Let's Go See A Movie

I originally wrote this post to celebrate having had my other blog for a year. I worked really hard on it, but then I decided it was extremely silly and not a good fit for that blog. So I'm shunting it over here instead.

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I've been running this blog for a year now. I must admit I've poured a considerable amount of money and an even more considerable amount of time into it. So it's only appropriate that for my one-year anniversary post, I've done something that involves both money and time: I've bought us a time machine!

"Where'd you get it?" What do you mean, where'd I get it? Yahoo! Auctions, of course, that's where I get everything.

Anyway, you and me are going to go back to 1959 and catch a showing of The Mysterians stateside. Yes, the dub is bad, but we're witnessing history here. We're going to San Francisco's Metro Theatre, because I like San Francisco. It's way too expensive these days, but in 1959 we'll be paying about a dollar for our tickets. We can sneak out before the movie they're double-billing it with comes on.

Here we are, and there's a line out the door! Everybody's scrambling to see The Mysterians and American movie critics in the '50s have a ton of respect for Japanese films and don't think they're a joke in the slightest.^{[citation needed]}

The lobby is nice and air-conditioned, but San Francisco in late spring isn't too hot in the first place. We're here in the last week or two of May, just after the film opened on the 15th. If you look closely, you can see a poster in the back advertising another upcoming imported feature - it's The H-Man, set to release on the 28th! Don't worry, there's enough juice in the time machine for a second trip.

Because I have a guy on the inside, we've got an original pressbook to look through while we're waiting in line. (We may be a bit early; time machine calibration is not an exact science.)

Let's see how they're trying to sell this one to theater owners across the nation:

• "Invaders from space coming to steal our women" is probably the #1 selling point across all the U.S. advertising materials.
• The color and scope are also highly emphasized, but this gets my goat a little, because it's shilled all over as a CinemaScope picture that utilizes Eastmancolor - it's not, it's TohoScope, but we wouldn't know that since the American cut removes the TohoScope logo. The technical specifications of TohoScope are almost identical to CinemaScope, I admit, but... it's just not, okay? 
• Space is cool! Everyone loves space! The Mysterians fit in quite well with the mania for atomic/science/space-themed sci-fi films in the 1950s.
• You can order 4,000 "heralds" (small two-page folded pamphlets) for $28.75 - that's about $313 in today's money. (I have of course ordered these to be sent to your house when you get back from our trip.)
• Moguera is hyped up in promotional materials but seen as a bit of a joke by critics, as we'll see shortly.

If we turned on the radio - we do have a radio inside the time machine - we might be able to catch an announcement advertising the film. There were eight different varieties of these for broadcasters to choose from. In the interest of space I won't duplicate every single one here, just the longest (which I've had to reconstruct a bit since the pamphlet I'm looking at is cut off on one side):

"From behind the moon they come - to invade the Earth - to abduct our women and [level] our cities!! They are THE MYSTERIANS... demons from behind the moon, who top our every top secret! MGM now [presents] an enthralling motion picture about a master race that smashed the atom before we even saw the light of day - THE MYSTERIANS! [Aliens] who abduct Earth's women so that they themselves [can breed]... super-sonic war erupts from out of space before your very eyes! [A giant robot]... sheathed in heavy metal... fifty times the size [of a man]! [Crushing every] human being in its path with the dreadful searing rays [from its eyes] - see it all in THE MYSTERIANS! A terrifying, fantastic [feature presented in] giant CinemaScope and Color! THE MYSTERIANS!"

And the shortest:

"MGM presents a first in terror - THE MYSTERIANS - a master race that smashed the atom before we were born! See electronic war erupt from outer space! See THE MYSTERIANS - in Giant Cinemascope and Color!"

Our theater has chosen to spring for all possible advertisement. We're beset by many different sizes of lobby cards, most of which feature lovely (although maybe not quite screen-accurate) original illustrations by Lt. Colonel Robert B. Rigg. 

I ask the guy behind the counter selling tickets so nicely if I can buy this one off him but he won't let me:

This is actually meant for advertising in newspapers and so probably wouldn't be on display in a theater. Also god damn

We might even see some kids playing around with a Mysterian trading card from Nu-Card, featuring a tremendously bad pun.

