Godzilla: Minus One (2023)

directed by Takeshi Yamazaki

Japan

125 minutes

5 stars out of 5

----

👉BIG OL SPOILERS BELOW. DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE FILM.👈

It is taking a gargantuan amount of self-restraint for me not to type this review in all-caps. Like I did with Shin Ultraman, I'm not even considering this a "review" in any meaningful sense of the word. I just got back from this movie and I need to yell incoherently about it for a minute. I already knew this was gonna body me as my first new Godzilla movie since I became a fan, but now I've experienced heaven and it's sitting in a theater with a sound system so powerful Akira Ifukube's theme music vibrates your sternum.

I took a lot of care to remain un-spoiled going into this. I didn't want to know anything about it. I stopped watching trailers after the first one. One of the only things I saw that gave anything away at all was an interview with the director that described his approach to the film as "scary". That was in my mind when I sat down in the theater, not knowing what to expect, and it's still in my mind now, because yeah, Minus One is fucking scary. This is the most nightmarish Godzilla you've ever seen. This movie does absolutely everything in its power to make you terrified of Godzilla, and it's successful. You get to see him remarkably early on and that first encounter on Odo Island is just a total fever dream: It's nighttime, our main character was supposed to be dead and already has that guilt on his shoulders, he's surrounded by a general sense of defeat, he just wants to go home along with everyone else around him, and then there's this thing. This boogeyman, this creature out of a bad dream that the villagers call "Gojira". It's horrific, it's monstrous. Those night shots of Godzilla just picking people up and flinging them around have such staying power. I've reiterated this in multiple previous reviews, but I feel that any time Godzilla bites something, it's a powerful moment because it's pure rage. Godzilla doesn't eat people, or anything else for that matter. But the Godzilla violence in this is really personal; even though he's not eating anybody, this is probably the first time we've ever seen him target individual people. Except for maybe that one poor girl in the hospital that time. Or Hiroshi Abe. Or Yoshio Tsuchiya. Alright, maybe that happens more often than I realized, but it's never any less of an intense thing to watch.

This is the angriest Godzilla I've ever seen, barring maybe GMK, and that's a very strong "maybe". Godzilla is not a too-large animal stuck in the midst of a civilized area, causing destruction simply due to his size rather than intentional malice. This Godzilla is some kind of vengeance demon. This is the #1 thing the movie imparted to me. Godzilla is a wretched living ghost, dragging itself around fueled by pain and rage. You can feel how much he's hurting. It's visible in everything he does. That is staying with me.

One of the stills that was released before the movie came out was Godzilla looking on at what appeared to be a mushroom cloud, and I remember the speculation online that that was the military deciding to nuke Tokyo to try to get rid of Godzilla - nope, turns out that WAS Godzilla. That first atomic breath attack was just... jaw-dropping. The sheer scale of destruction in this movie is unlike anything seen in the franchise thus far and it really, really hits. I could go on and on and on about single scenes I adored in this, but another favorite was when the Takao shows up and Godzilla just obliterates it instantly, taking gunfire straight to the face and not even blinking. Also, seeing and being able to recognize all the ships was great because it made me feel better about having spent this past summer watching a bunch of WWII movies.

The human story was something I was looking forward to, because the days when viewers could be (mostly) satisfied by a movie where the human characters dial it in, knowing the monsters are what everybody wants to see, are over. When it was first announced that this movie would take place after WWII, I saw a lot of people have this kind of knee-jerk negative reaction, assuming that it was going to be some kind of apologia just based on the fact that it was set during that time. But in reality this movie is staunchly anti-war, and that stance is at the center of the storyline. The government won't help you, in fact the government is actively trying to harm you; it's using the "little people" to shift the blame off of itself: We lost the war? Obviously, it's because YOU didn't kill yourself bombing the enemy. The only hope that exists in this movie comes from people turning away from the thought that a centralized government is going to protect them and realizing that if there's anything worth fighting for, it's sure as hell not the idea of a nation, it's you and the people who you love, and who love you. I think that statement is perfectly captured by the fact that the only time warships and bomber planes are shown being used, it's outside of wartime, commandeered by civilians working basically under their own aegis. Shades of the Gotengo, there, at least to me.

