Jun 16, 2021
Having watched pretty much every Godzilla movie there is, I must say that overall I prefer the human-centric ones. Shin and G2014 are probably my favorites, with the 1954 original being in a league of its own. So believe me when I say that on paper, this movie looked incredible to me. A human-centric Godzilla movie in an anime art-style with new interesting lore to go with it? Sign me up!
But no, it's pretty terrible. Let's break it down into a few bullet points because I don't even feel like writing a structured review:
-Characters are so painfully generic that you might as well copy
...
and paste their MAL description from TV tropes and no one would notice the difference. Being cliched is not necessarily an issue in itself, but it either has to support an otherwise good story or the characters have to be interesting in their own way. This movie achieves neither. The characters don't ever go beyond the trope they represent. You have the hot-headed leader that vows to avenge humanity which often puts him at odds with the higher-ups. There's the pure-hearted love interest whose advances go unnoticed. There is also the smart one. You get the gist. After watching two of these movies I can only vaguely remember the name of the protagonist.
-The plot is not much better. It takes an hour to get going after which it becomes just another action anime. The movie sets up interesting concepts like the interplay between humans and two alien races and the question of whether it's even worth it to come back to a hostile Earth in the first place. But they go unexplored in favor of generic drama where the young, ambitious hero has to convince the by-the-book higher ups to execute his seemingly suicidal plan that will of course work out in the end, leaving the leadership astonished and rallying everyone behind the protagonist. You've seen it all before done better elsewhere.
-I genuinely enjoy the art-style, but the animation is too janky to give it anything above a 6. The sound design and especially the soundtrack are great. The music is somber and foreboding and it reminded me of the original PS3 Demon's Souls of all things. Godzilla's theme is especially well done. It's different to anything that came before but it still manages to hold its own.
-The lore and world-building are very interesting. They blend the familiar elements of the previous Godzilla adaptations with a completely fresh lore which makes it stand out from all the other movies. But it goes largely unexplored beyond the surface level, in favor of the aforementioned generic action story. If you're a Godzilla fan, you'd be better off just reading the related entries on Wikizilla rather than watching the movie itself.
If after reading this you're still interested, go watch the movie, since the following section will contain spoilers.
**SPOILERS**
I usually don't like to nitpick the story if the anime is otherwise good, but this one isn't, so here we go:
-The colony ship has been traveling just under light speed for 20 years while exhausting its resources and barely making any progress on the cosmic scale. The situation is so dire that the leadership council decides to dump all the elderly and some women on a hostile planet just to get rid of them, killing them instantly. But a day later it's revealed that the ship can also open wormholes, which enables them to travel back to Earth instantly. Again, literally a day after they killed a third of their population to prepare for the journey ahead, they came back to Earth.
-A couple hundred malnourished refugees equipped with some scouting gear manage to achieve what the entire Earth and two alien races couldn't (it's mentioned that the kaiju they killed is pretty much identical to original Godzilla 20,000 years back). Haruo, who's only seen Godzilla when he was a kid, spent 20 years on a spaceship and isn't otherwise portrayed as above average in terms of intelligence, deduces that Godzilla's shield has to be generated by something, and doesn't just appear like magic. All of humanity and two advanced alien races couldn't come up with that. Maybe we really deserve to be wiped out...
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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