How did all this advertising pay off? Pretty well - the film grossed $975,000 in the American box office. Adjusted for inflation that is $10,607,092. Unfortunately 1959 is also the year that Ben-Hur came out, grossing $74,432,704 in the North American (U.S. and Canada) box office, which, adjusted for inflation, is $809,758,520. That's insane money. I could buy at least two DVDs off YesAsia with that. Still! Almost a million dollars for an imported Japanese feature means the people do like The Mysterians.

And enough about us, who already know and love this movie. What do the critics say? Before I picked you up in this time machine I went to a couple newsstands and grabbed some old papers and periodicals. Here's the May 23 issue of Harrison's Reports:

"From the production point of view, this Japanese-made science-fiction thriller, which is enhanced by CinemaScope and Eastmancolor, is far better than most America-made pictures of its type." Wow! That's much nicer than what most American critics of Japanese films had to say. 

Now let's look at Boxoffice. Dear reader - I mean, time machine companion - I hate this one.

Americans in the 1950s would go see a Japanese movie and be like "aw man there's Japanese people in this"

Emphasizing that "the cast means nothing" not once but twice within a one-paragraph review, describing Kenji Sahara and Yumi Shirakawa as having "only a slightly Oriental cast of features and [almost resembling] American teenagers"... oh boy. I forgot we were still in the 1950s for a moment.

Let's move on to Variety. Oh, it doesn't look good already. "As corny as it is furious, The Mysterians is red-blooded phantasmagoria - made in Japan and dedicated to those undiscerning enough to be taken in by its hokum."

"The cast - from Kenji Sahara to Minosuke Yamada - isn't intended to sell many Yankee tickets." Okay?

I've got a review from the New York Times as well, but I won't repeat it here since it's much of the same wisecracking and actually goes so far as to refer to it as a "mess". I do appreciate this quote, however: "It has to do with a huge, globular fortress that plops to earth 'from the fifth planet' (wherever that is), envelops a group of glamour girls and is finally destroyed by a brave young Galahad."

Hmm. Well, while the critics seem intent on dismissing the Japanese cast altogether, the people in the Metro with us today who have more "highbrow" tastes will definitely recognize Takashi Shimura from the Kurosawa films that have been playing stateside since Rashomon in the early '50s. People have also seen Yoshio Tsuchiya if they've seen Seven Samurai, but they probably wouldn't recognize him here, as his face is covered in The Mysterians and he is dubbed over. Anybody who's seen Godzilla, King of the Monsters! will (theoretically) recognize both Momoko Kōchi and Akihiko Hirata, and a very select few might have seen Hirata in other things - possibly one of Inagaki's Samurai films, or even Itsuko and Her Mother, although the chances of that being the thing they know him from are vanishingly slim since, as far as I know, that film only screened in Hawaii. And, of course, anybody here who's seen Rodan could recognize him, Kenji Sahara, and Yumi Shirakawa. We'll be seeing them all again quite soon in The H-Man as well.

So the cast means nothing to Americans, huh? It's debatable how much anybody actually cared, but to say that none of the cast of The Mysterians would have been familiar to American audiences is just not true.

I'll leave this alone in a minute, I promise, but stick with me a little longer here. I've always been curious about how much American audiences were actually paying attention to the cast of the imported Japanese films they were watching. I looked up Variety's review of The H-Man, which is credited to the same person who reviewed The Mysterians, and...

...this critic appears to have mixed up Kenji Sahara and Akihiko Hirata's roles in the film, which means he presumably was not recognizing people who were in the same movie he'd just watched a week or two prior (or at least not bothering to put names to faces). So the answer to "how much did Americans care?" is probably not very much.

Alright, the movie's about to start. We're in our seats, and you've endured me lecturing you for this long, time to get down to business. For a more extensive overview of how the American cut differs from the Japanese original, I'll turn it over to our friend Brian Culver at The History Vortex. One of the more notable losses in the American cut - which is fairly good as far as these things go - is Ifukube's formidable score, which appears to have been distorted into something more like the eerie, theremin-soaked sci-fi soundtracks Americans were used to. The second Moguera is also cut out entirely, which is a shame, because I screened The Mysterians to a small audience myself back in the present day and that moment got some big laughs.

The Metro is a stadium-style theater that has only one single screen but a massive seating capacity - 856 seats by the time of its closure, but probably a bit less when we're here. We're sitting in the front row, naturally. Can you see us? We're right down there.

85 minutes later (the U.S. cut shaves down some special effects scenes, removing three minutes of runtime), we're ready to get out of here before Watusi starts and go back home.