Ryunosuke Kamiki does a remarkably job conveying emotion in his character. He's really good at that kind of messy uncontrollable crying that you rarely see pulled off well in cinema. I was honestly kind of surprised at how believable his performance was because I guess I'm just not used to seeing that in kaiju film. Everybody else is great as well - these are people you genuinely care for, and the movie makes it very clear that none of their lives is guaranteed. There's a dozen moments where you think everybody onscreen is going to die. I loved when it seems like the big plan failed and Godzilla is charging his atomic breath and the camera cuts from person to person and lands on this kid who looks like he's about 15 - I was just thinking, oh my god, I'm really gonna see all of these guys die. I thought that was actually going to happen. It's rare for a movie to make me feel so uncertain of the ultimate outcome.

The pacing of this thing is also really interesting because it has these scenes that are unbelievably brutal, like, "they gave this a PG-13?" brutal, but they're spaced out seemingly at random. What I would argue is the most horrific and visceral shot in the entire film and possibly in the entire Godzilla franchise (that shot of Godzilla's face blistering as he gets nuked for the first time) is immediately followed by, and I'm not exaggerating this at all, a peppy, light-hearted montage of Koichi having fun with his buddies on a boat. The transitions aren't all as jarring, but the whole film is like that, to an extent: not necessarily high highs, but some very, VERY low lows between the mellower bits.

The soundtrack is immaculate as well. Like I said, the Ifukube theme is the absolute clincher and hearing it made me tear up, but the original music composed for the film is also extremely effective. During the most tense scenes there's often nothing but high, airy, unearthly strings, or even just a single ascending tone that makes you break out in an instant sweat. The music is otherworldly at times, deeply haunting like the Shin Godzilla OST and used perfectly to make an already unbelievably good movie even more gripping. Also I actually just rewatched King Kong vs. Godzilla last night and I almost screamed when they started playing the theme from it in Minus One.

I don't know how to end this. I don't really want to end this. I didn't want the movie itself to end. In classic Godzilla fashion, things are left somewhat open-ended, and good god I hope we don't have to wait another seven years for a follow-up. There was practically nobody in the theater with me, which was disappointing, but I think this'll make good returns because I've heard elsewhere that theaters were practically sold out. I love, love, love to be alive in this era where we're still getting new Godzilla movies. I was blown away by this. I've never seen anything like it.

The Cult (A Seita) (2015)

directed by André Antônio

Brazil

70 minutes

4 stars out of 5

----

This was a pick from my project where I use a list randomizer to get a random movie off of my giant watchlist and watch it, no matter what it is. Thus far this project has been all hits and literally no misses, and The Cult continues that trend.

This is a very low-key sci-fi movie where most elements of the "fi" half are introduced via the protagonist's voice-over narration, rather than portrayed through visuals. I say "most" because the exception to this is a sort of holographic image gallery the main character flicks through that requires no screen or visible input, but even that will probably be reality at some point. Our protagonist (I will alternatingly refer to him as the narrator and the protagonist, because he is both) is telling us the story of the year 2040, which he says was an important year for him for two reasons: The first is that it was the year he moved back to Recife.

The narrator is from something called the "space colonies", which he addresses repeatedly but without context, as if the audience for his recollection are peers of his that would immediately know what he's referring to. It's pretty self-explanatory, though it's not clear if the colonies belong to Brazil or to any one specific country. We infer that it's a much more wealthy society than that of those still living on Earth, which is not surprising considering that that's already the way space colonization seems to be heading. Because his currency is more valuable in Recife than in the colonies, the protagonist is able to move back into his old house and furnish it lavishly, living a life of what looks like ease and luxury. Despite the near-vacant streets and aging buildings, there's a real sense that the people in Recife post-"exodus" don't view their lives as anything other than the best they can be - but there's also a feeling that the lens through which we see life in Recife may be tainted by the protagonist's personal views. Another of the fictional elements is that at some point between now and when the film takes place, a mandatory vaccine was introduced that eliminated the need for humans to sleep. However, Recife is a holdout where dreamers still live, a small hamlet where people are still able to fall asleep. This becomes very important later.

