Review and news hub for movies, music and video games

Movie:		8.0
Picture:		8.0
Sound:		8.0
Extras:		6.0
Score:		8.0

Director(s):	Hitoshi Matsumoto
Writer(s):	Hitoshi Matsumoto & Mitsuyoshi Takasu
Starring:	Hitoshi Matsumoto • Riki Takeuchi
Genre:	Comedy • Foreign • Sci-Fi
Release Date:	July 28, 2009
Rated:

List Price:	DVD - $26.98
Amazon:

With Tokyo constantly under attack by giant monsters, of course you need giant ultra-heroes to defend its citizens; but when something that catastrophic had become the mundane for almost a century, what happens to the hero's status in society? Do they stay as revered saviors, or would their popularity eventually wane? After all, the world of modern pop culture has a short-term memory. The premise behind Big Man Japan is a mockumentary about a tokusatsu hero whose life is closer to The Wrestler than to Ultraman.

Japanese comedian Hitoshi Matsumoto, who co-wrote and directed the film, on top of starring as the mockumentary's subject, is Daisato (or Big-Sato), a man who comes from a family of Big Man Japans (Big Men Japan?). Big-Sato transforms into the fifty feet tall Big Man Japan when his nipples are zapped with electricity, enabling him to protect Japan from bizarre—and vaguely venereal—giant monsters, all sporting the faces of various Japanese celebrities like cult figure RikiTakeuchi. The film follows Big-Sato's scattered life, from his meager living condition, his modest salary, to his ex-wife's reluctance to let him see his own daughter. Most of all, it shows how much he is hated by the public, for a variety of reasons. His modest house and transformation power plants are always covered in graffiti or banners complaining about everything from his disruption of local wildlife to his wasteful power usage.

In a lot of ways, Big Man Japan can be seen as a mockumentary about a sport star's mid-life crisis. I'm far from an expert on the world of Sumo wrestling, but I have to think that the film is at least alluding to how the popularity of the sport among Japanese viewers has been steadily declining since the 90's. Big Man Japan features several man-on-the-street interviews, all of whom agree that Big Man Japan's monster fights are corny and not worth watching. Back in the days of his predecessors, the fights would air on TV during primetime, but nowadays, Big-Sato only appears on the tube at 2 AM.

A lot of Big Man Japan is actually quite sad and thoughtful, but it's also apparent that Matsumoto just has a very dry sense of humor that stems from painful awkwardness. He's also apparently the type of comedian that follows a joke to its logical and emotional conclusion, even after it stops being funny. When Big Man Japan accidentally kills a baby monster by dropping it, the darkly humorous bit is followed by a deadpan candlelight vigil for the monster, then a lengthy one-take performance by Matsumoto of Big-Sato drinking his woes away at a bar, denying all guilt over the child's death and refusing to attend the funeral service. It sort of becomes funny in itself how absurd it is for the film to take itself that seriously, which is in essence Matsumoto's big joke. It only becomes explicitly comedic during the CGI monster battles, which are equally absurd. One headless monster has a big eyeball at the end of the stretchy genital it uses to attack, only to hurt itself by getting debris in its eye.

As for why it uses CGI instead of the traditional kaiju method of miniatures, it pays off in the closing 10 minutes of the film—a laugh-out-loud spoof that keeps delivering until the end credits wrap. Matsumoto did not forget the genre that inspired his film. In the opening scene, Big-Sato tells us that he carries a pocket umbrella with him wherever he goes, regardless of the weather, if only because it's reliable. "It only becomes big when you need it to," he explains. The metaphor is obvious, but what the audience doesn't know yet at that point is how sad of a fantasy Big-Sato's view of himself is. For anyone who has ever loved super-sentai shows like any of the Ultraman series (or Power Rangers, for that matter), you'll recognize—or even empathize—immediately how he fancies his Big Man Japan as one of those heroes, and how it shapes his delusion. It makes the ending all the more perfect for it.

Bonus Features

The DVD actually has more stuff in it than I expected it to, being a Region 1 foreign-language release. It has that default barebones DVD feature, the making-of featurette, which is only interesting to watch to an extent; but then it also packs in the deleted scenes (there's 16 of them), which makes sense given that its a mockumentary mostly consisting of shots of characters sitting somewhere, talking to the camera. As you can guess already, a lot of the deleted scenes are just extended takes of those "interviews."

But of course, seeing how it only received a very limited run in theaters a couple of months back, the main draw of the DVD would be the movie itself.