While the recent Godzilla vs. Kong trailer may have sated kaiju fans’ hunger for computer-generated monsters beating the stuffing out of each other, one thing it was light on was the panicked, excruciatingly bureaucratic response of the Japanese government — the very thing that made 2016’s satirical monster movie Shin Godzilla so memorable.
Good news: The chief creators behind Shin Godzilla, Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi, have teamed up for another kaiju-battlin’ movie, Shin Ultraman, based on the classic tokusatsu superhero. And it appears that Anno and Higuchi are approaching Ultraman in a similar fashion, based on a brief teaser trailer released Thursday.
The trailer shows a kaiju attack on Japan, namely from Ultraman nemeses Neronga and Gabora. Science Special Search-Party (SSSP), an organization that investigates and responds to alien and kaiju threats, immediately launches a heavily militarized response. Only at the end does our big boy Ultraman appear, towering over power lines.
Shin Ultraman was announced in 2019. The film was planned and written by Hideaki Anno, the creator of Neon Genesis Evangelion and co-director of Shin Godzilla. Anno’s co-director on Shin Godzilla, Shinji Higuchi, is the primary director on Shin Ultraman, and frequent collaborator Shiro Sagisu is composing the film’s soundtrack.
Shin Ultraman is slated to hit Japanese movie theaters this summer.
