Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla (1994)

directed by Kensho Yamashita

Japan

107 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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As usual, revisiting this after having seen every Godzilla movie finds me with a changed opinion of it. I'm rewriting my review a little to reflect that. Previously I opened by saying that I had limited interest in Godzilla fighting different versions of himself, and while it's true that the 1990s did see a lot of Godzilla movies with that scenario, I don't feel like it's inherently bad just because it gets done a lot of times. I also called M.O.G.U.E.R.A "slightly ridiculous", which I apologize profusely for, because both here as M.O.G.U.E.R.A (this stands for Mobile Operated G-Universal Expert Robot Aero-type, and don't you forget it) and in The Mysterians, that mole robot is my best beloved.

I really feel like this span of Heisei-era Godzilla movies that all took place in the same timeline (meaning the ones that have Miki Saegusa as their connecting thread), rather than starting over from scratch every time like most other Godzilla movies do, is a high period for the franchise as a whole. I'm not saying that they're my favorites, but they're some of the most consistent. Individually they work well, but together they present this collection of ideas and events that feels a lot more solidly grounded than a lot of other Godzilla timelines - again, this is because they don't jump around and re-start every so often.

The crowd response to Godzilla vs. Biollante seems to have had a lot of influence on the tone of the movies that came after it. Evidently its darker feel and more complex storyline wasn't very popular with kids, so many of the movies afterwards have a distinctly more child-friendly vibe. I don't really have an opinion on this; I might be too biased here, because to me, the Godzilla franchise has never bent so severely towards being For Kids™ that it's lost other things in sacrifice to being tame. But I may only have that opinion because I am too in love with the Godzilla movies we did get to be caught up in thoughts of what might have been. Aside from a story or two here and there, we'll never know how much incredibly cool stuff might have been cut behind the scenes for being too dark.

Onto the actual movie. The strategy for dealing with Godzilla that the best and brightest minds have thought up this time is to get Miki Saegusa (not just her, eventually the technologically is meant to be adapted so that anyone can use it, but she's the one who has to kick it off) to control Godzilla psychically using her powerful ESP. This is a nonviolent concept, but it still holds moral and ethical quandaries that the people who came up with it apparently don't see as too big of an issue: Is it right to dominate another creature with your mind and force it to act against its will? Is it ever right to just wrest control of another conscious, feeling being, even if that being is something as lethally destructive as Godzilla? These are unsaid implications, they don't really get dealt with outright in the film - which is another reason why I love Godzilla: These films feel like they respect the viewer enough to bring up topics and let you explore them yourself. At the same time, there's a lone-wolf type who's trying to kill Godzilla as revenge for the death of his brother. Like the concept of Godzilla fighting a second, slightly different Godzilla, this has been done before, many times. I don't feel that it's particularly compelling in this case, certainly not as much as it has been before, because the lone revenge-minded character feels like he was only brought in because the writers wanted a foil to the ESP institute, or perhaps another human faction to act as the "bad guys" instead of having SpaceGodzilla be the sole villain. A baby Godzilla is also hanging around, and whether this is Godzilla's biological child or just another member of his species is not important; Godzilla is going to parent the absolute hell out of this kid and god help you if you get in the way.

So what is SpaceGodzilla? He's actually kind of fascinating to me. I have an image saved to my computer of a note from the extras in the back of one of the Godzilla comics that says "The thing you need to know about SpaceGodzilla is that he's a Godzilla from space". One of the most memorable scenes in this film is when one of its peripherally-important scientist characters explains the origin of SpaceGodzilla, which is really just deeply wacky and sounds more like something somebody would come up with for their weird fanfiction than an actual, canonical thing that happened. Basically we're expected to believe that after the carnage of Godzilla fighting Biollante, some of his cells drifted up into the atmosphere and eventually escaped to find their way into a black hole, get spit out by a white hole (?) and combine with an unknown alien life form (??) to create a sort of bootleg clone of Godzilla. Okay. Sure. They also add that it's possible Godzilla's cells stuck onto Mothra to travel out of the atmosphere instead of being ejected after the Biollante fight, but however his biological material got into space doesn't seem to be relevant.

But what makes SpaceGodzilla interesting to me is that he seems to exist for no reason other than to be evil. Like, we all know by now that it's not Godzilla's fault that he's the way he is. We only have ourselves to blame for that. But SpaceGodzilla was created by forces that humanity doesn't understand, millions or billions or even trillions of miles removed from Earth. He was born from some bizarre cosmic influence that shaped him into a being with no sympathy and either no motivation behind killing or a motivation that's unknown to us. He steals Godzilla's maybe-child and then just rampages around causing the maximum amount of destruction possible; he's ruthless. There's a cold alien menace to SpaceGodzilla that makes up for his corny name. I love the scene of the final battle in Fukuoka, how SpaceGodzilla uses his crystals to mutate the entire city into something as alien as he is. I was thinking about it and realized for the first time that while most kaiju destroy cities, no kaiju (at least in the mainstream Godzilla canon) has specifically transformed a city like that. For a movie that is superficially so rote and uses old ideas over again, there are some things in this that are extremely original.

