Shin Ultraman (2022)

For some time now, the members of a government organization known as the SSSP have fought off one kaiju attack on Japan after another. The danger and weirdness of the attacks only seem to increase over time. Fortunately, a giant silver guy quickly dubbed Ultraman – there’s a running gag about a politico coming up with kaiju names on the fly - appears and begins fighting the kaiju.

As it will turn out, SSSP member Shinji Kaminaga (Takumi Saitoh) has died and somehow melded with the alien Ultraman, who now sees it as his responsibility to protect humanity from alien menaces while driving Shinji’s body, or a version of Shinji’s body. Ironically enough, Ultraman’s appearance might actually worsen the situation, putting a cosmic spotlight on our (self-)destructive species.

After doing their very clever and fun version of Godzilla (which I apparently haven’t written up here), Shinji Higuchi and Hideaki Anno continue their renewal of classic Japanese kaiju and tokusatsu franchises. This time around, Higuchi is solely responsible for the direction, while Anno – who was apparently working on the eternal return that is his perpetual rejiggering of Evangelion – “only” directed, produced and edited. Tonally, this doesn’t lean quite as heavily on the political satire as the duo’s Godzilla movie did – though there certainly is some satire here – nor is the main story quite as serious. Rather, this one aims at being as fun as possible, throwing an astonishing number of monsters and fights and so much plot at the audience, you could make one and a half seasons of most streaming shows out of the material. There’s a sense of lightness to the film even once its plot escalates and it starts talking about the self-destructive nature of humanity and becomes something of a parable of the colonialist mind-set. With this lightness comes a willingness to take the silliness of its set-up seriously without being over-earnest, embracing the silliness without shame or irony.

It is also full of jokes that are actually funny.

The film is suffused by a palpable love of the original Ultraman series (and the franchise that became of it), not the sort of fanboy love that deems everything about the old material perfect and sacrosanct, but one that has identified which elements of the original it loves and then doubles down on them while being fully willing and able to discard those elements that were simply mirrors of its own time. Which to me seems like the obvious and best approach to this kind of project, avoiding slavishly tying oneself to elements that simply wouldn’t play to anyone but a tiny percentage of the most fanatic fans of a franchise, while also keeping the doors open for all kind of fanservice of the good kind, as well as people who might have been excluded from earlier iterations of the series. So why not make the original suit actor of Ultraman your mo-cap actor for this one? Why not have credits that show the SSSP minus Ultraman fight off half a dozen or so kaiju from the original show? But also why not give your female main character (Masami Nagasawa) actually something to do?

When it comes to the copious kaiju action, Shin Ultraman doesn’t falter, either. I’ve seldom seen CGI that not only shows such an understanding of what is awesome about suitmation traditions, but that also manages to integrate this knowledge (and some actual suitmation) this well, thus realizing kaiju fights that are inspired, awesome, dramatic and often also quite funny. And because the film is much pacier than basically anything else coming out right now, there are five or six big fights in here, one better than the next, until things culminate in the sort of psychedelic space shenanigans that reminded me of nothing so much as 70s cosmic Marvel comics, in form as well as in pop-philosophical subtext and heft. That, by the way, is one of the highest compliments I could make any piece of media.

In short: Attack on Titan: Part 1 (2015)

This live action adaptation of the popular and sometimes pretty inspired, some times annoyingly generic manga and anime series (short plot: humanity has nearly been destroyed by being eaten by mysterious, utterly horrifying humanoid giants; there might be a glimmer of hope, but it’s icky; also, mysterious mysteries abound) is a real emotional rollercoaster ride: half of it is nearly brilliant, the other half total crap.

Unlike a lot of fans of the source material, I am perfectly alright with the live action version taking huge liberties with the plot, background and characters; in fact, if there’s one thing that has ruined a lot of live action franchise work coming from Japan during the last decade or so for me, it’s the slavish devotion to just putting the source material on screen beat for beat, as if you could just turn an endless manga series into a pair of two hour films without making huge changes to make it work in a different medium. The art of achieving a good adaptation of anything lies in deciding what’s the visual/thematic/narrative core of the source, and putting that on screen to the best of one’s abilities. Shinji Higuchi’s version of Attack on Titan seems to get stuck somewhere half-way between, though, making huge changes but often replacing the kind of clichéd crap you have to put in your manga and anime or get lynched by horde of angry otaku with things that are just as trite and overplayed.

Not surprisingly, there’s also a decided lack of subtlety, with certain characters – generally played by tired veteran actors or pretty young things with excellent hair – only in the film to (comically, oh har-dee-har) eat potatoes, suddenly ask for a new baby daddy (that scene really needs to be seen to be believed) or creepily (and badly) quote Nietzsche without any of it actually making sense in the context they have been put in. Of course, every single moment of that is presented with grand gestures, unlike, say, in the blockbuster-wise comparable Marvel films of today where the quiet moments are actually allowed to be quiet and still feed into the overall carnage surrounding them. The way Higuchi handles the character moments, I mostly feel embarrassed by their unnecessary broadness.

The good part of the film are the giants and their attack scenes. Blood is flowing in buckets, and the CGI creatures manage to turn something that should be silly just as well into something creepy and horrifying as the manga does. And where Higuchi isn’t good at all at that icky people having feelings stuff, he does come into himself in the scenes of mass carnage and destruction, really bringing home the horror of the film’s monsters as well as how tiny and fragile the humans they eat are. The character bits that are actually integrated into the carnage tend to work better too, perhaps because here, Higuchi not doing “subtle” fits into surroundings that certainly don’t do subtle either.

“But is it actually worth watching!?”, I hear my imaginary reader ask. Well, sort of, I think. At least the film’s big monster doing big monster stuff scenes are fine, and the rest isn’t anything that can’t be fixed by watching this thing inebriated or fast forwarding through it judiciously.

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