I finally saw it last week and spent the next couple of days going back and reading through this thread from the beginning. I knew as soon as Shin Godzilla himself was revealed that this was going to be a divisive film, but damn, I don't think I expected it to be
this divisive! Did even Final Wars cause so much of a split among fans as this seems to have?
I guess one "benefit" of waiting so long to see it compared to many others is that I had a long time to digest certain aspects of it that I'd either seen or heard about over the months. The aforementioned look of this Godzilla being the most obvious one, but also things like how "talky" the film was meant to be, the tail beam (though not the back beams; somehow I managed not to find out about that part until I was watching the scene itself) etc., so some things I was prepared for. It did remind me a lot of Godzilla 1984 with the whole "dammit America, stop trying to nuke us!" angle, and while I agree that it certainly felt like the most nationalistic Godzilla movie to date, that aspect didn't really rub me the wrong way as much as it seems like it did for some people.
Again, I was prepared for it to be a very meeting-filled movie, but I thought the quick-fire dialogue generally kept most of those scenes from dragging as much as they could have, and I found it interesting to have a Godzilla movie almost entirely told from the government's point of view. I did feel like the pacing could have been tightened up a bit after he went into "cooldown" in the middle of the film though for sure, and holy damn did we really need subtitled for almost literally every single person, street, room, helicopter and even missile that makes an appearance?!
I've never seen more than a few minutes worth of Evangelion, so is that just something Anno likes to do in everything he touches, or just his attempt here at trying to keep things as "real" as possible? Either way it was definitely overkill.
I also thought the effects on the whole were really good. Certainly there was the occasional not-so-great shot in there every now and again, whether it be a helicopter or train looking a bit fake or Godzilla moving in a slightly wonky way, but overall I was really impressed. I'll always lament the lack of a traditional man in a suit, but at least there was still other miniature work mixed in there in various places, and similarly the use of classic music and sound effects was also nice.
As for Godzilla himself I basically look at him as an alternate universe "Elseworlds"-style take of the kind we, to be honest, only really got in GMK, despite that sort of approach supposedly being the Millennium series' whole "deal". As a result I didn't really have any problem with any of the crazy weirdness shown here, the mutations, the back beams etc. I completely get why people
would, but for me personally I just looked at it as a completely separate kind of Godzilla than any of the previous films or incarnations, because until and unless we find out that any future films are going to follow on directly from this and that Shin Godzilla is going to be
the Godzilla going forward, that's basically what it is.
I will say though in regards to the whole "when is it a mutation too far?" discussion that if they announced a sequel that really did follow on from this and actually had him mutate into some sort of crazy Godzilla/Human hybrid army (as opposed to, say, those things just breaking off from him or spawning from his cells etc.), that
would be going a bit too far imo. And please don't give him wings, either. But as an ambiguous ending in and of itself, I liked it, in all its metal craziness.
So yeah, overall I liked it, and I also just liked being able to see a brand new Toho Godzilla movie again for the first time in over a decade. It's a shame we're going to have to wait at least another few years for a live-action follow-up, whatever form that may take, but hey, at least it's for a good reason!