Well, I didn't mean to write this entire review over again, but I guess I did. My opinions and feelings have changed - not by much, but enough that I approach this with a different mindset now. I was too caught up before on how nothing about this movie makes sense, but now I know that being a Godzilla fan means letting go of the idea of making sense as you know it and allowing any given movie you're watching to inject you with its own version of making sense. That brings me back to why I think the Saegusa-connected span of Godzilla movies are so much fun. Instead of presenting ideas that only exist within one movie and then get overwritten when the next one comes out, we're invited to see a continuous timeline where characters deal with events with the benefit of knowledge of what came before. A lot of people don't like this movie and I specifically have seen people picking on the effects, which I don't really get, because to me they look fine for this time period. But again, I am biased. I love to see the wires, I love to see the shadows on the painted backdrop. It's not important to me that things look perfect, I enjoy it more when I can see what work was put into it.

Revealer (2022)

directed by Luke Boyce

USA

86 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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The thing that drew me to this movie is also probably the least relevant part of it as a whole: I like the idea of the (or "an") apocalypse happening sometime in the past. It's interesting to imagine how people during a different era would react to the end of the world. In this case, the apocalypse takes place in the late 1980s, at a place and time where preachy picketers and the sex trade are colliding. Sally is a particularly outspoken member of a group that regularly shouts and waves signs outside Revealer, the naughty bookstore where Angie works as a peep show dancer. On one morning not much different from any other morning, the apparent Biblical apocalypse suddenly begins, and the two very different women get trapped in the booths together as the world turns itself inside out outside. We're never shown any scenes of mass chaos, but that's not necessary in this situation because we have Sally's expert knowledge of exactly how Judgement Day was forecasted to go down, and everything that's written in the Bible about it is scary enough without a visual depiction. There is some gore and demons and whatnot, of course, but leaving the worst of the tribulations to a viewer's imagination is usually the right call with this kind of thing.

Before I get any further into talking about the movie itself, I wanted to talk about a point it brings up that I thought was really interesting and that I probably won't be able to explain well. Revealer doesn't try to alter the popular conception of sin and sinners, but instead uses it to conjure some very frightening implications. It becomes pretty clear that even though the message of the film is about not judging people and not thinking you're better than them because of your faith, the apocalypse is happening along the lines of the gospel according to Sally the holier-than-thou picketer. People literally are getting punished for being "harlots" and "sexual deviants". But the film still posits that being those things isn't bad. No, instead it takes this almost Gnostic view of the Christian God as an antagonistic, borderline negative force; whether you've been shamelessly flaunting your body for a living or devoting yourself completely to God (while hiding a secret that he deems "sinful"), you have the same chance of getting raptured - or not. The scenario that unfolds here is not terrifying because of the idea that we might not have been good enough, it's terrifying because the whole idea of "good" according to this specific rapture leaves out countless scores of people who are kind, lovely, and righteous people. It's terrifying because we suddenly realize that God is judging humanity by a metric that has absolutely nothing to do with who we are at heart and is, in fact, almost wholly unknowable.

Revealer doesn't even get that far explicitly; there's no outright discussion of who's getting raptured and who's left behind, but the vitriol that is spewed by the creatures who are loosed on the earth while God presumably just turns his back and lets it all happen proves that religion in this case operates on an idea of good and bad that does not spell redemption for much of humankind, if any.

Moving on. I guess it wasn't necessary for this to take place in 1987, as this kind of misdirected woman-against-woman hate has been going on for a long time, but saying that it wasn't necessary is kind of like saying that it wasn't necessary for a great artist to use red - when it comes to art, "necessary" isn't a productive idea. And this movie uses its '80s setting as an excuse to indulge in neon and garish outfits, which all looks great. I wish there'd been a little more meat to the soundtrack, because the one song it does feature is really good, but that's not the biggest deal. The acting seems to have turned a lot of people off, judging by reviews, and it did turn me off a little at first too. The actress playing Sally at times feels kind of stiff and overly rehearsed, but the more of the film I watched, the more I felt like her awkwardness fit well with her character, who is meant to be an awkward person.

