The following contains SPOILERS for Netflix’s Ultraman: Rising.
I’m as big a fan of superhero movies as anybody these days, and I’m also a huge fan of animation. As such, when Netflix released Ultraman: Rising earlier this year, I certainly took notice. Having said that, it was never high on my list of movie priorities. Maybe I was suffering from the alleged “superhero fatigue,” or maybe there's just so much new on Netflix that it got lost.
It’s not that I expected the movie to be bad, it’s just that I didn’t really expect much that would surprise me. While I’m familiar with Japan’s favorite superhero, I’ve never been a big fan myself. So I left the movie on the “to-do” list, not knowing when I would actually get around to it.
Recently, however, I found myself with an opportunity to interview some of the filmmakers behind Ultraman: Rising (stay tuned for that), so of course I needed to watch the movie. I’m so glad I was pushed to watch the film because it was so much more than I ever expected.
Ultraman: Rising Isn’t Your Standard Superhero Movie
While I’m far from an Ultraman expert, I was certainly aware of the character going into Ultraman: Rising. The franchise has been around for decades; the new movie isn't even the only new Ultraman content on Netflix in recent years. It's beein running almost as long as Doctor Who, and somewhat like the British sci-fi series, the show has gone through a lot of changes over the decades.
At its core, Ultraman is about a superhero who fights giant monsters, and I have to say that while I loved the amazing Godzilla Minus One, the kaiju genre has never really grabbed me.
I fully expected a new Ultraman movie, one that could take advantage of the limitless potential of animation, to look amazing and include some incredible action sequences. And to be fair, Ultraman: Rising is a visual spectacle, but that's not really what makes the movie something truly special.
Ultraman: Rising isn’t a movie about fighting monsters, it’s a movie about raising them. The movie focuses on Ken Sato, who was born into a family with a mom who loved baseball and a dad who was Ultraman. As an adult, he’s a baseball star, but he also takes up the mantle of his father as the iconic hero.
Ken doesn’t want to be Ultraman. His mother is missing, and he and his father have become estranged in the ensuing years. However, things get more complicated for Ken when he ends up in the possession of a baby kaiju, the child of Gigantron, who seemingly died following a battle with the Kaju Defense Force. The KDF wants the baby for unknown reasons, and Ken decides to keep it safe.
Netflix's Ultraman Movie Is A Story About Parenthood
What follows isn’t a story about fighting, it’s a story about raising children, which, as a father myself, I could absolutely relate to. Ken doesn’t know the first thing about raising a baby, because who does when they start?
Ken turns to Ami, a sports reporter who has been giving him a hard time, but is a parent herself, for advice on how to raise a child. Ami tries to have an adult conversation while her child is getting into everything and continually distracting. It was a moment I was able to relate to as my own two-year-old kaiju was running all over the place while I tried to watch the movie.
Ultimately, Ken brings in his own father, and the two men begin to repair their own relationship while working together to raise the baby monster, whom they name Emi. Ken feels his father rejected him as a child, caring more about being Ultraman than being a father. He doesn’t understand that his father’s decision was made out of love and a need to keep his son safe.
Needless to say I did not expect an Ultraman movie to make me cry, and yet, I did quite a bit of that. Rising takes a look at the parent/child relationship from two different angles at the same time. I saw echoes of myself as both a father and a son.
Ultraman: Rising Has A Big Superhero Finale Battle, But Not Like You Expect
Ultraman: Rising is an Ultraman movie at the end and there’s an expectation that we’re going to get a big monster battle at the end of the movie, and the film certainly doesn’t disappoint.
However, Ultraman: Rising does turn the traditional formula on its head by having our hero fight alongside the monsters. In the end, we actually get two Ultramen, Ken Sata and his father (Ultradad) fighting alongside Emi and the baby’s mother against a giant robot piloted by the head of the Kaiju Defense Force.
If that seems like a bit of an overmatched battle, it is. While there is certainly some tension regarding how the fight will go down, there’s no real concern regarding who is going to win, but that’s also by design. The purpose of the fight isn’t the fight.
The purpose of the battle is to see a family unite together. Not only does Emi reunite with her still-alive mother, but the battle allows Ken his father to work together as well. By the end of the film, the audience, and Ken himself, fully understand his father.
This moment culminates in the film’s best action moment which is just as emotional as anything the film has to offer. Ultraman is firing the famous Specium Beam at the massive robot adversary. The beam is fired when Ultraman makes a cross with his arms in front of his face. However, Ken’s arm was injured early in the fight, and a quick camera slide reveals that father and son are working together to create the energy blast.
I don’t know if Ultraman: Rising has made me an Ultraman fan, but I am absolutely a fan of Ultraman: Rising. The ending of the movie does tease the sequel, as so many superhero movies do. I can’t even be mad, because if the sequel happens, I know I’ll be watching, and I won’t wait so long next time.