Because there's little dialogue, most of what The Cult accomplishes as a film is conveyed through aesthetics. This is an absolutely gorgeous movie and it feels like in spite of minimal visual effects it manages to establish a sense of being in a place of the future, a place similar to, but ultimately different in its evolution away from, the Earth we're familiar with. Again, what we might look at and describe as "run-down" in Recife is anything but to its residents, and especially to the protagonist and narrator who has returned to it as his beloved home. It is - at least during the day - a haven for him. He walks the streets alongside men who dress like him. It should be mentioned that the protagonist is very openly and overtly gay, and all the people he interacts with are also men who love men, whether gay, bi, or anything else. Recife seems to be a kind of locus for safe, easy, even joyful cruising, and the protagonist spends much of the first half of the film doing nothing but lounging in beautiful clothing (or no clothing) in his beautiful house in bed with another beautiful man, in the beautiful weather of a city that feels like it's shed its aspersions and finally belongs to its people.

The second reason why 2040 is important to the narrator is because that's the year that he found the Cult. Midway through the film, one of the protagonist's partners calls him out for what he sees as his "fetishism" of Recife, chiding him for ignoring police brutality and fantasizing about the Recife he remembers from his rose-tinted childhood memories rather than the Recife that really is. Whether or not this is objectively true, it does seem to send the protagonist into introspection, and the next major plot development after this is his discovery of an underground cult (really more like a big recurring party) in the city. Instead of addressing his place in the city and his perception of it, the protagonist - and the narrative - draws further away from reality and towards fantasy. We're also told during the first half of the film that despite being what looks like a paradise during the day, Recife isn't safe to walk around at night in. However, I feel like the reveal of the cult and their aims may alter the legitimacy of this claim somewhat. While the cult is not doing anything that is technically harmful to anybody, stories of their presence may have been disseminated to create a general sense of danger that was not entirely accurate.

I was entranced by this movie. The atmosphere of languor, of carefree living, drew me in. The way the protagonist moves through the world surrounded by beautiful objects and beautiful people without the need to work for money or do anything other than desire something and achieve it was intoxicating. But it may be that we're experiencing Recife circa 2040 through a very narrow scope - even if misinterpretations of the cult led to most of the warnings about not going out at night, there's still apparently a heavy police presence. Recife may be an oasis - for gay men, for aesthetes, for anybody who wants to live in beauty atop the corpse of capitalism - but outside the oasis is always a harsh desert. The scope that The Cult encompasses despite being only 70 minutes long is impressive, and as an art object it looks flawless, a perfectly executed vision. I've spoken before about horror as a genre being large enough to contain films as lo-fi and sparse as this one as well as major classics, but the science fiction genre can be that inclusive as well. This is a brilliant movie, and it also makes excellent use of "Melody Day" by Caribou, one of my favorite songs.

Cyclops (1987)

directed by George Iida

Japan

52 minutes

4 stars out of 5

----

George (sometimes spelled Jôji) Iida is such an underrated horror director, having made two stand-out films (Spiral, Battle Heater) that only make the scarcity of his others all the more irritating. He's also a screenwriter, television director, and novelist, but none of his work in those fields is any more well-known than his films. Cyclops is something that had been on my radar for a long time, but was unavailable to watch with anything better than auto-generated English subs, so finally finding it with good subs in what I must say is some of the clearest, crispest quality I've ever seen a pre-2000s film in was a delight.

The main concept of the film, as explained through on-screen text at the beginning, is that some time in the past a scientist was doing research towards proof of his hypothesis that babies born with severe deformities (like cyclopia, hence the title) are not medical anomalies but actually a new stage in human evolution, equipped to handle increasing pollution and adverse circumstances. This is kind of ridiculous, but when you consider that one of the main causes of birth defects is environmental pollution or chemical side-effects, it's an interesting idea. This specific scientist is offscreen for the whole of the film, but a ragtag team of weird guys is continuing his research.

There's not much in the way of humor in this, but what of it that is there comes from the mismatched group of bad guys. There's an identifiable leader and an identifiable "heavy", but then there's a couple of henchmen who pop in and out of the story and seem to have defined identities, even though those identities don't ever get fleshed out. I think one of the best things you can do if you're going to have a large cast who don't get much spotlight time is give them mannerisms that immediately distinguish them as an individual - like the one guy repeatedly glancing towards his subject as she's laying nude on an operating table, or the other guy feverishly praying (?) aloud.

