Ultraman: Rising - A Parents’ Movie

All newborns are basically kaiju. My son is 9 weeks old, and his breath is atomic, his roar is ear-splitting, and his growth rate (already double his birth weight!!) is alarming. There’s nothing a giant monster can do that he can’t, short of demolishing a city — though as his dad, I think that’s probably worth testing on our next round of tummy time.

The buzzier animated family release of Father’s Day weekend may be Pixar’s Inside Out 2, but Ultraman: Rising (out today on Netflix) intimately understands the baby-kaiju connection.

Ultraman: Rising

Directed by Shannon Tindle and co-directed by John Aoshima, Ultraman: Rising is, on the surface, an Americanized update to a decades-old superhero franchise. Tsuburaya Productions debuted Ultraman in a 1966 TV show, where the character’s powers allowed him to grow to the size of a tall building and fight giant monsters. You can track Ultraman’s massive footprints everywhere in Japanese media and beyond, from the Super Sentai (a.k.a. Power Rangers) series to Pokémon to Neon Genesis Evangelion.

Rising introduces Ken Sato, an initially self-centered Ultraman whose life and family are radically changed when a tiny (err, truck-size) kaiju baby hatches in his hands and immediately imprints on him. She almost immediately tries to suckle on his Ultra chestplate.

Their encounter unlocks the movie. There’s a shot in which she emerges from Ken’s arms and the camera tracks her attentively around his Ultra body as she shakily takes her first steps, jump, and roll before he scoops her back up. Before he can think, Ultraman’s bachelor life and baseball career have blown up. He has to juggle not only his new fatherly duties and a day job but also his heroic secret identity — even as kaiju-killing military forces hunt for his adopted baby.

Ultraman: Rising may be a kaleidoscopically color-timed action adventure of throw-down battles, but it’s really about parenting in its many shapes and forms. That’s a refreshingly specific focus for a genre film pinned on one of the most theoretically exploitable IPs in the world. The movie makes nerdy references to baseball, Akira, Pac-Man, Hayao Miyazaki, and Ultraman lore, obviously, but it also speeds through topics parents encounter almost as soon as they meet their infant: the five S’s, spit-up, neglect, attachment theory, and developmental milestones.

Ultraman is an imperfect dad, but far from the only one in the movie, and his own fatherhood helps to heal his fractured relationship with his dad. The film presents multiple healthy and unhealthy types of parenthood — neglectful parents, tragic parents, absent parents, robot parents, single parents, bicoastal parents, dead parents, surrogate parents, grandparents, and the list goes on. Ultraman goes in unprepared for his new responsibility, both because he has his own growing up to do, but also because information on kaiju infants is frustratingly hard to Google or ask Siri about — just like it is with human infants.

Tuesday: A Mother’s Grief

Death looks a little different in Tuesday. Instead of the standard appearance of a cloaked, skeletal man, this Grim Reaper takes the form of a parrot, albeit one that’s grungy, filthy, and looks like he’s halfway dead too. Grudgingly, Death (voiced by Arinzé Kene) makes his way from one victim to the next, called to each person by their dying words. Those words never stop, echoing in Death’s head like constant white noise, until one day, Death arrives to kill Tuesday (Lola Petticrew), a terminally ill teenager whose lungs are about to give out. Realizing that she’s staring Death right in the face, Tuesday suddenly interrupts his creeping approach with a joke about a car full of penguins. Death laughs, and the voices stop. And thus begins the odd, lovely, and enchantingly strange directorial debut from Daina O. Pušić.

Tuesday walks a fine line between moving and mawkish, a thoughtful and high-concept portrait of a mother’s grief that also sometimes manages to be a little too cute. But thanks to a wholly dedicated performance from Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tuesday manages to transcend its slightly thin premise.

Tuesday meets Death.

Louis-Dreyfus stars as Zora, the beleaguered mother of Tuesday who spends her days pawning off all her belongings to pay for medical expenses. But the situation has become untenable, and Zora has turned into a prickly, harsh woman who rudely orders Tuesday’s nurse (Leah Harvey) around and ignores Tuesday’s silent cries for attention. As Zora rattles on about her day, Tuesday finally gains her mother’s attention by stating that she is going to die that night. When Death, who had spent the day bonding with Tuesday, appears in front of Zora, she does the only thing a desperate mother can do: she kills Death and eats him.