This is one of those movies where you mostly know where it's going in terms of how the two characters are ultimately going to bond with each other, but there's nothing wrong with that and in fact if it hadn't gone down that path I would have been disappointed. You know they're going to become close despite their differences and that there's gonna be some gay stuff (okay, maybe you don't know that, but you hope it) and it doesn't feel trite when all that does happen, it just feels like it's going the way it should. Aside from its fairly unique idea that what should be a reward day for all the holiest people in the world actually sucks really bad, there's not too much depth to this, but it's still a very solid film. Unfortunate how blatantly it succumbs to the "black guy dies first" rule, especially when there's not a lot in the way of onscreen death, making it more like "only the black guy dies".

Not much else to say about this. It is an interesting scenario executed well and with some good (though sparse) practical effects here and there. For some reason, this almost felt like an episode of Into the Dark or some other one-off anthology segment expanded into a feature film.

Ork (2022)

directed by Shoma Muto

Japan

45 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I found out about this short film and immediately decided to watch it, influenced partly by the "limited time only" disclaimer in the film's official YouTube release (here, but it may be taken down by the time you're reading this). Ork is a brand-spanking-new crowdfunded tokusatsu short shot entirely on an iPhone with what sounds like a real revolving-door crew. I mention this because in an interview with the crew, the role of director seems very de-emphasized (there is no mention of Shoma Muto in the description box on YouTube*), and instead the interviewer is speaking to the crew as a whole. They're not sure how many of them there were, "at least thirty" is the number whoever is being interviewed gives, but some people apparently only worked on a few things and then left. This style of filmmaking is really, really interesting to me and I like the idea of a film being worked on as more of a casual collaboration rather than rigidly conforming to studio conventions. I would love to see what this crew does in the future. Above everything you can definitely sense the love they have for what they made.

Unfortunately the English subtitles were somewhat lacking (it seems like subtitling was done very quickly) so I had a bit of trouble following the story. I will probably be talking more about design choices and filming techniques than the plot. There are two central characters, one a lecturer at a university and the other a student of his, who gain the ability, through stones with strange powers, to transform into Ork and Gum. I can't really describe what exactly Ork and Gum are, because in the way of most tokusatsu creatures and henshin heroes, they're wholly original beings that don't look like anything else. There is a theme of trying to change the future and also trying to change the past as well; one of the characters is hell-bent on bringing back his deceased wife and the other is using his newfound power to transform into Ork to fight against a future he was shown in which Gum kills his childhood friend.

All the stuff that makes a really great tokusatsu experience is here: Good suits, really good choreography, and a strong story-to-action balance. What this feels like is the pilot episode of something. It felt like we were being introduced to characters whose abilities we would eventually get to see used in other battles. The transformations and Ork and Gum's powers are really matter-of-fact, which is something I liked a lot. The whole thing is set in extremely dreary, mundane urban environments - courtyards outside buildings where it looks like it just rained, random woods, rooftops, just these incongruous locations that create a very visually striking effect when combined with the slightly whimsical design of the two fighters. The fact that Ork and Gum's design is not over-the-top is also crucial here. I love how their costumes are simple but also fantastical at the same time. There's a perfect level of fantasy mixed in with reality throughout this whole film - not just with the two main characters, but also with their various attacks and the witch/her familiar who controls the stones. It doesn't feel jarring against the background of everyday city life. It gives you that clandestine, exciting feeling like you've stepped just a little to the left of reality and found something hidden and new. 

All in all this is just a really great tokusatsu film. I have a review of The Great Buddha Arrival that I may or may not ever post publicly where I talk a little bit about how exciting it is to see new tokusatsu being made, because the genre is aging and the fact that people are still incredibly invested in it is very heartening. Ork is what I mean when I say things like that. I almost put this in with the next Indie Kaiju Roundup post I'm planning, but decided that in spite of its short running time, it deserves its own post. Forgive me if I've gotten any facts wrong about it too, here; I can't find much information on it in English.

*edit: I've just found out Shoma Muto is responsible for the designs of the Trigger Dark Giants in Ultraman Trigger, as well as some storyboarding for more recent Kamen Rider, so that is very neat!

Daigoro vs. Goliath (1972)

directed by Toshihiro Iijima

Japan

85 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I watched this ages and ages ago before I knew anything whatsoever about Tsuburaya and kaiju in general (embarrassingly, I assumed it was a Toho movie) and was wrongly convinced for a long time that it was not worth rewatching or paying any more mind to. Friends, I must do something to dispel the reputation this movie has for being unbearably goofy, throwaway, bargain bin kaiju eiga. Yes, it kind of is those things, but it is also, genuinely, honestly, a really good movie.

