Just finally watched it. It’s really an Anno movie through and through.
He probably directed one of the movies of his dreams, throwing a Kaiju (and the most famous one!) into Okamoto’s Japan’s Longest Day. His obsession with mankind being a band of amateurs absurdly thinking of themselves as professionals is everywhere. His love for handcraft also, as it is tough to make the split between the CGs and figures. And well, if there is one thing he does well, it’s laser blast. Godzilla’s first breath was absolutely terrifying.
I also liked that the monster wasn’t scary, but just weird at first. After all, if this is a new lifeform, it shouldn’t appeal to our primal instincts of what is scary or not.
95% of the cast was sadly incompetent (well, 95% of Japanese actors being bad, that’s pretty much expected), but I think the writing was also to blame. Everybody was pretty much monologuing, which is quite usual in artsy anime, but doesn’t work at all in movie form.
But it’s incredibly well directed, and the various “action” scenes are so different from each others and pay so many homages it’s really a blast for fans of Japanese movies.
I think it’s pretty clearly the best Japanese Godzilla movie other than 1954, but it’s not necessarily the most rewatchable or immediately rewarding, somewhat similar to Godzilla 1984, which is also one of the few actually good movies in the series. Aside from containing a great dissection of how a modern Government would handle Godzilla, this movie actually makes Godzilla scary, which is incredible rare - maybe not as malevolent as in GMK, but more hostile than just a force of nature.
This is now available on Prime over here, so I finally caught up. I wasn’t looking forward to this a lot initially since the new design with its ridiculously long and floppy tail felt really weird, but overall ended up liking the movie.
As Desslock said, it’s definitely the most serious Godzilla since the 1954 original. I can see how it’s disappointing if you go into this expecting some kaiju fun action. Knowing that it is a response to/take on the Fukushima disaster and the failure of the Japanese government to tackle something that their apparatus wasn’t built for made it work for me. All those scenes meetings and talk about procedures are as baffling as they are meant to.
I did like that there aren’t any human antagonists. For all the incompetence they show, the politicians in the movie want to do what’s best and are trying to do what they can to save human lifes. (Given that this movie is rather frickin’ topical again these days, that’s something you cannot say about all governments out there.) Even the new Prime Minister, who is not portrayed in a favourable light most of the time, ends up doing something that saves the day.
The second act works best for me, and the sight of Godzilla going ham as the music swells are well done. The solution to all of this in the third act felt a bit out of place and silly for what was a more grounded movie most of the time, but I guess the message here was that people can accomplish ridiculous feats when push comes to shove and everyone actually works together.
I really like the concept of this, but I think the execution let it down. World War Z (the book) is pretty much my favourite zombie fiction, so I’m totally down for a kaiju movie that focuses on the bureaucratic response, but in addition to the monologuing problem mentioned above, and contrary to what seems to be the consensus in this thread, for me it came across as propaganda for the Japanese bureaucracy. I don’t think they were incompetent at all. By the standards of disaster/kaiju movies bureaucrats/military, they were extremely competent, they were just undone by being faced with a nigh invincible threat whose abilities were constantly changing. In that context, they responded to new information rapidly and largely rationally, they didn’t let preconceived notions or structures get in the way, and they organised an incredible logistical feat to defeat Godzilla. Yes there was talk of how they couldn’t do X because of rule Y, but then they found a way to do it. And while I didn’t need some moustache twirling villain, it would have been nice to have some bureaucratic infighting/power struggles, rather than monologues about how wonderfully everyone was working together.
Also, you know, that origami thing was super silly.
