| B- | Fantastic Fest 2022 |
I enjoyed Shin Godzilla when I saw it at Fantastic Fest (good lord, six years ago?). So with this film coming from the same creative team, I had high expectations for it. I was only slightly disappointed.
There was a lot to like! They did a good job with Ultraman himself–looking very familiar yet more modern. There seemed to be a few surprises about him (or maybe I’m just not familiar enough with the old TV series to know). Fun monsters. Interesting style from the director–many camera shots were past or through or around other people or parts of the set. And one of the characters had a model of the USS Enterprise from Star Trek: TOS which ended up in a fair number of shots.
My main problem was the script felt like three TV episodes jammed together into one movie. There was a thread that followed through, but we skipped from monster movie to mystery/thriller to sci-fi planet-scale conflict. The middle section felt like a meandering away from being an Ultraman movie and is what draws the movie’s grade down a bit.