Daigoro vs. Goliath is just a weird movie on principle if you know anything about it at all. It was created for Tsuburaya Productions' 10th anniversary as a studio, which they celebrated with many other things that were wildly more successful than this*. Despite that, it has absolutely nobody in it that you would recognize from Tsupro's more popular series - with the notable exception of Akiji Kobayashi, who really gets to ham it up here, I love him. It was directed by someone who is not one of Tsupro's more well-known directors, but had directed several episodes from the Ultra franchise as well as Operation: Mystery.** It also contains no kaiju that audiences had come to associate with Tsuburaya, although the suits for Daigoro and Goliath are very clearly cobbled together from recognizable Ultra kaiju. Really, this is such a weird movie for a studio to make. It would have been far weirder if they had not also released more memorable and beloved media alongside it, but still. It's just strange for a studio that had become known almost exclusively for a specific couple of franchises to go "Why not make a monster movie that's entirely stand-alone and doesn't reference back to a single other thing we've done?" I assume they chose to do this because they had hopes of turning Daigoro into a new star - hopes that fizzled out somewhere. But I am glad that they decided to do that, because now we have Daigoro vs. Goliath.

So Daigoro is a giant, cuddly baby monster who just kind of hangs out on a beach. In appearance he's somewhere between a capybara, a cat, and a hippopotamus. His backstory is genuinely harrowing: When an atomic submarine exploded, Daigoro's mother was awakened from the ocean floor (yeah) and began rampaging into citified areas, so the Japanese military summarily destroyed her, only to discover that she had left behind an at-the-time tiny infant, helpless and vulnerable. Out of some sense of guilt, the military adopts this baby, christens it Daigoro, builds it a giant port-a-potty, and sticks it on a beach. The national feeling towards Daigoro seems to for the most part be adoration, especially among children, but the further you get upwards into the government, the more the attitude changes towards viewing Daigoro as a drain on resources. Daigoro is still growing, and the cost of feeding him rapidly becomes (as the government deems it) untenable, but it's implied that there's changes that could be made to national spending habits that would let Daigoro eat without too much harm to the nation. A one-off line from one of the film's handful of sorta-protagonists surprised me, about how if the military would decline to buy one single fighter jet, Daigoro wouldn't go hungry. Criticizing military spending in American film these days tends to not be too popular a stance, so I am not used to hearing stuff like that.

Even though all of the people who the film spends most of its time focusing on are sympathetic towards Daigoro, strings are pulled from above and an anti-growth serum is added to his food to keep him from getting any bigger. This is played up for high tragedy: Many children in the audience (and today) had probably experienced wanting a pet, but being told by their parents that they just couldn't afford to feed one. And how would you feel if you were an innocent, growing child and were told by the people who were ostensibly taking care of you that you could at times only drink water instead of eating because they had to spend all their money on fighter jets instead?

I really love this movie for the world it creates, which, while separate from any other Tsuburaya canon (both Ultraman and its competing non-Tsupro show Kamen Rider are implied to exist, but as fiction), is still well-developed and immersive. It gets deep into the scenario it creates, where Japan is not a nation oft-visited by monsters but instead the unexpected haven of one pretty needy one. This is a deeply funny movie and I love it the way I love Son of Godzilla: For being so bombastic and unafraid, giving 100% of everything, everything turned up as high as it can go and everybody seeming like they put their whole heart behind it. I think the key to why this movie is so good is because while it is extremely silly and the humor is slapstick and absurd, nobody at any point feels like they lack even one shred of belief in their role. And it also tackles the topic of governments acting really stupid in a way that is so distilled to its most basic points that even children can instinctually understand it.

And I guess there's another kaiju in here, too. Goliath is extremely generic, gets almost no backstory or traits, and just exists as a "whoops" moment where Daigoro gets to prove his worth to a government that, like most if not all governments, only sees the value in something if it can be weaponized. In that way, the ending is kind of a double-edged sword: Daigoro gets to live because he finally showed that he could be useful... but Daigoro only gets to live because he finally showed that he could be useful. That's one of those things you're really better off not thinking too hard about. All in all, I honestly was surprised that I ended up loving this movie upon second viewing. I think it might be something where you need to be used to this style of filmmaking to fully appreciate it. It's a shame that this is such a well-made movie and doesn't get even a sliver of the recognition of Tsupro's other 10th-anniversary projects.

*please watch Fireman.

**please watch Operation: Mystery.

Slaxx (2020)

directed by Elza Kephart

Canada

77 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I kept meaning to watch this, but wasn't in the right mood for it, which... I don't know what kind of mood you need to be in to watch a movie about a possessed pair of jeans that kills people, but I know I wasn't in it. But really, this isn't a mood movie at all; it's short, you don't have to prepare for it, and it's just good fun. Mostly.

