I knew nothing about Ultraman when I sat down to watch “Shin Ultraman,” and I’ll be perfectly honest: when the credits rolled, I still didn’t know much about Ultraman.The new film from director Shinji Higuchi is a modernized update of the classic Japanese character, a skyscraper-sized alien who defends the Earth from various threats, both internal (those blasted kaiju just keep emerging from the ground) and external (our planet is apparently on the radar of every scheming alien in the galaxy).
When he’s not punching giant monsters in the face, Ultraman lives among us as a (regular-sized) blank-faced government bureaucrat.
And as the film makes clear, he has many, many problems to deal with — “Shin Ultraman” resets itself with a new evil plot every 30 minutes or so, with each solved problem escalating into a new crisis.I’d be lying if I said I could follow it all.
This is
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