part Attack on Titan adaptation) and conclude that Higuchi is anything approaching an auteur. His visual treatment of Shin Ultraman is unavoidably indebted to his collaborator and, to the extent that it is already an elaborate homage to a previous era of fantasy filmmaking, it is also more obviously a direct homage by its director to Anno's own inimitable style and influence. As such, the film's greatest weaknesses seem to rest both in Higuchi's uncritical reverence for the script as written, seemingly unwilling to prune the narrative of its more plodding and inessential moments, as well as the lack of symmetry between one director's appropriation of another's style and the creative motivations informing their respective choices. Whereas Anno is exceptionally skilled at mapping the geography of a setting and establishing the relationships between characters through relatively subtle means, Higuchi frequently gets lost in the possibilities of digital cinematography, placing his camera virtually anywhere and everywhere that he can to capture a cool angle or, worse, to cheat some coverage on a scene that is, despite its already condensed style of writing, going on far too long. Some shots are so clearly spontaneous in their stylization that they lose all compositional legibility, both unto themselves and in a sequence, such as one in particular where some four-fifths of the screen is dominated by a power-saw laying on the floor, the two actors squeezed awkwardly into an excessively wide-angle distance. Worse yet, some shots are of a noticeably lower resolution, suggesting that the tightly-scheduled production, paused due to COVID-19 restrictions, was fraught with really basic technical snafus, forcing Higuchi to do the most unprofessional thing of all, which is to zoom-in and re-crop a shot due to the impossibility of re-shooting it. Yet, even still, it is the effusive spontaneity, self-indulgence, and enthusiasm behind the camera that really ties the deadpan absurdity of Shin Ultraman together, accentuating its layers of homage with the sorts of rootless creative choices in which a "B" director-for-hire would occasionally indulge to spice up the already hokey proceedings.
Moreover, Higuchi's management of the film's production and design choices is a resounding success in pushing Shin Ultraman beyond merely meticulous homage and into the terrain of truly beguiling pop art. With Shin Godzilla, he and Anno had made the apt decision to do away with all previous Godzilla canon in order to focus on designing a narrative and monster that were all the more spiritually faithful to the grotesque, bizarre, nightmarish implications of the original. Shin Ultraman is much more reverent in terms of its direct references to Ultra-media than Shin Godzilla was to Godzilla movies, but the odd thing is that this only seems to have resulted in aesthetic choices that are all the more radical and incisive due to their anachronism in both style and tone. The basic execution of the film's fusion of conventional visual effects with CGI and digital compositing is nothing short of magnificent, with the textures of the film's various monsters and aliens, no matter how odd, coming off no less life-like and tactile than even the whales of James Cameron's Avatar. But rather than trying to make Ultraman look "real," Higuchi instead opts to make his design, mannerisms, and choreography so exact in its approximation of the limits of old school tokusatsu that, in close-ups, you can even see that the digital artists have applied a texture to the hero's model so that his exterior looks painted on, rather than as if it were truly some mystical alien armor. When Ultraman flies, he does not "perform" like a digital stand-in for an actor, but like a static model being strung on a line. Even the skies, in some shots, appear to have been touched up to look like a studio backdrop. This stark juxtaposition between the real and the unreal creates a sensation that is something like the inverse of the "uncanny valley" effect: Rather than being so realistic that it heightens our implicit awareness of artifice, it is the artifice of Shin Ultraman that is so specific and meticulous that it becomes all the more disquietingly real. Though campy, the movie never comes off as unserious, and rather proves quite provocative because of its unqualified nostalgia for and love of the deeply absurd.
If there's one thing holding the project down, it's a simple matter of an unclear audience. In a short interview screened before the film, the director expressed his reservations about the cultural differences between Japanese and American audiences. Whereas he wanted Shin Ultraman to be a spectacle that would cause audiences to cheer for the hero, preview screenings were apparently rather silent and reserved. Though the director hoped that Americans might be a little more rambunctious in their reception of the film, it must be said that even for the older, die-hard tokusatsu fans who knew about and showed up for the event, there weren't many audible thrills, either. There were some laughs at the deadpan line-readings (helped immensely by the English dubbing, which was above average and keyed perfectly to the film's tone), and then there were some muted exhales at Ultraman's rather violent and succinct dispatching of his foes. But Higuchi's hopes seem rather remote from the film that he and Anno actually made. Whereas Shin Godzilla could reasonably function as a mature spectacle because the source to which its harkens was designed to make a more generalized humanitarian appeal, Ultraman was always primarily for the kids. And once the dust starts to settle on Higuchi and Anno's elaborate pop art experiment, it really is a wonder where a younger person is supposed to find a space in this pageantry of the bizarre that, presumably, the filmmakers would like to inspire in them just as they were inspired when they were children. Only one pair of parents saw fit to bring their eight-year-old to my screening, and by an hour and a half the poor kid was getting audibly restless. They were stuck in an endurance of adults playing with their own toys.
Brilliant in some respects, deliberately gangly and uneven in others, Shin Ultraman might, at the end of the day, just be a little too oddly navel-gazing for its own good, easier to respect than to really like outside of a very particular frame of mind.
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