Having successfully revived the king of monsters in 2016’s Shin Godzilla, director Hideaki Anno is now ready to reveal the greatest of Japan’s television heroes, Ultraman. Our first look comes in the brand-new trailer for Shin Ultraman.
The trailer doesn’t actually say much, but it gives us our first look at the hero. Shin Ultraman comes from writer Hideaki Anno and director Shinji Higuchi. The pair worked together on 2016’s Shin Godzilla. and even in just 36 seconds this trailer seems to suggest that Shin Ultraman will have a lot in common with that film.
Like Shin Godzilla, the film goes with a very classic take on the character. We only see Ultraman in the final moments, but we get a clear look at him. Where Netflix’s 2019 Ultraman anime significantly updated and streamlined the look of the character, this version looks a lot like it did in the original 1966 television show. Even the monsters look classic enough–meaning unabashedly cheesy–that it’s hard not to laugh at them as they lumber through the forest.
The other common thread is that the movie looks like it will focus less on the blockbuster antics of the monsters shown in Godzilla: King of the Monsters themselves and more on the government response to these monsters. Shin Godzilla was really about the lumbering way in which a government would struggle to deal with the sudden appearance of an apocalyptically huge beast. The Ultraman trailer seems to be interested in the organization that supports Ultraman in the shows, the Science Special Search Party, or SSSP, an organization that handles extra-terrestrial cases.
Shin Ultraman is set to hit Japanese theaters in Summer 2021. Stateside, we’re scheduled to get our next dose of killer kaiju in Godzilla vs. King Kong on March 31, 2021. Unless it gets delayed again.
