Shin Ultraman (2022)

Shin Godzilla proved to be a bit of an inflection point for tokusatsu cinema, and its success gave director Hideaki Anno and effects director Shinji Higuchi, both veterans of the field in one way or another (the latter having worked on the Shusuke Kaneko Gamera trilogy), the keys to some of the most influential franchises of the form. They’ve ended up using the “Shin” moniker to denote all their creations as one loosely connected meta-series, but just how connected would these subsequent reboots be? Shin Ultraman, the first of the follow-ups out of the gate, provides a surprisingly complicated answer. Directed by Higuchi and written by Anno, this new version of Tsuburaya Productions’ signature kaiju vehicle inherits some of Shin Godzilla‘s aesthetic preoccupations (and a few of the thematic ones), but is not really aiming for the same apocalyptic feeling—in keeping with the general tone of the material it’s based on, this is a lighter affair that is less focused on re-imagining its monster action to fit modern anxieties, but rather transplants much of the original vision of Ultraman into a modern setting and sees how it plays out. That allows them to be more openly fannish in the number of callbacks to the original series they include, some going so deep as to be based in the details of the series’ production, but the most surprising thing about that is just how invested they are in really examining the ideas present in the original.

Nope (2022)

Writer-director Jordan Peele’s Nope follows the critical and commercial success of his horror films Get Out and Us, and using all the cultural clout he has accumulated over the last five years, he has produced one of the most high profile creature features in recent memory. It’s a true blue classic-style monster movie, too, one that readily engages in some of the genre’s oldest themes (in a story engages with the history of the American entertainment industry in general) in ways that are smart and modern. Seeing this combination of expensive-looking action, B-movie enthusiasm for the weird, and interesting characters in a mainstream film is impressive, and is even more so because of the way it respectfully contributes to the history of its genre.

Hatching (2022)

Now begins our brief evaluation of some of the monster movies of the previous year, to see just where filmmakers have been taking the form in recent times. At least in the beginning, the Finnish film Hatching (Pahanhautoja), directed by Hanna Bergholm, seems to lean into modernity, introducing us to a family documenting itself in online video form, and positioning itself as aspirational in the way social media influencers often do, with their gleaming, crystalline European abode and their coordinated normalcy (their house is really the only way they flaunt any kind of wealth, which is the one crucial difference between them and most other influencers.) This, as it turns out, is really only one component of the story, an inescapable twenty-first century incarnation of some well-worn themes of image obsession and parental pressure, all your favourite adolescent anxieties presented here with the addition of a gross and bizarre monster, a thing of pure chaos that manages to both briefly assuage and act upon those anxieties.

Mad God (2021)

Visuals effects artist Phil Tippett has been at the game of producing amazing on-screen creatures since the seventies, including the ones seen in the original Star Wars trilogy, Piranha, RoboCop, and Starship Troopers. In the very early nineties (around the time his studio was creating effects for RoboCop 2), he began work on the independent stop motion-animated project, but shelved it—partly because his studio was too busy, and partly because while working on Jurassic Park (famously given the credit of “Dinosaur Supervisor”) he was shown early footage of the CGI that would eventually be used in the movie and became convinced that his innovative puppet-based effects had been made completely irrelevant (something I learned from the documentary Phil Tippett: Mad Dreams and Monsters.) Over twenty years later, the people in his orbit convinced him to finish the film, and with the help of a Kickstarter campaign and support from his employees and numerous volunteers, he created three shorts that were then combined and expanded to become the film Mad God (which can now be watched on our old pal Shudder.) One does get a sense from the movie itself that multiple decades of pent-up creativity in the realm of classic-style physical effects and stop motion has been unloaded into it…and many other pent-up emotions as well. It is both celebration of the imagination that Tippett brought to cinema and also an unrelenting nightmare burned onto film, and that’s what makes it particularly special.