Ultraman: Rising is a potential manifesto for a hypothetical Kaiju Lives Matter movement. Kenji Sato’s (Christopher Sean) opening voiceover describes a kaiju as “not a hero, but not a villain either.”
I hear that. If kaijus were real, they wouldn’t have a moral alignment any more than any other animal does. They would be neither good nor evil; they would just follow their nature. Like the shark in Jaws — but they still had to blow up the shark in Jaws, didn’t they?
Giant monsters routinely lay waste to Tokyo. What else is new, right? Giant superhero Ultraman (whose real identity is baseball star Kenji Sato) is the city’s self-appointed defender, a job that officially belongs to Dr. Onda’s (Keone Young) Kaiju Defense Force (KDF). The main difference between Ultraman and the KDF is that while Ultraman opts for non-lethal methods, the KDF is willing to use lethal force to combat the kaiju threats.
The problem with Ultraman is that he chooses half-measures when he should go all the way. He can’t decide whether he wants to protect Tokyo or save the kaijus. Not only would Ultraman be content to let Gigantron fly away, but he feels compelled to come to its aid when the KDF threatens to kill it.
Has it really never occurred to Kenji — or to his father and former Ultraman, Professor Sato (Gedde Watanabe) — that not killing Gigantron is part of the problem and not the solution?
In a flashback, we see that Gigantron has been a pain in the ass since Kenji was a little boy. How many times has this monster been allowed to fly away, only for it to come back and wreak some more havoc?
To put it in perspective, mosquitoes are micropredators. They suck your blood without killing you. Pretty harmless, right? What’s a little blood among friends? But then, mosquitoes are also vectors of disease (malaria, dengue, West Nile virus, chikungunya, yellow fever, Zika fever, and many, many more). Mosquitoes are not heroes, but not villains either. They need to feed like every other living thing and are unaware of the damage they cause. Does that mean we should not control mosquito populations?
Meanwhile, Dr. Onda is somehow the bad guy just because he wants to find Kaiju Island and destroy it and everything in it (never mind that no one has ever seen Kaiju Island, no one knows where it is, so how do they even know it exists?).
Considering how well Tokyo copes with kaiju attacks (Gigantron disrupts a baseball game, which is then rescheduled for the very next night), it’s tempting to believe that the good doctor is perhaps overreacting. Either these monsters are exemplary of the stereotypical Japanese politeness, or the city magically rebuilds itself after each attack.
Then again, it’s implied that people die in these attacks. The only casualty that we hear about is Dr. Onda’s daughter, and that was before the events of the movie, but she can’t be the only one; otherwise, it would be hard to justify the expenditure required to run a large-scale, technologically advanced operation like the KDF (or maybe it’s all baseball money, which is how I assume Kenji pays for his own state-of-the-art facilities).
Again, we’re supposed to think that Onda is in the wrong because he’s motivated by revenge, but at least he has a reason that has probably saved many lives.
On the other hand, how many lives have Kenji and his dad endangered through their unwillingness to put kaijus down for good? These aren’t mockingbirds we’re talking about here; more like the rabid dog that Atticus Finch had to shoot, even though it wasn’t the dog’s fault that it had rabies. Do you think Atticus is less heroic for performing a necessary act of violence from which he derived no pleasure, or more?
Moreover, the Satos fail to produce a single compelling reason for wanting to preserve the kaijus, nor does it ever dawn upon them that they’re just kicking the can down the road, and it’s a humongous can that (allegedly) crushes everything in its path. They’re like an exterminator who gets squeamish about gassing bugs. Makes you wonder why they went into the kaiju-fighting business in the first place.
On the plus side, Ultraman: Rising looks pretty good for a computer-animated film, and it assumes the audience has a basic knowledge of the subject matter, so it wastes no time on tedious origin stories.
Conversely, at almost two hours, you’d think the screenplay could have bothered with a little exposition as to how Ultraman’s apparently hereditary powers actually work. Also, Mr. Baseball called, and it wasn’t too happy that you used its premise as a glorified subplot.