This movie is known mostly as a splattery, gory type of thing, but it's actually a really slow burn. The cinematography is top-notch for something this compact and definitely speaks to Iida's proficiency in mainstream, feature-length films, unlike most splatterpunk directors, who cut their teeth on weird indie shorts, and it shows if they ever produce anything more formal. This is basically a normal movie for about 40-45 minutes, with some really artful framing and lighting - even a character brushing their teeth is shot in a remarkably thoughtful, deliberate way - and then the stuff we're all waiting for happens.

I appreciated the unusual clarity of the video file I was watching very, very much when it got to the finale, because it meant I got to see the practical effects in all their slimy glory the way they were meant to be seen. This is a movie with mutation at its heart. Because it takes so long to get to the payoff, I won't spoil it by describing it too much, but there's a lot of really beautiful fleshy blobs and sticky, gooey transformation sequences. I particularly liked the sequence in the elevator because I think having an action scene take place in an elevator is inherently an interesting way to set something up on film: the time it takes for the action to unfold is limited by how long it takes for the elevator to get where it's going, so you have a guaranteed payoff whenever the door opens, and cutting away to another character watching once the elevator gets to its floor adds a sense of anticipation. Again, this movie is really artful and shows a definite mastery of scene and framing that is a rare addition to something this yucky.

I wonder why shot-on-video films of less than an hour's running time never became a thing in the West. There are some, but they don't really achieve even cult status the way Japanese splatterpunk movies like this one do. It seems like the phenomenon of a short movie that gets everything done within less than an hour is just not something that ever became part of Western filmmaking tradition. 

Weirdly, Kai Ato, the actor playing the head bad guy who gets super-mutated, was in nothing but very serious, well-regarded films, such as Station, Lady Snowblood, Ballad of Orin, and Kagemusha, of all things. I think this is the only time I've seen an actor who's been in a Kurosawa movie also be in a movie where he has an arm burst out of his stomach and strangle someone.

Psychic Vision: Jaganrei (1988)

directed by Teruyoshi Ishii

Japan

49 minutes

4 stars out of 5

----

My excitement about seeing this was disproportionate to its short running time. It sounded like something that ticked all of my boxes, and it was. There was this brief moment in the 1980s and '90s where a lot of movies were coming out that explored how old traditions of ghosts and hauntings might be integrated into a world that was rapidly becoming more technologically advanced, and some real bangers came out of that question - I'm thinking Prince of Darkness - but now the subgenre of "digital haunting" seems to have become saturated by a thousand iterations of "what if there was an evil app and a ghost came out of it".

Psychic Vision: Jaganrei purports to have been intended as a documentary about an idol revamping her image and debuting as a more mature singer with a new single. It's not any kind of incisive deep-dive into the idol industry, which is horror fodder unto itself, but pretty soon a few odd things start cropping up as the crew follows the process of writing, producing, and recording the song. I love how this movie segues into the supernatural because it's so innocuous at first. When it becomes clear that the original writer of the idol's new song is unknown, it doesn't feel that strange, because songs are so often ghostwritten or lifted from magazine contest submissions that it's entirely possibly the true authorship could just get forgotten. But as the film goes on, the identity of the writer becomes a crucial element to its plot. This film is so short that it would be easy to spoil it, so I'm going to keep my review brief and try not to give away too much.

There's a moment where the movie palpably ramps up from being a fairly tame mystery to showing its teeth a little, and I'm not going to say what it is, but if you've seen this, you probably know. It involves a car. That's what I'm talking about when I say that this movie knows how to segue: Abruptly, when it has to get your attention, but also, at the same time, slowly, over the course of the entire film, to keep that attention. It's got a big vibe for such a short movie, and covers lot of themes that I'm personally really fascinated with - the transfer of energy into a digital format, basically a "grudge"; this is revisited in Ringu when it's revealed that Sadako is making films using pure psychic energy. If I have any complaints about this at all, it's that the backstory of the weird psychic attacks is made too cut-and-dry - I liked it better when it was an onslaught of bizarre, unstoppable terror with no apparent explanation, but that's a personal preference.