Like most slashers, this isn't a very character-driven movie. It does have a decently-sized cast of distinct personalities, but their main purpose is to eventually get pantsed at some time or another, so you won't get too attached to them. Insofar as there is a main character, it's Libby, a new and very young employee at what we're told is a hugely popular clothing chain store. She has the misfortune of her first day falling on the night before "Monday Madness" - a big sale where the chain is about to unveil their revolutionary new product, and also have a popular influencer in to spread the word about it. Said product is a line of jeans that are supposed to use cutting-edge "thermal technology" to mold perfectly to your unique body shape, therefore being all-size and -gender inclusive. Because we know we're watching a movie about evil killer jeans, we of course know to be suspicious of this new product, but none of the characters do, leading to denim-fueled mayhem after hours.

I worked at Old Navy as my very first job when I was around the same age as the protagonist in this movie, so a lot of this was... nostalgic? Let's say nostalgic. The store is obviously not real, but the set decorators did such a great job of capturing that aesthetic via basically inventing it wholecloth that it might as well have been. It's a very immersive set, with color-coordinated marketing, posters, and even an invented terminology: I've never heard any retailer refer to each employee's specific work zone as their "ecosystem", but it sounds like the kind of positivity jargon a store manager would use. The attitudes of the employees range from Libby, bright-eyed and genuinely buying into the head of the chain's reputation for humanitarianism, to the awful wannabe regional manager, to Shruti, who has absolutely no time for any corporate spiel at all. Everybody else plays an important part in fleshing out the film, certainly, but they've pretty much got timers counting down to when they get killed.

The thing that makes this movie good is that is plays itself so incredibly straight. There is no sense that the people who made this were thinking "haha we're making a funny bad movie". This could so easily have gone the route of other "killer object" films in which there's either a deliberate attempt at goofiness or just a lack of caring about whether or not things came off as goofy, but it doesn't do any of that. In fact, it almost feels like it's trying its best not to be goofy. Slaxx wants you to take murderous denim seriously. I think this works so well in large part because of the kills, which are as gory and bloody as you'd expect them to be, but stop at the perfect point where the gore isn't gratuitous or out-of-place.

I also really appreciate the way the killer jeans are achieved onscreen. Everything else aside, if that had failed, this movie would have been nothing. From what I could tell, the jeans were operated with practical effects whenever possible. This is crucial because I feel like we all know by now that fabric is one of the most difficult things to get right with CGI, and in fact if you're looking at a particularly good CGI character, the thing that can immediately give it away as being fake is the clothing. So for the most part I think this was genuinely just jeans and wires, and it looks incredible. There's some shots, like a pair of the jeans scooting down an empty hallway lapping up a trail of blood, that are so unique I found myself lauding the sheer creativity of that, and the fact that cinema has never seen the likes of a pair of jeans scooting down a hallway lapping up blood and may never see it again. There's also a level of anthropomorphism here, though again, like most other things, Slaxx never takes this too far. The pockets look a little like eyes, and the waistband of course makes a gaping mouth, and it's perfect, but it's not used so often that your eyes immediately zero in on the jeans' "face" in every shot. If the face were too obvious, I think it would remove a little bit of the sense of danger and just become cute.

This movie's biggest shortfall, I think, is that it does actually try to play certain things a little too straight. I don't really have a place talking about this, because I'm a white American who has undoubtedly worn clothing produced in sweatshops and with child labor (though I do shop secondhand almost exclusively), but there's something about the way Slaxx tries to tackle those topics that doesn't feel quite right. Spoilers here, if a movie about killer jeans is something you're desperate to keep your mind untainted for. I'm just going to say it the way it is and you can decide how it sounds to you: The jeans are possessed by the spirit of a 13-year-old Indian girl, killed in a thresher accident while picking cotton on one of the clothing company's subcontracted farms. Close to the climax of the film, the jeans obtain a mannequin torso and attach it to itself (herself?) for increased mobility, and the first thing it does is daub a bindi on the mannequin's forehead with blood. Also, the first tipoff that the spirit in the jeans is in fact a former human is when the characters discover it has a soft spot for Bollywood songs. Now... like most other things in this movie, none of that is framed in a way that's obviously intended to be a joke. It is not making fun of Indian people, child labor, Bollywood music, or any of the other topics it covers. But at the same time, having that kind of thing in a comedy movie and covering it the way it's covered just feels... I don't know. If anything, I feel like it fails to deliver the impact of what it's trying to say. I don't need to be shown cruelty happening to know that it's happening, but the image that the film provides - a girl working in what look to be fairly nice conditions, who, through pretty much a total accident, ends up killed - feels like, if such a thing is possible, a deeply rose-tinted vision of child labor. 

