T3hSource

I wish I could enjoy this movie in its entirety, but alas, that's only the last 30 minutes of it. For all it's elaborate setup, it's still a simple, cheesy kaiju movie. Have the monster appear out of nowhere, cause carnage and destruction, work out a solution, proceed to the cheesy action. It's a shame such a simple sequence of events had to be made convoluted mostly because the screenplay had to fill the alloted 1:30h hour mark for a full on movie to be released in theaters. The story is the worst part of it. Gen Urobuchi could never make exposition dumps natural or compellingin any way. So the 1st whole hour is just a grueling trudge through pointless politicking and technobabble all alluding to the final fight and the character of our MC. It is blatant, obvious and patronizing, on top of being needlessly convoluted. Godzilla attacks! Gasp! Let's have 2 alien races come and not-save-us-by-making-mecha-godzilla, cuz we need to throw that reference in, all to have us start in the setting of spaaaace! What the fuck does space have to do with my kaiju apocalypse?! The movie agrees and has us go back to Earth... 1000 years post-Godzilla cuz spacetime continuum. Except it's 10 000 years once we see the Earth, except it's 20 000 years after we examine the carbon contents of the plants. So all this setup was to just get us into a jungled up foggy ass Earth to face Godzilla, and dinosaurs while we're at it! All the talk about living in a ship, wandering through space, that's just to fill time, we're on Earth, so everything's fine right? It's not like you'll be facing those same issues when plant leaves are harder than your pocket knife and shatters it on impact. There's no point to it all, it doesn't ground itself for the super serious tone it goes for, and doesn't really explore the despair it mentions. Characters, as usual, make the story in anime. Except when they don't, when we have a rebellious MC that starts out with a suicide bomber threat because he cares for his grandpa, only to obsess over Godzilla's murder for the rest of the runtime. Very consistent, deep character writing indeed. Metphies, the "alien" companion gets a special mention as being the plot device that enables the MC to be batshit crazy without consequences and be reprimanded again, on top of blatantly stating in metaphor what's about to happen, the worst kind of foreshadowing, when you're too lazy to allude it and just outright state it. He also doubles as a mouthpiece preaching not-Christianity like a crazed priest, who worships *drumroll* God(zilla) - The King of Monsters! The rest of the cast are your usual military hardasses and politicking council members who don't do jackshit, but get to expodump it anyway. The rival that screws the MC, gets it wrong and redeems himself. Add a stock waifu, and bam, a whole cast of colorful characters which you will instantly forget once you're done watching! Polygon Pictures have been infamous for their shoddy CG Netflix shows, but this time, they actually improved their model rigging and it doesn't feel like animations are played in 15 FPS. Movement is just smooth enough to feel natural from the characters. The grimy aesthetic isn't bad when it works, but those are rare few moments. The shadows are too heavy, too high on contrast, the metalic scratches don't seem natural at all, the background art which they use seems unpolished and blurry in order for the CG to fit in easier. And despite all that the directing is competent enough to make use of 3DCG action framing that makes things feel tense and exciting. A shame that even the director's professional work couldn't make up for Urobuchi's amateur approach to exposition and setup. And something important for Kaiju fans- Godzilla is but ugly and the crew knew it, the shots were skewing away from the rough model, deliberately avoiding to show it off. It's very disappointing to see how the studio is taking 1 step forward, yet 2 steps back into the pit of "CG trash". Sound design just doesn't really match what you'd imagine is bullets hitting metal-like objects. There's no real satisfying crunch to the explosions, just a loud noise. Again it falls down to the serious presentation of the show falling flat on its face, As all the the inappropriate OST used for key battle scenes, it really takes you out of the experience, trying to piece together what it's conveying with techno chip music when it's been using ambiance and orchestra for the most part. Shows that live off spectacle alone can get away with shoddy SFX if they get it right, and even when it does, it's immediately undermined by another sound effect that just doesn't seem to fit or make sense, because the audio director also didn't have a good idea of what the scenario was supposed to be. The only enjoyment I got from the movie is the Godzilla fight obviously. It's so cheesy, and very much feels like a video game boss raid. Controlling the movements, the timings, positioning, distracting aka aggro control, now THAT is some fun stuff to any gamer to observe. Virtual tactics applied in a movie. On top of the visual spectacle, the movie redeemed itself on that front, as an in-the-moment thrilling joyride. Only to end on a cliffhanger with a cynical message that holds no water or meaning due to the empty setup up to the Godzilla encounter. So yes, this is a pretty awful movie when you watch it with any modicum of standards, be it for narrative or visuals. It doesn't even work as a cheesy action flick due to the grueling 1 hour exposition setup before the actual Godzilla scene. It was torturous to watch, and I didn't even get a proper reward for getting to the end, I only got another preaching lecture to hype up the next movie, as this is now a trilogy... yay...

Draconalis

Godzilla has had it rough since his reawakening. With the boringly slow pace of the Legendary Godzilla, to the blazing fast pace with no real motivation that was Shin Godzilla, none of the recent Godzilla movies have really been all that good lately. Will this Movie make the difference and usher in a new age of excitement and kaiju goodness for Godzilla and all his fans? No… no it won’t. To be honest… the trailer was enough to make me want to avoid this movie. The CG looked god awful, and I wasn’t entirely impressed with the premise… I don’t even really understand what motivated me towatch it. I should have skipped it as I had originally planned The movie was poor on all accounts, but the thing I want to complain the most about is the visuals… they are awful. Nothing looks good. Everyone looks like videogame characters from ten years ago, and the G-man himself looks like a giant lump of bashed metal. No details to pick out at all. His overall design seemed to me to emulate the Legendary (thicker) design, and as I wasn’t a fan of that design to begin with, rubbing all the detail out and making it look metallic didn’t help. It wasn’t all bad though… there was this moment when, not one, but TWO alien races came to the planet to kill Godzilla and failed spectacularly… the ridiculousness of it did make me laugh… it was the only laugh though. Speaking of these aliens though… why didn’t either of them mention to the humans that “Look, we’ve been refugees ourselves for like… ever? There are no planets out there, fight for this one” at the beginning? And what happened to their “fleet” of ships. Did they just drop some of their kind off and leave?” Why didn’t humans evacuate on those ships since all of these aliens just seem to be so “we’re in this together”? There was also a off hand remark about how one of these aliens has seen the fall of civilizations all over the galaxy, and MOST of them fall to creatures like Godzilla. That last one took me out of the experience more so than ANYthing else in this God(zilla) forsaken movie. What are the Kaiju then? Are they actual tools of destruction? Tools for whom? All in all, the movie was terrible.