I have no doubt whatsoever that the song being titled "Love Craft" was just a random choice. H.P. Lovecraft absolutely has a following in Japan, and this director also helmed several episodes of Ultraman Tiga and Ultraman Gaia - the spookier episodes, of course - and both of those series notably took story elements from Lovecraft's work. He also directed for Ultraman Cosmos, Choseishin Gransazer, and unfortunately not a whole lot else. The actress who played the idol, Emi Satô, is just credited as "self", so I'm not sure if that means that she's an idol in real life or not, but a quick glance at her filmography doesn't make it look that way. It's too bad that this is so obscure, and that everything else by the director - popular television series excepted - is obscure as well, because there's some really interesting stuff in Psychic Vision: Jaganrei, and I kind of wish this was a full-length film.

Cloverfield (2008)

directed by Matt Reeves

USA

85 minutes

4 stars out of 5

----

It's been a long time since I've revisited Cloverfield. Being as cemented in pop culture as it is now (which isn't very, but it does have something approaching cult status), it's hard to imagine watching it with no knowledge of what was going to happen. I was growing up when this came out and I remember people acting almost personally offended by the shakycam filming style - somewhat understandable, since this was, as far as I can remember, the first really mainstream found-footage movie, at least since The Blair Witch Project. The sequels have gone in... weird directions, but at the time it was released, Cloverfield was a kind of excellent little slice of sci-fi/horror presented in a relatively new format.

As far as I'm concerned, Cloverfield joins the ranks of classic kaiju films not because it has a giant monster in it but because it has a human story that feels forced and boring. The film begins innocuously and obnoxiously as we're taken along for the ride while an increasingly drunk and annoying cameraman films "testimonials" at his friend's going-away party. We (and everybody else at the party) find out about his friend's affair, things become awkward, and the cameraman will not stop bugging this random girl (Lizzy Caplan) who doesn't even really want to be there. I sound like I'm ragging on it, but I don't mind the party segment of this film - it feels real enough to occupy the viewer's time while they wait for the action to kick in, and the music and the clothing styles can give you some "fun" whiplash if you, like me, can't comprehend something from 2008 looking so dated. Personally, I don't need a human story in a giant-monster movie; it can be interesting if it's done well, but I don't feel like I need somebody to relate to in every single movie I watch. I also dislike Clover's parasites for this same reason: They feel like they're only there so the human characters have something more in their own scale to interact with. But the going-away party only lasts for so long before it's interrupted.

At first everybody thinks it's a terrorist attack, of course, because the only thing anyone can see or hear from their place in the city is loud noises and lots of smoke. Even when the party spills out into the streets, there's so much confusion that nobody can tell what's going on. Fairly early, there's a somewhat iconic shot that I've always had a love-hate (okay, it's mostly hate-hate) relationship with: That scene where the Statue of Liberty's head comes flying out of the sky and lands in front of the main characters. Firstly, I would think a projectile of that mass launched at that speed from that height would make something of a giant crater rather than just kind of gently coming to rest in the street. Secondly, it's too convenient - the very first thing Clover smashes is America's most iconic monument? One could possibly argue that Clover thought it was another giant lifeform, and therefore a challenge, but Clover would really have no reason to recognize the Statue of Liberty as a lifeform any more than it would recognize an apartment building as a lifeform. What it feels like is a money shot; the creative team knowing they have the thing that's going to go on posters, blog articles, DVD covers, etc. And it encapsulates the tone of the film as a whole: A very, very well-done imitation of roughness, of spontaneity, of amateur filmmaking, but one that cost $25,000,000 to make.

There haven't been a lot of "on the ground" perspectives in a giant monster movie, which is why Cloverfield feels so fresh within the genre. The reactions of the main characters and the people around them make this movie hit home. But it's not consistent - the less said about T.J. Miller, the better, and Odette Annable as Beth is not the best actress I've ever seen - but sometimes it's really striking. Lizzy Caplan's character Marlena in utter shock as the only person in the main party who actually got a good look at Clover while everybody else was still confused and unaware is maybe one of my favorite parts of the first half of the film. Her delivery when she says "It was eating people", so blank and matter-of-fact, is way more effective than hysteria. It's also unusually tragic when Rob gets a call from his mother during a lull in the action and has to tell her his brother died. I think this movie does have a good handle on emotion, but only part of the time.