Thank you for accompanying me on this journey. I'm not talking about the time machine anymore, I'm talking about this blog. It's a lonely business running a fansite for an actor who most people in the English-speaking world only know for one role, but I genuinely enjoy writing these posts very much. I think it is worth doing and I hope you think it is worth reading.

Even if you don't, there will still be more posts.

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Note:

In this post I've embellished a few details to give a fictionalized idea of what it would be like to sit down and see The Mysterians in a U.S. theater during its initial run. While I have no proof that The Mysterians ever played at the Metro Theater specifically, it very well could have. However, everything else is factual and is taken from reliable primary sources. The photo of the theater interior I've used is not the Metro Theater but the Bagdad Theater in Portland, Oregon; I've chosen it for its ambiance and the size of its screen. You can find more information about the Metro Theater here.

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Image credits:

Metro Theater exterior: from Jack Tillmany collection

Metro Theater lobby: photo by Ted Newman, from Jack Tillmany collection

Bagdad Theater interior: photo by Kathleen Nyman

At the Earth's Core (1976)

directed by Kevin Connor

UK/USA

90 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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At the Earth's Core is honestly the most I've felt like I was watching tokusatsu during any single movie made outside of Japan. The dichotomy between how Japanese practical effects films were/are perceived - especially in the '70s - and how Western ones are perceived means that no one would acknowledge it (Japan makes the goofy rubber-suit-and-cardboard-city movies, the US and UK make Art™, or so popular opinion goes), but there really is not much aesthetic difference between the suitmation in this and something like, say, Ultraman Taro.

We get little introduction to the lead characters: the first time we see them is pretty much as soon as they set off on their underground voyage, and instead of stopping to give us backstory at any point, the film remains firmly focused on the present, having them react to challenges in front of them as if they came into existence when the film started. As our two leads we've got a guy named David who is the most unremarkable man in the world, and his sidekick, Dr. Perry, played with extreme Britishness by Peter Cushing. If there's any aspect of this film I solidly disliked, it was David, and really by extension all characters except for Perry; I would have accepted a version of this movie that was just him down there getting into random situations. But the two do play off of each other very well. David is the kind of bland protagonist that exists in a lot of adventure novels where he has such a lack of personality that the reader is given to map their own thoughts and feelings onto him, but to me that seems like it works much better in a book than on film. This movie has a lot of issues that any given book-to-film adaptation usually has (namely, that a lot of things feel unearned due to having spent less time with the characters than we would if we'd been reading a book), but it's also awesome and I love it.

The majority of what happens once the digging machine - which is the Gotengo, by the way, it is so perfectly the Gotengo - reaches the center of the Earth is generic male fantasy stuff. David commits a social faux pas by being nice to a girl, which turns out to be a no-no in this society of cartoon barbarians, and then spends the rest of the film fighting monsters and other guys for the right to marry her. To her credit she ultimately refuses him at the end but it's out of some weird sense of racial pride, that her lot in life is to stay down in the underground with her own people, which... yeah, we're gonna get into the race stuff in a minute, but it's not handled very well, although from what I know about the source material, the racism is actually toned WAY down here.

But my god, dude, the monster suits. The foggy, neon-lit soundstage jungle. The rear projection which is so obviously rear projection but you're too immersed in it to really care. It's one of those movies where you can see the zippers and the wires and imagine the boundaries of the set, but instead of looking cheaper for it, it's all the more impressive how much the film attempts to do. There are multiple types of weird creatures: shouty monkey guys herding humans into chain gangs to do their bidding, telepathic birdmen who control the monkey guys, hippopotamus-like dinosaurs who shoot fire, other dinosaurs, living plants, giant Venus flytraps... there's an entire ecosystem presented to us in glorious suitmation, and honestly, I love every minute of it. And if you like worldbuilding, this is Burroughs we're talking about - the film doesn't even scratch the surface, but it's an admirable attempt.

Now, the first time I watched this, I didn't pay too much attention to the whole idea of multiple human tribes existing in Pellucidar who were constantly at odds with each other, because what the movie does to depict these tribes is give all the non-white actors the same really bad curly wig. I didn't catch that these were meant to be members of a different "tribe" the first time around because I just assumed they had bad wigs for no reason other than somebody in costuming thought it was a good idea. It's not really a huge part of the story, but another deed our savior David does on his journey through Pellucidar is unify the tribes, which is shown as a big celebration with much dancing and music - but, again, the word here is "unearned". If there was real-world commentary intended here, it's not fleshed out enough to be anything other than awkward and poorly done.

