This emphasis on old-school, episodic tokusatsu action is maybe Shin Ultraman‘s biggest strength. Taking Shinji’s body and impersonating him at the SSSP, Ultraman settles in with the rest of the team, defending the planet from both kaiju of all stripes and more nefarious aliens who want to use the chaos to achieve their own ends. That’s Ultraman, an alien from the Planet of Light, sent to explore and defend humanity. He fights off the latest kaiju (though Shinji dies in the battle).
KAMEN RIDER MOVIES 2016 SERIES
The SSSP - composed of a series of extraterrestrial experts, including Shinji Kaminaga (Takumo Saitoh) and their leader Tamura ( Drive My Car‘s Hidetoshi Nishijima) - struggle to fight the beasts but receive some unexpected help in the form of a silver-clad, humanoid giant. (The country has seemingly learned its lesson after the first film, thank God there’s far less bureaucratic gridlock to speak of here.) In the wake of Godzilla’s attack on Tokyo, more and more kaiju are springing up all over Japan, prompting the creation of an alien-fighting force called the SSSP. Less haunting and harrowing than Shin Godzilla, Shin Ultraman feels very much in the sprightly, campy spirit of the ’60s TV series from which it spawned. Now, the pair are back (Higuchi directing, Anno writing) to adapt another classic ’60s kaiju staple for the modern day with Shin Ultraman, and boy, it’s a winner. Hot off the back of America’s take on the MonsterVerse, which traded allegory for AAA-budget Hollywood spectacle, Shinji Higuchi and Hideaki Anno reinvented the character in a huge, sprawling disaster flick that was just as much about the inefficacy of Japan’s bureaucracy to handle existential threats as it was an eye-opening spectacle. (This dispatch is part of our 2022 Fantasia Film Festival coverage.)Ģ016’s Shin Godzilla felt like such a breath of fresh air for a creature and a genre that’d long run around in circles. We look at the return of a tokusatsu giant to the big screen, a feature-film extension of a legendary Taiwanese series, and a South Korean romp about a man and his dead dad’s haunted car.