Shin Ultraman (Blu-ray Review)
- Review Date: Aug 07, 2023
- Format: Blu-ray Disc
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Director
Shinji HiguchiRelease Date(s)
2022 (July 11, 2023)Studio(s)
Toho/Cine Bazar (Cleopatra Entertainment)- Film/Program Grade: C
- Video Grade: B
- Audio Grade: B
- Extras Grade: D-
Review
[Editor's Note: It's come to our attention that initial disc pressings of this title on both Blu-ray and DVD contain formatting issues with the English dubtitles (not subtitles). As such, Cleopatra Entertainment has started a replacement program. To receive a corrected disc, email them at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. with your proof of purchase, which format you need a replacement for, and your full name and address.]
Evangelion mastermind Hideaki Anno is well-known for tinkering with his own work, changing his mind frequently and then altering the material to match—in the case of his Rebuild of Evangelion movies, he ended up revising everything to such an extent that it would have made even George Lucas blush. So, it was natural that Toho would turn to him to reboot their dormant Godzilla franchise in 2016, and just as natural to have him do the same thing for Ultraman in 2022. (He continued the trend with Shin Kamen Rider in 2023.) Anno wrote and directed Shin Godzilla, with Shinji Higuchi helming the visual effects sequences. For Shin Ultraman, Anno still wrote the script, but turned all of the directing duties over to Higuchi.
Anno’s challenge in reimagining the Ultraman mythology is that the long-running franchise has already spawned myriad sequels, reboots, and spinoffs. The original series ran from 1966-1967, and was immediately followed by seven more series during the Showa era alone—and there have been nearly two dozen variant series since that time, plus dozens of one-off specials and movies. That’s not even counting ancillary media like manga. When reimagining Ultraman, the question is, which one? Yet at its core, Ultraman has always been a superhero kaiju show, pitting giant alien mecha against a never-ending stream of giant monster opponents. Everything else is just window dressing. While there have been a few animated spinoffs, at its heart, Ultraman has always been pure tokusatsu (the umbrella term that describes traditional Japanese visual effects, including suitmation). Yet under the aegis of Shinji Higuchi, that’s the area where Shin Ultraman ended up reimagining things the most radically.
Higuchi has had an interesting journey in the world of visual effects. While he cut his teeth as an assistant on The Return of Godzilla (aka Godzilla 1985), he really came into his own supervising the effects for Shûsuke Kaneko’s stunning Gamera trilogy during the Nineties. Working on lower budgets than what Toho was spending on the Heisei Godzilla films, he managed to craft effects that were even more impressive, and his work on Gamera stands to this day as some of the finest tokusatsu ever committed to film. Higuchi did start to incorporate some CGI elements, but always in support of the suit effects and model work. He’s embraced CGI more fully as the years have gone by, and as a result, Shin Godzilla completely threw out suitmation in favor of the first fully digital Godzilla in a Toho feature film. Shin Ultraman followed suit (no pun intended), and while there’s still some practical miniature work for the background plates, Ultraman and his foes are pure digital creations.
They look like they’re digital, too, with the weightless quality that plagues modern CGI, and with little sense of scale. Yet in this case, it seems like all of that may have been deliberate. The effects in the various Ultraman series were usually shot quickly and on the cheap, rarely looking as good as the effects did in Toho’s various Kaiju films. In making the move to digital, Shin Ultraman seems to have also accepted a digital version of the cheesiness that was inherent to the original practical effects. That’s thrown in even sharper relief by the fact that Higuchi opted to shoot the live action in the same style that he had previously used to film practical effects, keeping the camera low, favoring wide-angle lenses, and using foreground objects to create forced perspective. As a result, the human characters look monstrous, with even more of a sense of scale than the digital monsters have. Intentionally or not, that gives Shin Ultraman a self-aware quality that borders on being self-parody. Was that perhaps what Anno had in mind all along? Viewers will have to judge for themselves.
