Shin Ultraman

Although not strictly a sequel to 2016's Shin Godzilla, director Shinji Higuchi's Shin Ultraman does go further than a few vague allusions to its predecessor. The film begins by painting The King of Monsters' name in the swirling extradimensional emulsions familiar to fans of Tsuburaya Productions before a bristling re-design of the monster Gomess from the 1966 Ultra Q television series - in its original incarnation a lightly dressed Godzilla suit inherited from the Mothra vs Godzilla and Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster shoots - puts in a bunker busting appearance. This spiked variant recasts Higuchi and Hideaki Anno's flayed take on Toho's monarch, and the film that detailed his landing, as an inciting incident: the first clash between mankind and this kind of cataclysmic kaiju. Shin Ultraman then is the light-hearted follow-up, one in which, rather than simply see Japan wither under radioactive fire, humankind is slowly beginning to take possession of these incredible powers for themselves. 

Whatever the film's lineage, Shin Ultraman impresses in its ability to constantly update both the stakes in play and the genre language used to decode them. The film's early passages set up a scenario straight out of the Silver Age Superman comics with Takumi Saitoh's Shinji Kaminga as the Clark Kent-like human alter-ego for Ultraman and Masami Nagasawa's Hiroko Asami as the Lois Lane analog snooping into his affairs. This section contains delirious super-fights between the androgynous otherworldly defender and a radiation gobbling monster who has, in this instance, been spewed up from a revolting Earth. Viewpoints on these clashes are both observational and intimate. Whereas some shots are clearly derived from the locked perspectives available to awed human bystanders, other glimpses use an explicitly hand-held language, as if an equally massive cameraman has wriggled in-between these gigantic, steaming, participants. The lancing computer generated protrusions of these battling titans are also, clearly, rigged with (ginormous) GoPro cameras as they jab at Ultraman's indifferent alien face. 

Shin Ultraman then discards its secret identity intrigue, using a giantess (that staple of atomic age science fiction) to introduce the idea that the human body is - in this universe - a rich and endlessly modifiable resource. The extraterrestrials that follow the silent and stoic Ultraman to Earth, although not above toppling skyscrapers to get their way, largely engage with a bemused mankind by employing a delinquent form of political brinkmanship. Several successive wheeler-dealers - the most distinctive of which is Alien Zarab, a well-spoken metallic creature with a cosmically powered smartphone who conceals its blue pinhole eyes (and two-dimensional body) under a black coat and tipped fedora, an appearance not unlike Hiroshi Fujimoto and Motoo Abiko's The Laughing Salesman - ingratiate themselves with the Diet, offering Japan all manner of magical boons that, on the face of it, should allow Ultraman's adoptive country to definitively take its place amongst the world's superpowers. Japan's political class are portrayed as greedy, power hungry and hopelessly out of their depth. They fail to consider a perspective beyond their own planet; what these technological gifts then mean for an unseen, and apparently uneasy, intergalactic détente. Shin Ultraman then honours the intent behind the grasping humanoid mutations seen at the conclusion of Shin Godzilla, if not necessarily the strict circumstances of how they came to be.