On the whole, the movie is frequently cheesy, extremely unserious, a bit of a mess, and has a few flaws, but I do still think it's one of the more unique things I've seen. The Isao Tomita score (not really, but that's what it sounds like) and multitude of strange beasts that all seem to explode instantly upon death, the wide-eyed ten-year-old boy fantasy vibe, the occasionally groan-worthy humor... there's so much going on in this movie's 90 minutes. For better or worse, this kind of thing could only exist in 1976, and even if it's a critical failure, I'm glad people made this movie so I can keep rewatching it and going back to its hypnotic, hallucinatory, out-of-time fantasy world.

Eraserhead (1977)

directed by David Lynch

USA

88 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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It's been probably over ten years since I last watched this and it has been one of those films that exists in my head as a concept more than as an actual memory of having seen it. And, like many if not all films that attain that category, even if I consider them to be personal favorites, I'm always surprised by how good they are once I finally do watch them again.

David Lynch's death is a hard one to deal with. Much has been said lately about his refusal to elaborate upon or explain themes in his films, choosing instead to leave it up to the viewer to interpret them. I think that this is an extremely admirable way of making art, and one that, if the artist is able to be personally content with putting their work out there in its finished form and letting it speak for itself, can be fulfilling for both the artist and the viewer. Art will always exist as much in the mind of the audience as it does in the mind of the artist. An artist might mean something specific by incorporating a specific thing in their work, but that thing will always ultimately be most meaningful to them; what resonates with a single viewer could be wholly different from what the artist intended when they created the work.

It's freeing, as a viewer, to be able to interpret a film without feeling like you're coming to the "wrong" conclusion about it. For that reason, I'm going to talk about what I think of Eraserhead on a personal level.

One of my biggest takeaways from the film is that there's something weirdly American about it. It feels heavily reminiscent of dour Soviet and Eastern European films like Stalker, The Ugly Swans, and 1980's Golem (among many others), but the characters, the way they conduct themselves, the music and the furnishings that they're surrounded with, all speak to a kind of uniquely desperate mid-20th-century American way of life. It's a little anachronistic; I wasn't alive in the late 1970s, but to my understanding people didn't really dress like the Lady in the Radiator or even like Henry's girlfriend Mary unless they were elderly. Henry himself goes around in a suit most of the time and proclaims that he works in a factory. It feels a little bit more like the times Lynch himself might have grown up in rather than the contemporary atmosphere.

A theme that seems to recur throughout the film is the horror of a hole. Things come out of, and happen inside, holes. Our introduction to the place where Henry lives is through an apocalyptic aerial zoom of a house with a large hole in its roof. A non sequitur involving the worm thing Henry finds in his mailbox ends in the worm itself growing a gaping maw that the camera falls into. Henry's brief affair with the woman next door culminates in the two of them sinking slowly into a hole that appears in the center of his bed. And at the very beginning, the film's horror of horrors, the baby itself, is birthed from Henry's open mouth. This is a deeply, deeply unsettling film, more frightening with what it shows you than with what it holds back, but there is still that sense that there are things in the shadows of it, at the bottom of holes, craters, canyons, mouths.

One tempting and even somewhat compelling read of the film is a literalist approach that says the world it depicts is some kind of post-apocalyptic wasteland, where everything and everyone is strange because they're poisoned and mutated from radioactive fallout or some such. The film itself even gives us a small detail that could seem to point to this interpretation: the framed picture of a mushroom cloud next to Henry's bed. This could be a hint, or it could mean something else, or it could mean nothing at all. Personally, I think it kind of fits in with the American-ness of it all, the casual display of a symbol of incredible destructive power out of pride, maybe, or fascination; hung prominently the way one might mount a small crucifix.

And then there is the baby. I honestly forgot how horrible that thing is. It's one of the rare elements of the film that is acknowledged as being somehow wrong and bizarre within the film itself - "They're not even sure it is a baby" - and characters react to it in a way that seems reasonable given what it is, which can't be said for most other aspects of the film. On some level it does elicit a sympathetic reaction, since it is a helpless, sick creature too weak to do anything but cry and move its head a little, but it's also just so disturbing that it's impossible to really empathize with it. As for its significance to the narrative, to me it felt like after a while the baby was becoming an extension of Henry himself. They do become physically indistinguishable after a point, with Henry losing his own head and having it replaced with the baby's. Henry finally cutting the baby open and stabbing it could be read as a kind of suicide.