And I really don't know what to make of the ending other than that a 13-year-old girl whose death was covered up by the people who were ultimately responsible for her safety is set up as a bad and hateful person who does the wrong thing. The army of jeans unleashes denim fury on a crowd of hapless customers, and the main character fails in convincing the girl's spirit to relent. I mean, in fairness, if the spirit had been appeased by sweet words and empty corporate promises, the film would have felt entirely toothless. But I feel like there could have been some middle ground, another way to conclude this story than casting an innocent girl as an obvious wrongdoer. So this is a pretty good movie and, as I said, lots of fun, it just feels like it stumbles a little in (what was almost definitely a well-intentioned) attempt to draw attention to real-world issues.

A Chinese Ghost Story (1987)

directed by Tony Ching Siu-Tung

Hong Kong

98 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I love Hong Kong horror movies, but I always come up at a loss when I try to review them because usually the "complexity of plot" to "comprehensibility of subtitles" ratio is so imbalanced that I have no idea what's going on. But as it turns out (and as I probably should have known from the start), this is really a very different animal from the type of movie I was thinking of. It's absolutely nothing like your average Shaw Bros outing; with far higher production value and a more mature humor, this is more along the lines of a historical romance than a goofy schlocky horror movie*.

Our main character (played by Leslie Cheung!) is a tax collector who's very poor, with no worldly possessions except the pack he carries around for much of the movie. In classic horror movie fashion, when he asks around for a place he can stay the night with no money involved, he gets the old "Well... there's that weird old temple that's supposed to be horrifically haunted..." and, having no real choice, ends up staying at said temple. This is a gross oversimplification of a movie that already has a surprisingly simple plot. Most of the appeal comes from how well an old story is executed, visually. The cinematography is beautiful and much more relaxed and subtle than I was expecting - for example, I liked the visual tricks employed to make the protagonist stick out of the faceless crowds that he is often in, like how even with no knowledge of the film we would be able to tell immediately who the main character was just from the fact that he's carrying around that huge bindle all the time. The running joke where everyone talks about him behind his back and shuts up as soon as he turns around to look at them was very funny. He also ends up shoved against a shop display selling hell money and gets the ink, and the inscriptions, smeared all over his back, which later is our first tip-off that the girl he falls for might not be entirely human. This is another example of the subtle visual clues this movie is good at deploying.

Once he gets to the temple, the protagonist - whose name I have not been using because I've seen it Romanized in many ways and I don't know which one is the right one - finds that the rumors of it being haunted are true, but the nature of the haunting is more faceted than the townspeople seem to think, and hey, who's this really pretty but kind of weird girl who lives at the temple, who's very pale and freezing cold all the time?

The character who I am tentatively calling Nieh Hsiao-Tsing (and please forgive me if this is a mangled spelling) was a bit of a surprise to me because, honestly, I'm sorry that I keep comparing this to movies that it has nothing to do with, but I've been watching a lot of Shaw Bros lately and I'm used to women having a status lower than furniture in these films. Generally a woman in a bad HK horror movie is not allowed to have desire except as a joke; bawdy old women and prostitutes are typically the only time a woman is seem expressing her own wants and needs. But the first time we see Nieh Hsiao-Tsing, she's falling all over our protagonist, begging for him, oblivious, to warm her up. It is clearly in line with her character as a lonely being who hasn't felt normal human touch for a long time, but to me it was notable to see a woman who so clearly knows what she wants and in fact makes the first move. He doesn't have to woo her, or convince her of anything. The romance is two-sided and entirely consensual.

Another character who stood out to me was Hsiao-Tsing's captor, who the subtitles called "The Old Dame". From what I could tell, she was a kind of ancient, malevolent tree spirit who fed off of energy from living humans. What I liked about this character was that she (I'm relying on mangled subtitles here - the other characters could very well have been avoiding pronouns altogether when talking about the Old Dame) has aspects of male and female and this is not presented entirely as a joke. Crossdressing is another thing I run into frequently in HK horror and it is always strictly for a cheap laugh, some guy in garish makeup and women's dress acting lewd and we're all supposed to think it's the funniest thing ever. This character is a man in makeup, but she is not treated as inherently funny. Her voice is dubbed to very interesting effect where at random it switches between a higher and deeper register. This character's gender is never explicitly brought up, but I understand there are many beings in Chinese mythology who have aspects of more than one gender or do not have a gender at all. It's just not very often that I see that depicted in what is almost approaching a respectful manner.

