[Fish Sandwich]

So in my rush to get to the stuff Zero was in, I actually completely forgot I meant to watch Super Ultra 8 Brothers as a sort of lead-in. Or Superior Ultraman 8 Brothers. Or 大決戦！超ウルトラ８兄弟, to be as accurate as possible. Seriously, these names get confusing. I'll get to that one in a second but as a lead-in to what is now a lead-out, I rewatched Ultraman Mebius & Ultra Brothers. Still a pretty darn good flick. A lot of what I said about Saga applies here too. Not an awesome space epic, but has tons of heart to compensate. And it's about Mebius, which automatically makes it way cooler. It's a very well done tribute to the franchise.

Ultra 8 Brothers, on the other hand, is, to recycle my thoughts on yet another Zero movie:

WOW

What a film. Take everything I just said about Saga and the Mebius movie, multiply it by two, and you have my thoughts on this one. It's pretty much the exact opposite of epic, but it's insanely great as a love letter to all things Ultraman. The entire plot has this very obviously meta dimension to it with a message that is pretty squarely aimed not at the children watching, but at the adults who watched Ultraman as children. It's kind of a crazy idea and if done poorly it could border on self-indulgent, but it works great here. I said about Saga that Keiichi Hasegawa clearly cares about the franchise, but I didn't realize just how right I was about that. Not only is the entire film basically telling you liking Ultraman makes you awesome, it's doing so with tons of references to older stuff bolstered by a frankly astonishing amount of returning actors, in roles both major and minor, adding legitimacy to everything.

I don't know, it's kind of weird movie, because even though on the surface it's just alright, I was extremely satisfied by it. How do I put it? Oh I know! Check out this shot (that's actually recycled from the Mebius movie but shhh):



It's just some Ultramen standing around, right? It should be boring. But take a closer look, and you realize, they're *standing* there. They look awesome, and triumphant, and heroic, and a bunch of other words. There's not that much to it, and yet there's everything to it. That's the kind of feeling this movie has, and I'm actually glad I ended up saving it until the end of this little journey of mine. I'm definitely not burned out on Ultraman, but I'm probably done playing catch up for at least a bit, and this makes a great place to take a break.