There's a scene in the movie Jigoku that I kept thinking about during this. The guilt-ridden protagonist of that film descends through Buddhist hell until he meets his dead girlfriend, who tells him that she's had a baby down there, but she put it on a big leaf and sent it floating away down the river, and he has to rescue it right now, hurry up, he has no choice, he has to save his baby, right now, go! Overwhelmingly, watching that scene, as with watching Eraserhead, I got the feeling that I was watching a nightmare on screen, because nightmares are the only place where I personally have experienced such a sense of deep urgency and obligation coupled with a situation that is so outwardly bizarre and impossible. It feels like a classic nightmare situation to be tasked with doing something that is of life-and-death importance but is also nearly impossible and makes very little sense in the first place, like raising a disgusting cow fetus-baby when no one has ever told you where it actually came from, just that you are somehow the father.

I guess I have to stop this somewhere. This is one of my favorite movies. It's an easy five stars. I could watch this ten more times and come away from it with ten new interpretations, each entirely different from the last. It's a film that really feels perfectly realized, and I think that may owe a lot to Lynch's ability to put art out there without explaining it. I love that a film can just be weird and nightmarish without having to justify itself.

Cellphone Investigator 7 (2008)

directed by Takashi Miike, Takeshi Watanabe, Hiroyuki Tsuji, Manabu Asō, Kazuya Konaka et al

Japan

4.5 stars out of 5

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As a tokusatsu fan, I should probably know better than to judge by appearances at this point, but I have to be honest: I did not expect the television show about a walking, talking cell phone who solves cyber crimes with a 16-year-old boy as its partner to be one of the best things I've watched in recent memory.

The show basically gives you everything you need to know about it within its opening credits. Keita, a high school student, suddenly finds the whole course of his life changed when he witnesses a man killed by a rogue construction crane in front of him, and discovers that the man was secretly an agent for Under Anchor, an organization developing special AI-powered cell phones to combat cyber crimes. Keita is reluctant at the beginning of the show but becomes a full-fledged Anchor agent soon enough, and by the end, god damn, that high schooler is the best agent they ever had. (Okay, maybe not the best, but probably the most emotionally invested.)

This show has pacing issues. I will say that up front because I think that what constitutes "issues" for any other show is instead, for CPI7, something it wears with pride. One of the things this show does that I really admire, and that I wish more series would do, is bring in different directors and let them keep their directorial style. Every so often there will be an episode that's so wildly different that you think "wow, who did that one?" and you look it up and surprise! It's Mamoru Oshii (for example), and you can tell it's Mamoru Oshii, because instead of keeping to a baseline throughout the entire series, some episodes are allowed to just be these wonderful little one-off capsules of weird that don't develop the plot but feel instead like a movie starring the characters of the show you've been watching.

For a show ostensibly about cyber crimes, there's really not a lot of cyber crime-solving going on. Most of what happens is very self-contained and usually the stakes aren't that high: Keita and some random guy almost get killed by gun smugglers, a little girl finds Seven (the phone) and he helps her get over feeling alienated by her parents' impending divorce, a really bad comedian makes it his mission in life to court Touko, and, like, literally just The Ring, to name a few. Like I said, the double episode that Oshii directed is one of the most astonishing things I've seen in the context of a television series, and it has absolutely nothing to do with solving crime. It just lets us meditate with the characters for a while in a world that is wholly a fantasy and is more real for it.

"Life is just saying goodbye."

"Then what is the spring that always returns?"

I think by far the crowning achievement of CPI7 is how much it got me to care about the phones. When we begin the series' storyline, Anchor had been developing cell phones called Phone Bravers with the ability to walk and talk and learn from their partners, seven of which were created but only three remain functional (we learn about the others as the show progresses). The phones are partnered with human agents who are referred to as their "Buddy", and develop a bond with them where each influences the other, as the phones provide tactical and logistical support that a human couldn't, and the human provides, for lack of a better term, life skills for the Phone Bravers. And let me tell you, they are doing some kind of magic with how well the Bravers are integrated into the cast. By the end of the show I was 1000% invested in the phones and 1000% forgetting they were little CGI phones and not actual human cast members. It's just absolutely perfect at making you care about the Bravers and feel for them as they respond to - and develop - emotions in their own flawed, weird, nonlinear, very human way.

