It’s easy to be flippant about superhero fatigue right now, since the MCU & DCEU filmmaking behemoths are both dozens of titles into their decade-long stranglehold on Hollywood, with all possible surprise & novelty long squeezed out of the genre’s lungs.  Still, my exhaustion with superhero blockbusters has less to do with the genre at large than it has to do with those two franchises in particular.  There’s still plenty of surprise & novelty to be found elsewhere in superhero media, especially if you’re willing to stray outside the US.  I was recently tickled by the anti-fascist Italo circus superhero flick Freaks vs. The Reich, for instance, which happened to include similar touches of laboratory torture & Radiohead song placements as Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3, just in a much more interesting context (time-traveling ether-addict Nazis vs. Totally 90s™ mixtape aesthetics).  I’ve also been enamored with Neon Genesis Evangelion mastermind Hideaki Anno’s years-long project of building an MCU style interconnected universe out of pre-existing Japanese tokusatsu properties – first in Shin Godzilla, then in Shin Ultraman, and most recently in Shin Kamen Rider.  The project shamelessly leans into the commercial end of filmmaking instead of the artistic, collecting all of Anno’s superpowered freaks in action figure toy commercials instead of a crossover feature film.  It’s also, just three titles in, the most exciting big-scale superhero media on the market.  Anno’s Godzilla film was more of a governmental bureaucracy satire than a superhero picture, subbing in the titular kaiju god for any number of natural disasters that the timid, rules-obsessed humans on the ground were ill-equipped to respond to with any speed or efficiency.  By contrast, his Ultraman movie (which he wrote, produced, edited, and mo-capped but did not direct) is pure retro superhero fluff, throwing back to its titular space alien’s vintage TV roots.  It’s such an infectiously wholesome, psychedelic superhero story that I didn’t even care that I was missing a half-century of contextual Ultraman lore that would help explain its scene-to-scene idiosyncrasies.  It did convince me to dip my toe deeper into the back catalog of Ultraman cinema, though, finding a movie specifically made for people who grew up steeped in Ultraman Awareness the same way that most current teens aren’t old enough to remember a world before the MCU.  It was a baffling experience but also a delightful one.

I should have known from the longform title Mega Monster Battle: Ultra Galaxy Legends The Movie that the 2009 sequel to the TV show Ultraman Mebius was not going to be as welcoming of an entry point as the series-reset Shin Ultraman (in which “Shin” is commonly translated as meaning “New”).  According to my half-assed Wikipedia research after stumbling into Mega Monster Battle blind on Tubi, Ultraman Mebius is “the 20th TV series and 40th anniversary production in the Ultra Series.”  Mega Monster Battle: Ultra Galaxy is the second sequel to that show, “preceded by Ultraman Mebius Side Story: Ghost Reverse, a direct-to-video special from Ultraman Mebius.”  As someone who recently rolled his eyes at the news that the latest Guardians of the Galaxy movie included plot details set up by a straight-to-Disney+ holiday special outside the 30+ movies of prerequisite homework, you’d think I’d also find this overwhelming mountain of contextual backstory to be an automatic deal breaker.  Instead, I found it freeing.  The infinite supply of Ultraman lore means that there isn’t enough time in my scatterbrained life to possibly watch it all, so the pressure is off.  Walking into Mega Monster Battle: Ultra Galaxy having only seen Shin Ultraman before it is kinda like watching Avengers: Endgame after having only seen Captain America: The First Avenger, an out-of-the-loop disorientation that the TV-series recap in its first few minutes does little to soften.  The narrative continuity of the Ultra Series only matters so much, though.  It’s relatively easy to shut your brain off and accept statements like “The Planet of Ultra will perish unless we retrieve the Energy Core” at face value without worrying about what the Energy Core is, or who’s threatening the Planet Ultra with mass destruction to begin with.  If anything, Ultra Galaxy overloads the screen with so many Ultramen, Ultrawomen, and Ultrathems that it’s clear there’s no need or even possibility of getting fully caught up with Ultraman lore as a newcomer.  To put it in American superhero media terms, it’s the Ultraman equivalent of the Spider-Verse, wherein almost every character—good or evil—is some kind of Ultraman variant.  One Ultraman has horns; one red-eyed Ultraman is evil; one pigtailed Ultraman is a girl.  It doesn’t actually matter what their names or histories are, just that it’s wonderfully surreal to see them all share the screen as they collectively beat down an equally infinite supply of resurrected rubber-suit monsters from the Ultra Series’ past.  I may not fully understand all of the characters relationships & insular worlds of Ultra Galaxy, but I do fully understand the joys it finds in excess – flooding the screen with all the Ultramen and all the kaiju all at once.

If anything, this is exactly how I remember watching superhero media in a pre-MCU world.  As a child, I didn’t tune into episodes of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, or Batman: The Animated Series with decades of comic book history or even weekly episodic continuity informing the battles of the day.  I just knew that Shredder, Rita Repulsa, and The Joker were “Bad Guy” villains that had to be constantly, violently be beaten back from victory for the sake of peace on Earth.  It used to be possible to drop into the continued adventures of an intergalactic superhero at any point of their cyclical journey the same way you can tune into a single match of a months-long pro wrestling program and instantly get the gist.  In this particular instance, the evil Ultraman Belial plans to dominate Planet Ultra (where all Ultramen originate, apparently) by resurrecting the ghosts of famous dead kaiju on the meteor that serves as their graveyard.  A collective of elite Ultramen led by Ultraman Mebius, Ultraseven, and the original Ultraman form a Power Rangers-style superhero team to beat back Ultraman Belial and his own evil team of undead kaiju before it’s too late.  There’s also some human Earthling involvement and the aforementioned Energy Core McGuffin jumbled up in that plot, but they’re insignificant to what makes the movie entertaining: the nonstop superheroic martial arts.  Mega Monster Battle: Ultra Galaxy is a surreal mix of tactile fight choreography and green screen sci-fi effects.  It is pure excess in its relentless Ultraman-on-kaiju mayhem, leaving very little room in the runtime for the audience to ponder the lore before the next rubber-suited monster attacks the superpowered citizens of Planet Ultra.  Lacking any other context, I can only compare Ultra Galaxy to Shin Ultraman in terms of filmmaking craft, and Anno’s film appears to be a cut above other modern Ultraman media in that side-by-side.  Shin Ultraman still comes across as a lumbering, slow-to-act superhero origin story in that comparison, though, as Ultra Galaxy assumes you’ve already done the homework and immediately launches into constant Ultraman battles until you’re well past satisfied.  Maybe if I had already seen 30 other movies in the Ultra Series that bombardment would have left me as numb as the MCU has left me post-Endgame, but there’s still plenty of surprise & novelty left in this particular superhero franchise for me.  In fact, I understood so little about the background lore of Planet Ultra and its infinite Ultramen that the next time I watch one of these out-of-sequence Ultra Sequels I’ll likely be just as baffled (and delighted) as I was this round. I’m looking forward to it.

-Brandon Ledet