SYNOPSIS:
Four gigantic warriors locked in a titanic combat will decide
the fate of Planet Earth. The Warriors of Darkness have returned.
Their mission is to rid the world of the menace known as mankind.
Agent Daigo, of the Global Unlimited Task Squad, once uses
the ancient power and transforms himself into Ultraman Tiga,
a twenty storey tall warrior with muscles of hardened steel.
Has Ultraman Tiga become a Warrior of Darkness?
MOVIE REVIEW
The
release of ULTRAMAN
MEBIUS & ULTRAMAN BROTHERS must have sparked some
sort of revival interest for the Ultraman franchise in Singapore
as Scorpio East were stocking up our local retail stores with
more installments of Ultraman’s movies. An interesting
point to note is that Ultraman Mebius & Ultraman Brothers
was the last Ultraman movie that been released and in order
to cater to the demand for more Ultraman’s movies, Scorpio
East digs deep into the Ultraman franchise and brought back
Ultraman Tiga The Final Odyssey from the year 2000. The result
was a rather mixed bag as this movie offered something different
from the usual Ultraman movies but yet was no where as satisfying
as Ultraman Mebius & Ultraman Brothers.
While the previous movie jumps straight into action and has
very little continuity issues for the viewers to deal with,
Ultraman Tiga: The Final Odyssey placed more emphasize on
storyline from the television series that involves the humans
from the special task forces that we always see looming around
Ultraman and contain very little “Ultra” actions
until the last 30 minutes of the movie.
On one
hand, it’s a refreshing change to see the human counterparts
in Ultraman’s movies taking up a more prominent role
in defending earth from the devious monsters and it was also
even mildly intriguing to see a depowered Ultraman’s
human host involved in a tricky triangle love affair but ultimately,
Ultraman’s movie goers want to see the Ultraman combating
Monsters with cities being destroyed in the process which
is served much too little and too late in this movie.
One reason
that why this Ultraman spend most of the movie time in his
human form (Daigo Madoka ) could be that the actor playing
Daigo was Hiroshi Nagano, band member of a popular Japanese
pop group V6. It’s hard not to see why the film makers
want to capitalize on Hiroshi Nagano’s fame as a V6
band member to draw in fans into Ultraman’s fandom but
for those who are coming from the Ultraman’s camp, it
just felt odd and unnecessary long.
Another
unsatisfactory aspect of this movie had to do with the lack
of explanation of the design of Ultraman Tiga. It’s
the first time that the design of an Ultraman that include
non red colors and this Ultraman’s suit comes in a variety
of color mode. The ideology behind the few different color
suits was that each version represents the different combat
mode that Ultraman Tiga is in. For example, when Ultraman
Tiga suit is primarily red, it represent that it’s in
the Power Mode and his power here is focus on strength which
also makes him relatively slower or when the suit is in it’s
primarily purple version, it meant he is in it’s speed
mode. It’s an interesting addition to this Ultraman’s
mythos but it was never explained in the movie to new viewers
(like me).
Given
that this movie was done when the studio was trying to reboot
the Ultraman’s franchise by revamping these classical
iconic characters and while this is not as good as the previous
Ultraman movie released locally on Dvd format, Ultraman Tiga:
The Final Odyssey is still worth a spin on the player for
Ultraman fans to witness the restructure process.
SPECIAL FEATURES :
NIL.
AUDIO/VISUAL:
The disc comes equipped with Japanese, Cantonese and Malay
language options.
MOVIE RATING:
DVD
RATING :
Review
by Richard Lim Jr
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