[macblo]

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Originally Posted by Fish Sandwich

Well since Geed has inexplicably turned me into a huge fan of Ultraman Zero I decided to finally get around to... well, all the crap he was in. Including no less than three movies and numerous extraneous things. Most Ultramen would just be content to stick to a 50-ish episode television series, but hey, the franchise was in a weird place at the time.

Anyway to start things off I watched Ultraman Mebius: Ghost Reverse... which doesn't actually have Zero in it. But I love me some Mebius and it connects directly to the actual first thing Zero was in, although not in any way where you need to watch it. It's mostly its own thing, and it's alright. Not anything special, but I wasn't waiting for it to be over the whole time. If anything about it is truly interesting, it'd be the effects. The whole thing is one big space adventure and as such there's chroma keying up the wazoo. For better or for worse, I was constantly reminded of old 90's FMV games.

Getting to the main event, we have *ahem* Mega Monster Battle: Ultra Galaxy Legend the Movie. I'm pretty sure I got that title right but part of me refuses to believe that's the real name of a movie, especially when the series it takes most of its name from was Ultra Galaxy Mega Monster Battle. Seriously, I'm getting a headache just writing this.

But who cares about names when the actual movie was super interesting. It really felt a big blockbuster movie version of Ultraman, having a ton of characters, a huge threat, and a similar style to Ghost Reverse with the composite shots everywhere, except here it actually looks quite nice. It's a far cry from how Ultraman is normally filmed, but it works. The effects are good and the action is fast, although with Koichi Sakamoto directing that's pretty much a given.

About those characters though. They're both a cool thing about the film and a huge reason I appreciate it a bit more than I like it. Not that I didn't have a good time, but there's a distinct lack of a true protagonist that prevented me from getting into it as much as I would've liked. The movie spends a good 20 minutes of its 90 minute runtime sort of focused on Mebius, before finally getting around to introducing Rei, who the opening narration and title of the movie would suggest to be the main hero here, except for the part where Tsuburaya had this totally hip, new, cool character you're just gonna love! to shill.

Not gonna lie, I didn't much care for Zero here. He wasn't too bad but seeing his debut here immediately reminded me why I just kind of assumed he was some terrible fan-fiction OC shoehorned into the franchise. By which I mean, that's pretty much exactly what he is here. The ensemble nature of the story means this new character, who is ultimately extremely important to the plot and it's kind of crucial you care about him, doesn't even show up until halfway through, and is only in a couple scenes building his character before having him play a HUGE role throughout the big climactic fight.

It's kind of a lot to ask of the audience to give a s*** about this guy we've barely met and as such nothing involving him quite hits the mark. Like, sure, his backstory makes him an obvious parallel to Belial, but then, so does Rei's, and because the movie's attention is so split, neither of them get much of a payoff from that fact.

There's just not much of an emotional hook going on. No real central theme or characters arcs (Zero's hardly counts), and that takes what could've been something great down to just being good, in my opinion. Of course, that's just looking at it from one perspective. Viewing the plot as a vehicle for fanservice and action, it holds up way better. There's returning Ultra actors all over the place teaming up to fight evil, and sometimes maybe that's all you need. Belial's a great, intimidating foe to go up against, and despite Zero trying to steal their thunder, all the heroes come off looking cool. Seeing the cast here even took Mega Monster Battle from totally off my radar to faintly on my radar! That probably sounds sarcastic, but it's amazing it got me to care at all when there's so many other things I could watch.

Ultimately I'm probably WAY overthinking all this. At the end of the day Mega Monster Whatevertheheck is a big dumb movie that you can watch and have fun with, and that's cool. Definitely worth your time, although personally, I'm mostly just excited to see Zero become an actual character after this.

Oh, and also the subs from GUIS were really weird. As I understand it, there were official subtitles they just touched up for accuracy, but half the dialogue is still basically made up whole cloth, in the weirdest way possible. It's almost like a completely different script with the same exact plot and characters. Just... bizarre. I don't even know how to describe it, and I guess it doesn't matter too much in the long run, but it was really tripping me out the whole time I was watching it.

I never thought about how OC-like Ultraman Zero was in the first movie, mostly because I was at least somewhat familiar with him going into it, but that totally makes sense now that I think about it. I was expecting a lot more screen time from him given the fact that this is the first movie in the Ultraman Zero film trilogy but it was fun none the less so I don't mind too much.

On a somewhat related note, I find it hilarious that Ultraman Zero: The Chronicle actually airs this movie second while they air Super Decisive Battle, Zero's second movie, first.