by jellydonut25 » Fri Jan 29, 2016 3:59 pm
I too was VERY vocal about not wanting another Toho Godzilla movie if they were gonna half-ass it like they did the Millennium films. And I said that as someone who ENJOYS the majority of the Millennium films. At the end of the day though, their reason for existing is pretty shallow, and just a knee-jerk reaction to the hatred of the 98 film and clamoring for "the real Godzilla" from fans.
I've been saying almost since the day I saw the 90s Gamera films that it's a shame that Godzilla has been surpassed by a Godzilla knockoff since the end of the Showa era, and Toho should be embarrassed that they are no longer the best at making kaiju movies, and need to deeply re-evaluate their approach to the genre.
It SEEMS like they have. Now, very little about this project specifically EXCITES me: I don't like the design, I haven't been impressed with Anno's other works that I've seen, it's still a fairly short production schedule, and it really does smack of cashing in on the newfound popularity of Godzilla in the wake of the 2014 film (to me, you can throw away their planning beginning before the release of the 2014 film, they didn't start planning it until that movie was shooting, and they didn't start shooting it until that movie was released; had the 2014 film flopped, I feel they would have just written this off since they hadn't started filming it yet), HOWEVER, it seems like Toho took a step back and said, "If we ARE going to make a Godzilla movie, we can't just phone it in, and we can't get a director and then interfere with him every step of the way." Whether or not I wind up LIKING this movie, I feel like Toho has given it the old college try...something I don't think they've legitimately done since the 80s.