But let's talk about Clover. Oh ho ho ho. "Clover" is a nickname for the giant creature who really has a problem with Manhattan. Its official designation is "Large-Scale Aggressor", but you must stop me if you see me starting to go off about that, because I could talk for several more paragraphs about how referring to a lost, scared baby as an "Aggressor" cheeses me off. Clover is destructive not out of aggression, but due to being dropped in the middle of arguably the most bewildering civilized area in the country. Imagine you get lost in the middle of a maze, and you've never seen a maze before in your life, and you're also a baby. You are going to run into some walls. Unfortunately in Clover's case those walls are buildings with people in them. That Clover apparently eats humans (but finds T.J. Miller as unappetizing as the rest of his species does) isn't as big of a deal as I think this movie wants it to be, because again, this is a baby, and we all know how hard it is to keep babies from putting random things lying around on the ground into their mouth.

This movie feels like a video game. The way it progresses is like going through a series of challenges, some of which you fail: Try to keep all of your party alive while juking and dodging your way through a devastated city, with CGI rubble here and there and a creature or two on the loose. The film certainly has a video-game-like idea of what kind of damage a person can take - my "favorite" is Beth being apparently impaled through the shoulder and staked to her apartment floor, but then being able to run around as soon as she's freed and, inexplicably, move that arm, as if the piece of shrapnel just happened to conveniently bypass the muscles and bones in its way.

I guess I am being a little harsh on something that I rated four stars, but none of the things I've been pointing out actually bring me out of the movie. It wouldn't be as much of a thrill ride if there were more deaths or debilitating injuries to break up the flow of the story. This is a good movie; it got famous because it's really fun to watch and it's done in a (for the time) unusual style. The CGI still holds up for the most part, and although Clover never gets as much of the spotlight as I wish it would, this is still a very interesting version of the humans-vs-giant-monster story.

Godzilla 2000: Millennium (1999)

directed by Takao Okawara

107 minutes

Japan

4 stars out of 5

----

This is an older review, but since I rewatched this film last night in the theater and it's Godzilla Day, I'm going to try to edit it to be comprehensible enough to post. I have some thoughts about what is, unexpectedly, possibly my favorite of this era of Godzilla films. Yes, jellyfish Orga looks silly, and the CGI in some of the shots of Godzilla superimposed over land is dodgy at best, but there's something really special here that took a couple of viewings for me to appreciate.

This movie introduces us to a slightly updated version of Godzilla. Everything we're used to is all still there, of course - the roar, the atomic breath, the overall vibe - but made newer and shinier. Godzilla himself is spikier than ever, oddly slope-shouldered and distinctly green. He feels more calculating in this one, too. He seems to strategize and look at things from every angle before deciding on a plan of action, even being visibly weirded out at one point when Orga starts to transform. A newer suit actor (Tsutomu Kitagawa) may have had a lot to do with Godzilla's different mannerisms and body language in this film. I think Kitagawa does really well in the suit - he gives Godzilla a kind of fluidity of motion, as well as a distinct sense of scale, and you notice that Godzilla never really stands still.

In the opening scene, when we see Godzilla at sea, crunching up a boat, he does it with an uncharacteristic quiet. The first time I reviewed this, I remarked on how I thought that Godzilla being introduced in total silence like this instead of announcing his presence with a roar was probably a deliberate move to try and present him a little differently in this film than in others, but the thing I noticed more than that upon second viewing was that the boat Godzilla has in his mouth feels like a direct callback to the infamous train scene in the 1954 original. This whole scene is fascinating because it shows us Godzilla as something you could miss. We are of course used to his chaos and noise, his trail of destruction, but this shows us that Godzilla is a creature who is also capable of stealth. We see this two more times in the movie: When Shinoda, his daughter Io, and their unwilling photographer partner Ichinose come face-to-face with Godzilla in a tunnel, he's quiet and calculating, breath fogging up the windshield before he breaks it with his roar. Also, at the end, of the film, he confronts Hiroshi Abe's character Katagiri directly, one of the only times to this day that Godzilla has interacted with a single, specific person. Neither of these two instances display any of the wanton, indiscriminate destruction that has been Godzilla's signature for much of his history.

