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.

Ace Attorney (2012)

Original title: Gyakuten saiban

(I'll go with the accustomed names of the characters from the western translations of the videogames here; I'm sure there won't be any objections).

Turns out the Japanese judicial system is just as weird as I have always expected. To cope with overburdened courts, a rather more duel-minded court system has been established, because who needs things like judicial fairness, logic, or a proper chain of evidence when he can instead have people dramatically pointing their fingers while shouting "OBJECTION!", holograms, confetti rain and lawyers with manga character fashion style? Not me.

Phoenix Wright (Hiroki Narimiya) is a rookie lawyer trying to establish himself in this glorious style of court battles, and he's already breaking down to cringe in moments of crisis with the very best of them. Just after winning his first case against hot-shot dandy prosecutor, as well as his former co-student,  Miles Edgeworth (Takumi Saito), Phoenix's mentor Mia Fey (Rei Dan) - of the Fey spiritist family if you need to know - is murdered; supposedly by her younger sister Maya (Mirei Kiritani), but that's a case of judicial error Phoenix takes care of fast enough. This murder is only the first step in a series of events that will lead the attorney to defending Edgeworth against the excellently named prosecutor Manfred von Karma (Ryo Ishibashi) in another murder case, lighting up the murky shadows of his and Edgeworth's fathers' pasts, and learning to cringe even better.

It's a natural law that 99 percent of all videogame movie adaptations are terrible shite. Fortunately, beloved (by me!) Japanese director Takashi Miike does not believe in natural laws of any way, shape, or form as little as the "Ace Attorney" videogames themselves do believe in real-world logic, due process, or a confetti-less court system, so he just went and made a good videogame movie.

Miike is pretty much the ideal director for this sort of thing, for the mixture of hyped-up yet straight-faced absurdism and pop culture references of the - heavily manga, anime and tokusatsu culture based - videogames plays to some of the directors strengths, namely getting distracted by any shiny thing and then filming it, and not giving a crap about realism of any shape, kind or form.

What strikes me as slightly surprising - but works out very well for the film - is how much Miike avoids the stylistic and narrative excess Ace Attorney suggests. The film may be full of ridiculous nonsense and look like a real-life comic book, but it's also restrained enough not to become annoying, generally avoiding to shout into its audiences faces how CA-RAY-ZEEE it is, though it is, in fact, plenty crazy. Ace Attorney's craziness, however, has a very effective internal consistency. Rather like the mirror image of US superhero movies that usually ask how elements of a comic strip would work in the real world, Miike's film asks how elements of the real world would work in a comic strip, and builds its sense of fun on that basis.

For my tastes, Miike keeps up this sense of fun for the whole 130 minutes of running time of the movie. I'd even call the film tight, for, atypical for the director even in his more commercial mode (though you got me if you ask if this is, in fact, made in Miike's commercial mode), there's nary a moment that's pure digression here. Even the many, many moments when the film seems to digress later turn out to be important parts of a rather well-constructed - at least if one is willing and able to accept the film's internal logic - plot.

This makes Ace Attorney an easy to love film for me, for what could be more entertaining than concerted weirdness that still makes its own sort of sense in the end, combined with absurdly-haired people shouting "objection" (or rather "OBJECTION!!!!!")?

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