Moving on. Like I said, this is primarily a love story, but it's one done in a way that feels genuine, not rushed, and has that element of star-crossed love that does usually get to me regardless of my pretensions. It's not that original - I think most people could name, or at least are familiar with, a story or two where a couple is in love but one is unaware that the other is a ghost. That A Chinese Ghost Story takes place in a Daoist setting makes this more complicated and, in my opinion, more tragic, because it means that the kindest act our protagonist can do for the girl he's fallen in love with is make sure her remains are properly interred so that she can finally reincarnate - whereupon he'll never see her again, because her soul will now be in the body of someone who could be anywhere in the world. It's a twist on the typical ending to these stories of just having to accept that you can't be with someone, and I don't know if it's comforting or even more sad.

There are still action scenes in this, and some zombie skeletons and various ghouls, you know, that kind of thing, and they're all great. Most of the comedy relief not delivered by our protagonist himself being so good-hearted and innocent comes from a somewhat rowdy monk who also hangs out at the temple. Midway through the movie he bursts into what I can only describe as a hip-hop song and dance number about Daoism for no apparent reason. Also, whenever he does some epic action move, the transformation sound effect from the original 1966 Ultraman would play, which was driving me absolutely crazy. I think my favorite thing about this film was the cinematography, but it's got everything, rolled into one: A good love story, a little spookiness here and there, awesome practical effects, nice soundtrack, and humor that never feels like it's hitting you over the head. I wonder if the sequels manage to maintain this level of quality.

*please note that I deeply love goofy, schlocky Shaw Bros movies as well.

Shin Ultraman (2023)

directed by Shinji Higuchi

Japan

118 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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I am going to apologize up front because I wrote this on Wednesday night, as soon as I got back from seeing this movie, and my thoughts about it were (and still are) in nothing even remotely resembling a coherent order. I usually do try to have a framework to my reviews, to make one paragraph segue into another, to relate topics to each other, etc. I can't do that right now. So I'm just going to talk about a lot of separate things that hit me in this very, very, very good movie.

There is something about the first time Ultraman ("Ripiah", here) does his now-very-famous Specium Beam pose that is sticking with me. It's showy, it's deliberate. He does it slowly like he wants everyone watching to see exactly what he's doing. He never performs the beam this way in the original series. While a concrete explanation for why he does it this way in the movie may not exist - beyond simply that the director knew the audience would eat it up - a couple of possibilities stuck in my mind. The first is what I believe to be the most likely, and it's that Ultraman is doing this for the first time. He just arrived on Earth basically seconds ago and we don't know where he's been before this, we don't know if he's been in combat at all, if he's ever used this specific attack. He could be trying out an entirely new skill. The second explanation is that he's doing it so slowly because he knows his next host is out there somewhere; he knows someone important is watching so he's demonstrating what that someone is going to eventually do alongside him. Seeing as Kaminaga's partnering with Ultraman was an accident that neither of them foresaw, I don't think this is particularly likely, but I do enjoy thinking about it. Either way, that first beam attack is an incredible moment. I love it.

This is not an especially kaiju-heavy film; mostly it focuses on alien intrusions and meddling with humankind. It stuffs two entirely separate alien invasion plans (three, if you count what Zōffy was doing) into one movie. These alien plots brought something into Shin Ultraman that I was not expecting, and that's the kind of shamelessly fun espionage-and-intrigue subplots that the original Ultra series so often had. I kept myself deliberately in the dark about as much of this movie as I possibly could, so I had no idea what to expect, but I had in mind something a little bit more serious and dark, and while this movie is serious and dark, Zarab's and Mefilas' attempts at overtaking the Earth are... they're goofy. Zarab wears a trenchcoat and a fedora, like in the original. Mefilas is so smarmy and ingratiates himself so easily with humanity's elites that it's amusing how hatable he is. These are fun, funny things. The original series was very, very fond of random spy stuff and weird INTERPOL doings, that kind of thing was always popping up, but I didn't expect to see it here. I absolutely love the mixture of humor into moments of crisis.

I just... I can't pack everything I want to say into this! This series means so much to me and I just watched a movie that honors what it means in such a deep way.

While in the '66 Ultraman we saw much more of Hayata's perspective as a human, this movie flips it the other way. Ultraman himself is a much stronger presence than his human side - in fact, his human side has essentially been killed, and while, as always, as always, he is both, human and Ultra, is is Ripiah piloting the body. Ripiah is who everyone is talking to when they talk to Kaminaga's body. Takumi Saitoh puts in such a good performance here, fleshing out this role and conveying a sense of outsiderness but also of deep care - the way he is initially cold to the people around him because he just doesn't know what being a human is, but also the way, immediately after that awkward interaction with his new coworkers, he goes to the library and reads up on human nature. He cares about us from day one. He puts in the effort to learn about us. The "buddy"s are genuine, once he learns how to use them.

