The Best Movies of the Year: Facing the End of the World in Shin Ultraman

In the realm of action movies, the end of the world is a routine threat. Whether it’s a nefarious supervillain scheming to deploy a doomsday device or an all-consuming menace from beyond the stars, countless stories have dangled the fate of everything before our eyes to keep us on the edge of our seats. However, there’s a problem with this approach, particularly if you’re a seasoned moviegoer: Seeing this scenario play out over and over again eventually becomes numbing. It can feel like every other high-octane climax escalates its stakes to such gargantuan proportions that it becomes difficult to wrap your head around their scale. These kinds of shifts can also sideline the more grounded concerns of its characters, whose problems become dwarfed by the sheer size of what’s in front of them. We can easily relate to the day-to-day issues of people trying to get by, but can we fully grasp what facing the end of the planet would be like? Well, it turns out that, given the right framing, we at least partially can. Although Shin Ultraman is another story that builds towards an apocalyptic scenario, it makes the most of this premise through imagery that appropriately communicates the grandeur of this concept and the cosmic dread it inspires.

For those unfamiliar, Ultraman is a long-running Japanese TV show following a superhero who grows to giant proportions so he can battle similarly large monsters. It’s a tokusatsu series, a term used to describe the FX-heavy live-action productions that followed in the wake of Godzilla (1954), and that frequently feature either kaiju, masked do-gooders such as Kamen Rider or Super Sentai (which was adapted into Power Rangers in America), or combine them in the Kyodai Hero subgenre, which the original 1966 run of Ultraman helped popularize. Shin Ultraman is a standalone film that reimagines this setup and was written by Hideaki Anno, the legendary creator of anime like Neon Genesis Evangelion, and directed by Shinji Higuchi, who has collaborated with Anno in the past and worked on several tokusatsu projects.

While this is another case of a beloved series being reenvisioned, Shin Ultraman is far less interested in altering tone or texture to cater to contemporary audiences. It doesn’t make the proceedings “grittier” or more nakedly self-aware. Instead, its special effects and aesthetic seek to directly replicate the campy thrills of a posing, laser-beam-launching vigilante who battles big lizards and nefarious aliens. Shin Ultraman even feels structured like a TV show, with a sequence of initially separate threats that escalate over time, including subterranean monsters, Machiavellian would-be conquerors, and an almost unfathomable final foe. This earnestness very much works in its favor, and it’s this last enemy, which threatens the destruction of everything, that sets up the film’s most compelling plotline.

After defeating many previously alluded-to massive creatures and interstellar invaders, Ultraman (Takumi Saitoh) is greeted by Zōffy (Koichi Yamadera), an adjudicator from his former planet. We learn that by interacting with earthlings and exposing them to size growth technology, our hero has gone against the code of his people and demonstrated that humans could be potentially used as “bioweapons” due to their compatibility with the tech. Because they could eventually be repurposed into killing machines, Zōffy callously rules that their home must be annihilated, citing that the loss of one out of 13 billion intelligent lifeforms will make little difference in the grand scheme of things. He summons the Ultimate Celestial Suppression Weapon, Zetton, a being so large that even though it’s stationed in outer space, it can still be seen from Earth’s surface. In a short time, the creature will fire a beam that will destroy the entire solar system. Ultraman informs his companions of this threat and, believing that he’s humanity’s only hope, flies to intercept this adversary. But he’s no match for the creature and is quickly thrashed before crashing back down to the planet below.

On its face, these absurd turns seem like they would run into the exact problems that plague many final acts, blowing up the scale to such cartoonish proportions that the proceedings lose all meaning. However, that doesn’t come to pass. The most straightforward explanation for this is that, over the course of Shin Ultraman, we’re introduced to a natural escalation of seemingly impossible-to-defeat extraterrestrial foes, making it so that when we finally meet one that can obliterate entire planetary systems, this threat doesn’t feel particularly out of place.

But more than this, the appearance of what may as well be a wrathful deep space god materializing from the heavens connects perfectly with Shin Ultraman’s growing sense of cosmic horror. As the members of the S-Class Species Suppression Protocol (SSSP), an anti-kaiju force helmed by pitiful Earthlings, face increasingly insurmountable opponents, we feel as they, and the rest of humanity, are overwhelmed by their smallness compared to an incalculably vast universe that’s suddenly revealed itself. Merely contemplating the theoretical scope of outer space invites a feeling of vague nihilistic purposelessness, but for these people, the hypothetical harshness of this greater world has been made literal, as a harbinger of doom. In response to this creeping dread, they’ve increasingly clung to Ultraman while tacitly admitting that they’re defenseless against these previously unimaginable forces. So, when he is swatted out of the sky like a gnat by Zetton, much of Earth’s leadership resigns itself to oblivion.