To discuss the story in-universe a little bit: the bond between the Bravers and their buddies is integral to the overarching plot of the show. The ultimate villain is a rogue AI named Gene created by Ultraman Agul a shady tech CEO that evolves to come to the conclusion that humans are making the world a worse place and should be eliminated. Gene becomes a villain precisely because it's let loose without the ability to learn from an individual human the way the Phone Bravers are. Gene's creator failed to provide the kind of care, attention, and empathy that the Under Anchor agents did for their phones, and instead he just mass-produced them as quickly as possible with a childlike brain intended for rapid growth and self-sufficiency rather than emotional reasoning and understanding. The Phone Braver program works because the phones are treated like people, because they functionally are. The relationship between the Bravers and their buddies is a friendship between equals. Gene is a feral child left to fend for itself, with nobody else to learn from but other feral children.

I want to nominate Masataka Kubota, who plays Keita, for every award retroactively. The way he handles the massive tonal shifts from episode to episode is admirable. He does at times feel authentically like a 16-year-old boy, but he doesn't play Keita like a parody of himself. And he always sells his interactions with Seven and the other Bravers. The whole cast does, but Keita has more direct interaction with the phones than anyone else. I was so fully invested in the final episode due to how Kubota was nailing it and how the writing team was managing to make these phones feel like real living characters that it was honestly a little overwhelming.

So, yeah. I watched the cell phone detective show and it got me really emotional. I wish there were more shows like this, but this one is a special, rare thing, and maybe that's how it should be.

Mystery Comet Tsuifon

Godzilla vs. Megaguirus (2000)

directed by Masaaki Tezuka

Japan

105 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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As its full title ("The G Extermination Strategy") suggests, this is one of those Godzilla films in which the goal is simple eradication - not finding a way to live with Godzilla through psychic mediation, not putting him somewhere where he can never be a problem again, just killing him dead, no nuance. This straightforward approach reflects Godzilla's role in the film as well. However, even though he is a cut-and-dry villain here, this is one of the more comedic Godzilla iterations. I was actually surprised by how comedic he is on my most recent rewatch; some of the fight scenes are Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster-level goofy.

Some of these movies give Godzilla a real "jealous boyfriend" attitude: on the one hand, when humanity does anything he doesn't like - such as developing nuclear weapons - he comes to put us in our place. But on the other hand, if any other kaiju emerge to threaten humanity, he'll also come and dispatch them. Not to protect us, but because Godzilla can only ever be the sole arbiter of humanity's fate, and no potential usurpers will be tolerated. This film in particular takes place in a neatly explained timeline in which the original Godzilla was the beginning of a series of attacks, where any time a milestone of scientific development was reached, Godzilla would appear and destroy it. There is a human villain at the end who is unscrupulous enough to risk getting Japan stomped in favor of financial gain, but humans on the whole are not the bad guys per se. Still, the human characters are too thinly developed to really root for: the protagonist is given the most predictable of backstories (her mentor was killed by falling debris during a Godzilla attack in front of her, now she swears vengeance), and Godzilla is just doing what he usually does in knocking humanity down a peg when they get too high and mighty.

I really don't like bug kaiju. Not because I'm afraid of bugs but because I think "thing, but huge" is a really silly and uninteresting format for a monster (this is also why I dislike King Kong). Megaguirus is no exception. I appreciate the level of detail put into her (her?) design, and the puppetry was so good I kept forgetting it was puppetry, but as a character she doesn't compel me nearly as much as other Godzilla antagonists, especially considering this movie was sandwiched between Godzilla 2000 and GMK, which - and you can dislike 2000 as much as you like, but Orga was a cool idea - both have great kaiju casts.

This kind of feels like a Godzilla movie for people who don't particularly want to watch a Godzilla movie. It is good, and I enjoy it whenever I watch it, but it's a movie I watch and then don't think about very much, whereas every other Godzilla movie occupies a permanent spot in my brain. The black hole gun is an interesting idea but it becomes almost laughable when Godzilla repeatedly shrugs it off almost every time they fire it at him. Killing Godzilla for real at the end of the film was basically not ever going to happen, so even the big moment where they seemingly blast Godzilla into the crust of the Earth has its impact dulled by the final scene implying the Dimension Tide didn't work so well after all.

This is not my favorite Godzilla movie, but I rewatched it on New Year's Eve, and - without timing it at all - it hit midnight almost exactly as they fired the Dimension Tide for the last time, and let me tell you, it got me hype as hell.