I think, personally, the backbone of the Ultra series has always been persistence. This is the core of why Ultraman fights for humanity in this movie. In the end he isn't even really fighting aliens or kaiju - he dispatches all of them easily enough (when he sliced Zarab in half somebody in the back of the theater hooted). In the end he's fighting his own kind. He's fighting Zōffy. Zōffy isn't malicious towards humanity but he doesn't see the value in it like Ripiah does - but he can be made to, and this is another important point: There always has to be somebody to say wait a minute, somebody to stay their hand and stand up. The Ultra series isn't even about a fight in terms of two opponents, on even ground, who desire destruction for the same reasons. It's about the reasons why each side fights, the thought process behind it, and how that thought process might be changed, how peace might be achieved through understanding. I mean, most of the time. Sometimes peace is achieved through slicing stuff into little pieces, but you know what I mean. I also think that the fact that Zōffy was able to be swayed is a mark of how the Land of Light is a more advanced civilization than ours.

And there's something really, really interesting that this movie does that the series never explicitly comes out and does. This is, I'm guessing, only possible because it's a stand-alone movie and not a series that has to worry about how to go on after doing something that could functionally wreck the need for a continuing storyline. This is when Ultraman gives humanity the secrets behind Beta Capsule technology. The relationship between Ultras and humanity - specifically, how Ultras can protect humanity and involve themselves with us without "interfering" - is something that a lot of spinoff media (ask me about Mystery of Ultraseven and how much I hated the first issue when you have two hours to spare) fails to capture, but this movie captures it pretty much perfectly. Ultraman has always wanted humanity to grow into its own; he wants to see us learn how to fend for ourselves, but again, because of the nature of a series he was never really able to say "here is a superweapon please be careful with it". There is in fact so much crammed into this movie that I feel like it could be an entire series. Not a 51-episode thing like they used to be, but just a short miniseries that could tastefully expand upon the themes of the original without having to worry about length. Anyway, like I keep saying, I haven't digested the whole plot into my brain yet. I just know that the way Ultraman interacts with humanity as a whole here is a big part of why I was so into this film.

I actually love the way CG was used here. I of course am a dedicated suit acting fan but the design that went into each individual kaiju (again, there's not as many as you think!) drew my attention. I love the fact that Shin Gomess is made to look like Shin Godzilla as a tribute to the way the Gomess suit in the series was a reused Godzilla suit. I thought Neronga was absolutely beautiful, I loved how there were so many individual parts to him that moved and shivered when he did. Gabora was great too, and again, has facial similarities to Neronga as a tribute to them being the same suit. And my god, Zarab! You can't tell from still images, but he's hollow inside, like the rotating mask illusion! While I do love the original Zarab suit (and the overall design, apart from being hollow, is remarkably unchanged), this is something that could probably only be achieved through CGI. And I remember as soon as I saw posters and trailers for this film I thought that the design of Ultraman himself was really something else. It feels true to the original design both in terms of Tohl Narita's sketch for it and in terms of how the suit actually ended up looking. When Asami sees him for the first time she calls him beautiful and I have to say I was thinking the exact same thing too.

And oh. My. God. Zetton. I'm dedicating an entire paragraph to Shin Zetton because I thought everything about it was just incredible. The way it assembles itself outwards from a central point, the unsettling symmetry of it, how alien it looked but how you can instantly still tell it's Zetton from the antenna. The sheer, unbelievable scale of it when Ultraman flies right up to it and you can see how tiny he is in comparison. And back on Earth, those shots of it just barely visible in the sky, cruciform, hanging over the world like the ticking time bomb it was. I love everything about Shin Zetton conceptually and in terms of aesthetic.

I might come back and add more to this review plotwise once I've lived with it a little because at the moment I'm not thinking too deeply about the plot in specific (besides just "IT WAS INCREDIBLE I LOVED IT") but I want to express that this movie is FUN. I felt like I could barely take in everything at once. I would urge you all to see it on the big screen, but unfortunately it was only in theaters for two nights, so I'll urge you instead to wait until you can get a Blu-Ray or DVD and watch it on the biggest screen available to you. The battles are just incredibly good, pure sci-fi madness, everything is pitch-perfect. I have nothing whatsoever against the use of CGI for a traditionally suit-acted role because I know that care was still put into bringing this Ultraman to the screen, just like always. The fact that they brought Bin Furuya back for the mo-cap should dispel any doubts about that. But overall this was just such a pure good experience. If the rumors about a Shin Jack and Shin Seven are true, I will be in the theater for them too, should they grace our shores.