The cinematography for Shin Ultraman was handled by a witch’s brew of credited cinematographers, including Osamu Ichikawa, Keizō Suzuki, Katsuro Onoue, Masayuki, Ikki Todoroki, and Linto Ueda, as well as Higuchi and Anno. Given how many cooks were involved with this particular broth, an equally wide range of equipment was involved. Shin Ultraman was captured digitally at resolutions from 2.8K to 4K in ARRIRAW and Redcode RAW formats, using ARRI ALEXA Mini and ARRI AMIRA cameras with Zeiss Ultra Prime and Angénieux Optimo lenses, as well as Epic Red Dragon cameras with Zeiss Ultra Prime lenses. Some shots were captured at 4K in ProRes using a Panasonic Lumix GH5 with Leica lenses, and a few were even captured in 4K using an iPhone 11 Pro (presumably the extreme wide angle interior shots). Post-production work was completed as a 2K Digital Intermediate, framed at 2.39:1 for its theatrical release.
Disappointingly, the encoding on this version runs at an anemic bitrate that rarely exceeds 20Mbps, and it frequently drops to well below that mark. While facial closeups do show a nice amount of fine detail, more complex shots with movement in them tend to suffer the most. As a result, the CGI tend to look even smoother and more unnatural than it should. The colors look fine and the contrast range is quite strong, with deep black levels, but there’s a good chance that the compression has sacrificed some shadow detail. There are some compression artifacts visible, too. It’s still not a bad presentation overall, but there’s no doubt that it could have been improved significantly with a more robust encode.
Adding to the disappointment, the audio is only offered in lossy Japanese 5.1 Dolby Digital, as well as English 5.1 and 2.0 Dolby Digital, with optional English subtitles. (Note that the subtitles are for the English language track, not the Japanese track, meaning they're really dubtitles.) Given the low average bitrate for the video and the minimal extras, there’s simply no excuse for not offering lossless audio here. Unlike Shin Godzilla, where Anno opted for a retro 3.1 mix with no surround channels, Shin Ultraman does have a full surround soundtrack—although this 5.1 version is the bare minimum, since Ultraman was released theatrically in IMAX, and the Japanese 4K Ultra HD release sports a Dolby Atmos track. Despite the lack of channels and the lossy compression, this 5.1 mix is still effective. The surrounds are active, there’s a decent level of deep bass, and there’s even a bit of dynamic impact. Shirô Sagisu supplied the score yet again, and like his work on Shin Godzilla, he borrowed a few more themes from his classic Evangelion music. Lossy or not, more Sagisu is always welcome.
Note that there a couple of different issues with the English subtitles. The titles and any onscreen text aren’t translated, and there are also some coding issues that may or may not affect all players. When the aliens speak, their dialogue is supposed to be italicized, but that didn’t work when viewed on an Oppo UDP-205—instead, it displayed HTML tags like <i> and </i>. That proved to be a wee bit distracting.
Cleopatra Entertainment’s Blu-ray release for Shin Ultraman includes the following extras, all of them in HD:
- Trailer (1:23)
- Slideshow (2:51)
- Area 51 Trailer (1:30)
- Scavenger Trailer (1:29)
- The Ghosts of Monday Trailer (1:33)
- A Taste of Blood Trailer (1:55)
- The Hex Trailer (1:26)
- Baphomet Trailer (1:07)
- Skin Walker Trailer (1:28)
Aside from the Slideshow, which is a brief stills gallery, the rest is nothing but trailers. That’s it. Cleopatra Entertainment may lack the resources to do any better (most of their discs appear to be barebones when it comes to extras), but the excessive video compression and lossy audio is a bit harder to swallow. Unfortunately for non-Japanese speaking audiences who want to see Shin Ultraman, this is one of the only options available—Toho’s Japanese language Blu-rays and UHDs don’t include English subtitles. So, Cleopatra’s disc is still recommended for ardent Ultraman fans who want the subtitles or the dubbing, but with some major caveats.
- Stephen Bjork
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