by MouthForWar » Sat Feb 20, 2010 4:48 am
Is this post even necessary? This movie has been talked to DEATH, even in a fairly recent topic... oh well, I guess the talkbacks wouldn't have been complete without it. I like this movie and actually think its a lot of fun... but then again, I say that about so many other junky films that nobody else will watch.
I'm tired of talking about my opinion of this movie, so I'm just gonna state my basic opinion by trying to be as basic, yet thorough as I can. Good cheesy fun. But people pick on this for being too stupid and too sloppy, but things like Megalon are just fine and dandy. How Kitamura is the devil for saying things like he doesn't like the newer films, yet Jun Fukuda's disdain for the genre is fine... I don't get it and I never will. Not liking the film is one thing, but the majority of the criticisms it gets could be leveled at most of the other films in the series... shoddy FX? Check. Lack of plot/plot holes? Mega-check. Shamelessly aping trendy Hollywood films? Check. Bad acting? check. Bad writing? MAJOR check. But these have pretty much been constants in the series since the 70s, but its like nobody seemed to care until now. People just pick and choose it seems. I chalk this up to 2 things... the hype this movie had as a "50th Anniversary" film (whatever that even means) and nostalgia for the older films (but hey, its OK for those movies to be bad, but not this!)
No Final Wars is NOT a good movie, but neither is like 60% (maybe more) of this series... these movies are fun and imaginative and that's why I watch them, just like you watch a Friday the 13th movie for stupid deaths, decent gore FX and nudity. GFW is a freight train of insanity, which I why I like it. That's also why I can watch Godzilla vs. Megalon pretty much any day of the week. I find something like that to be much more rewarding as a viewer than the rehashed plots and techno-babbly over-expositional nonsense of most of the films from the 90s-00s. I'd take the humans having fight scenes (even if they are trendy Matrix knock offs) over guys standing in a room and OVER explaining the film's science and monster's biology or shoving a moral message down my throat any day of the week.
Now what Toho SHOULD have done if they wanted a 50th anniversary celebration movie is make a good SOLID flick with 3-4 monsters in it. More than that is simply overkill because some monsters are gonna be glorified cameos, and the monster/human scenes will always be lopsided. Heck, I'd rather see Kitamura's original treatment for the film where Godzilla was the only monster in it. Of course Toho's money driven sensibilities were offended by such an idea and instead we get 13 monsters and a mish mash of weird sci-fi action and an illogical plot... but that's also why I like it. Also, if they wanted this movie to be some kind of celebration of the series, they should have given it a MUCH longer production time. It was done in something like 5 months, and that's crazy for any movie, let alone the final entry in a series. Its obvious that Toho just wanted to rush it out the door instead of thinking about its quality. Toho in general needs to realize one thing... LESS STUDIO MEDDLING AND MORE PRODUCTION TIME.
But as it is, this movie, to me, is like the Super Inframan of the new millennium. As someone who watches movies just for the pure fun of watching movies, crazy stuff like that is up my alley. Its campy action packed fun with a good sense of humor and even though it doesn't hold up as well on repeated viewings, its fun for the occasional watch. But of course I'm one of the 4 people ever to really like this movie, so my opinion probably isn't going to be "valid" to the more stuck up people looming about.
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