But I still think that this film, above all (or at least many) others might be my favorite example of Godzilla's creatureliness. The way humankind interacts with him and he interacts with humankind is handled in a deeply faceted and interesting way. We have two perspectives presented here regarding how to deal with him: A scientist who dropped out of his field due to clashes with colleagues over how immoral he felt his discipline was becoming, who wants to research Godzilla, and the leader of a defense organization, who only wants to kill Godzilla. You can see where both of them are coming from, because no one is going to argue that attempting to stop something causing unfathomable loss of life and material damage is a bad idea, but the message here is one of the essential core principles of this entire franchise: We shouldn't kill because we don't understand. It's not up to us to decide what lives and what dies just because we struggle with our place in the world next to it. We have to take responsibility for what we've made. We don't get to blindly eliminate what we wish we could forget.

The CGI is rough. Orga is a very strange enemy in general and the less I say about it, the better. I think this was the first or one of the first times that CGI was used so heavily to render a kaiju that Godzilla fought against, and it does not hold up to today's technical abilities, but again, it took a second viewing for me to be okay with that, and now I am. It is what it is, basically. The idea is there, and I don't like dismissing it just because the method of conveying that idea isn't up to my standards as a viewer in 2023. It's interesting, too, the way Godzilla fights Orga's "creature" form animal-to-animal at first, instead of just blasting it with atomic breath. For some reason his first idea is to go over and just slap the shit out of Orga. A lot of people make fun of this, but I interpreted it as Godzilla testing the waters, hitting his unusual opponent lightly at first to see how it would react.

I really appreciated the human characters in this one, which is a rare thing to say for these films. The characters we spend the most time with are not members of the military, or a cadre of scientists, but a father (who is, granted, an out-of-work scientist) and daughter who, along with some other scattered individuals across the country, make up a stormchaser-like network that tracks Godzilla and alerts the populated areas in his path so that they can have the most possible time to evacuate. The goal of this is to find a way of living with Godzilla, like adapting to life in an area prone to natural disasters. I was greatly thankful for this new outlook that wasn't from the perspective of the military, as that plot was getting a little long in the tooth from being hammered in practically every film. The military is there too as a foil to the GPN, but the focus is on smaller-scale attempts at finding a better solution than shooting Godzilla with masers and throwing fighter jets at him.

Hiroshi Abe's character provides genuinely one of my favorite scenes in this entire franchise when he faces down Godzilla one-on-one at the end of this film. Like, I could talk about this forever because it literally gives me chills, everything about it is so striking and powerful to me. The naming of things: What is "Gojira", as a name, in the context of this film? Godzilla 2000 exists in the same continuity as the 1954 original, so the people of this film would know "Gojira" as an indigenous language's name for the creature haunting their country. But, in that context as well as arguably in real life, it's a nonsense word. Any name we give an animal is only indicative of the way we interpret its nature; it says nothing of its true nature as an entity. It's like facing down a tiger and saying "Tiger!" It's putting a name to something that is so of itself that any puny human label we apply to it fails to adhere. Katagiri looks right at Godzilla and acknowledges the inextricable relationship between Godzilla and himself as a human by using the only word he's ever known to describe the creature. There is mutual recognition in that moment. The most important thing this movie does is make extraordinarily clear that we are a part of Godzilla and he is a part of us.

I once brought up Frankenstein in one of my Godzilla reviews because I felt like it was the closest Western equivalent: a creature who is not just a creature, but who stands for something more, who has a depth to them outside of their physical appearance. In Frankenstein, the monster's creator is horrified by his creation and rejects him, leaving the monster in a state of anguish and turmoil, as he doesn't fit in with human civilization, but is all too aware that he is still a thinking, feeling being. Is this not similar to Godzilla's own creation? Did we not bring him about ourselves, only to immediately begin searching for ways to destroy him? This film asks: even though he always brings such destruction, why does Godzilla end up protecting us in the end? The answer to this is almost at the level of parody - "Maybe there's a bit of Godzilla inside each and every one of us" - but I think I realized for maybe the first time that even if Godzilla has no respect whatsoever for human civilization, he does seem to do things that ultimately serve to protect human life as a whole, despite massive casualties in the process. And I think maybe he keeps us (most of us) alive because he doesn't think we deserve to forget him. It's this cycle of trying to live with the ghosts of our past, of trying desperately and failing repeatedly to learn from them and stop committing the same mistakes, and ultimately the realization that we cannot begin to move on if we don't recognize ourselves in the monster and the monster in ourselves.

Edit: Why on Earth does this review currently have over 250 views.