Shin Ultraman

Watching Shin Ultraman feels like someone took a 1966 toy box, dumped it into a supercomputer, and told it to simulate a high-stakes cabinet meeting. It is a frantic, dizzying, and deeply affectionate reimagining of a Japanese icon that manages to be both a sleek modern sci-fi and a clunky, charming throwback all at once. If you’ve seen Shin Godzilla, you know the drill: writer Hideaki Anno and director Shinji Higuchi love two things above all else—giant monsters and the chaotic beauty of government bureaucracy.

I watched this while eating a bowl of lukewarm miso soup that I forgot to stir, and honestly, the salty clumps at the bottom matched the movie’s sudden tonal shifts perfectly. One minute you’re watching a geopolitical debate about energy resources, and the next, a silver alien is performing a vertical suplex on a monster that looks like it’s made of electrified drill bits. It’s a specific kind of madness, and I found myself grinning through most of it.

A Bureaucratic Ballet

The plot moves with the speed of a panicked Slack thread. We follow the SSSP, a specialized task force designed to handle "S-Class Species" (Kaiju, to the rest of us). When a giant silver humanoid descends from the sky to save humanity, the team—led by the stoic Hidetoshi Nishijima and the energetic Masami Nagasawa—has to figure out if this "Ultraman" is a guardian or just a very large, very shiny threat.

What makes this work in a contemporary context is how it handles the "superhero" element. In an era of franchise fatigue where every Marvel movie feels like it’s setting up three other movies, Shin Ultraman is refreshingly self-contained. It treats the arrival of an alien not as a "chosen one" narrative, but as a massive legal and diplomatic headache. The movie treats government meetings with more tension than most blockbusters treat the end of the world, and there is something genuinely hilarious about watching officials scramble to figure out which department is responsible for cleaning up alien debris.

The Uncanny Silver Alien

The action choreography is where the film really plants its flag. Instead of the heavy, "realistic" physics of Western giant monster movies like Pacific Rim, Higuchi opts for something more ethereal. Ultraman moves with a strange, uncanny grace. He doesn’t just punch; he glides. He holds poses that feel like statues come to life. This is a deliberate choice—the filmmakers used motion capture from Bin Furuya, the original 1966 suit actor, to ensure the movements felt "authentic" to the character’s history.

The visual effects are a fascinating blend. While the CGI is obviously digital, it purposefully mimics the "tokusatsu" (special effects) style of the 60s. The monsters—or Kaiju—look like they could be made of rubber and foam, even though they are rendered with modern tech. It’s a "Shin" trademark: using 21st-century tools to polish a 20th-century aesthetic until it glows. Some might find the CGI a bit "floaty," but I think it adds to the dreamlike quality of the film. It feels less like a documentary of a monster attack and more like a myth being told in real-time.

Human Hearts and Alien Eyes

At the center of the chaos is Takumi Saitoh, playing Shinji Kaminaga, the man who becomes one with Ultraman. Saitoh gives a performance that is wonderfully "off." He stares a little too long, blinks a little too rarely, and carries himself with a rigidness that suggests he’s still learning how to use a human skeleton. It’s a subtle bit of acting that grounds the high-concept sci-fi in something personal.

The film also digs into the "why" of it all. Why does this god-like being care about us? In an age of climate anxiety and political polarization, the film’s answer is surprisingly optimistic. It’s about the potential of humanity to be better, seen through the eyes of an outsider who finds our fragility endearing. It’s a message that could have felt corny, but because it’s delivered between scenes of a giant alien slicing a mountain in half with a halo of light, it lands with surprising weight.

One thing to note for the uninitiated: the dialogue is fast. Hideaki Anno writes scripts that feel like a competitive typing test. Characters talk over each other, technical jargon flies like shrapnel, and the camera cuts between extreme close-ups of telephones and eyes with dizzying frequency. It’s an acquired taste, but it creates a sense of momentum that never lets up over the 112-minute runtime. It is essentially a movie where the most dangerous weapon isn’t a laser beam, but a well-formatted email.

Shin Ultraman is a rare beast—a legacy sequel that understands exactly what made the original special while reframing it for a modern audience that lives on their smartphones. It’s weird, it’s fast, and it’s unashamedly Japanese in its execution. Whether you grew up with the silver giant or don't know a Beta Capsule from a bottle of soda, there is a sheer, infectious joy here that is impossible to ignore. It’s a reminder that sometimes, the best way to look at our world is from a few hundred feet up.