The consequences of killing Death are predictably dire — your usual apocalyptic half-dead corpses, plagues of locusts, and whatnot — but Tuesday isn’t interested in that. Instead, it foregrounds Zora and Tuesday, who spend the day repairing their fractured relationship after so many years of dealing with Tuesday’s illness. Even as Zora lovingly dotes on her daughter, bathing her, teasing her, and playing word games with her, she’s only keeping the painful reality at bay. As the facade starts to crumble, and the reality of the lengths Zora went to for Tuesday start to reveal themselves, Tuesday takes an even stranger turn: Zora becomes Death itself.

Zora and Tuesday are forced to come to terms with Tuesday’s looming death.

Through all its strange twists and turns (one of which includes Louis-Dreyfus ballooning up to the size of a titan), Tuesday never loses sight of its central relationship between Zora and Tuesday. Louis-Dreyfus is magnificent in the role: angry, patently unlikable, and achingly vulnerable as a mother who has built her entire life around her daughter and resents it. But her situation (killing and eating Death aside) is painfully understandable, even as her selfish actions put the world itself at risk. Awful people are still allowed to grieve, and Louis-Dreyfus plays that idea up with more nuance than you’d expect. Lola Petticrew holds her own against Louis-Dreyfus admirably as the embittered teen who knows that her days are numbered. But Kene is the surprising standout as the voice of Death, giving a growling, deliberate performance with a voice so low and deep it sounds like it emanates from the bowels of Hell.

Under Paris: Shark Attack

Years after surviving a shark attack that killed her husband and marine crew, scientist Sophia (Bérénice Bejo) faces a terrifying truth: the rapidly evolving sea beast known as Lilith has made her way to Paris, ready to feed.

Let’s make one thing clear: the premise of Under Paris is seriously silly. It’s practically a prerequisite of shark movies these days — in a post-Jaws world, there’s no chance of making the greatest shark film of all time, so instead, filmmakers largely double down on daftness or campy fun. That’s been the approach of The Meg and its sequel, the ultra-pulpy Deep Blue Sea, the chompy thrills of The Shallows, and 47 Meters Down. Now, quite preposterously, get ready for sharks in Paris; rather than ‘Les dents de la mer’, Xavier Gens’ disposably entertaining Netflix film plumps for ‘Les dents de la Seine’.

For the most part, Gens — previously behind Hollywood’s Hitman adaptation, and New French Extremity favourite Frontier(s) — plays the shark-movie hits. Our central figure is scientist Sophia (Bérénice Bejo), who has personal beef with ‘Lilith’, the rapidly evolving mako shark responsible for wiping out her team (this time, it’s personal); the Parisian mayor (Anne Marivin) is more concerned with popularity and profit than keeping her citizens safe; there’s a plan to blow up the predators before they can attack again. But there’s freshness in the unconventional French setting — the touristy cinematography accentuating the Parisian locations (hello, Eiffel Tower!) and differentiating the film from the rest of the shark-cinema canon.

A mid-movie massacre in the Paris catacombs brings a welcome level of carnage.

Tonally, Under Paris veers between pulp and preachiness, laying the eco-satire on incredibly thick. The arrival of Lilith in Paris (and the nature of her surprise new tricks) is down to ocean pollution and climate change — she’s a symptom rather than the disease. And, as with global warming, Lilith is a clear and present danger that nobody can agree on exactly how to handle. It’s not really a spoiler to say that the scientists don’t get listened to. In the film’s baggy second act, the heavy-handedness threatens to sink it all — but when the fun begins, it’s a blast. An hour in, a mid-movie massacre in the Paris catacombs brings a welcome level of carnage — Gen-Z eco-warriors, sceptical law-enforcement officers, and fearful scientists are all served on the menu for Lilith as agendas clash and blood flows.

In that sequence — and the grand finale, set during a Seine-centric triathlon that sends swathes of swimmers into the shark-infested waters — Gens conjures a palpable sense of splash-panic. The closing act, too, pulls no punches, dialling up the social commentary for a final reel that makes bold, bleak strides, and sets up a potentially wild sequel that — frankly — has a chance at being a much more interesting film than this one. Sure, it’s basically all nonsense, with thin characters and daffy logic — but Under Paris has just enough teeth where it counts.