Godzilla 2000: Millennium (1999)

directed by Takao Okawara

107 minutes

Japan

4 stars out of 5

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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.

Shin Ultraman (2023)

directed by Shinji Higuchi

Japan

118 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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I am going to apologize up front because I wrote this on Wednesday night, as soon as I got back from seeing this movie, and my thoughts about it were (and still are) in nothing even remotely resembling a coherent order. I usually do try to have a framework to my reviews, to make one paragraph segue into another, to relate topics to each other, etc. I can't do that right now. So I'm just going to talk about a lot of separate things that hit me in this very, very, very good movie.

There is something about the first time Ultraman ("Ripiah", here) does his now-very-famous Specium Beam pose that is sticking with me. It's showy, it's deliberate. He does it slowly like he wants everyone watching to see exactly what he's doing. He never performs the beam this way in the original series. While a concrete explanation for why he does it this way in the movie may not exist - beyond simply that the director knew the audience would eat it up - a couple of possibilities stuck in my mind. The first is what I believe to be the most likely, and it's that Ultraman is doing this for the first time. He just arrived on Earth basically seconds ago and we don't know where he's been before this, we don't know if he's been in combat at all, if he's ever used this specific attack. He could be trying out an entirely new skill. The second explanation is that he's doing it so slowly because he knows his next host is out there somewhere; he knows someone important is watching so he's demonstrating what that someone is going to eventually do alongside him. Seeing as Kaminaga's partnering with Ultraman was an accident that neither of them foresaw, I don't think this is particularly likely, but I do enjoy thinking about it. Either way, that first beam attack is an incredible moment. I love it.

This is not an especially kaiju-heavy film; mostly it focuses on alien intrusions and meddling with humankind. It stuffs two entirely separate alien invasion plans (three, if you count what Zōffy was doing) into one movie. These alien plots brought something into Shin Ultraman that I was not expecting, and that's the kind of shamelessly fun espionage-and-intrigue subplots that the original Ultra series so often had. I kept myself deliberately in the dark about as much of this movie as I possibly could, so I had no idea what to expect, but I had in mind something a little bit more serious and dark, and while this movie is serious and dark, Zarab's and Mefilas' attempts at overtaking the Earth are... they're goofy. Zarab wears a trenchcoat and a fedora, like in the original. Mefilas is so smarmy and ingratiates himself so easily with humanity's elites that it's amusing how hatable he is. These are fun, funny things. The original series was very, very fond of random spy stuff and weird INTERPOL doings, that kind of thing was always popping up, but I didn't expect to see it here. I absolutely love the mixture of humor into moments of crisis.

I just... I can't pack everything I want to say into this! This series means so much to me and I just watched a movie that honors what it means in such a deep way.

While in the '66 Ultraman we saw much more of Hayata's perspective as a human, this movie flips it the other way. Ultraman himself is a much stronger presence than his human side - in fact, his human side has essentially been killed, and while, as always, as always, he is both, human and Ultra, is is Ripiah piloting the body. Ripiah is who everyone is talking to when they talk to Kaminaga's body. Takumi Saitoh puts in such a good performance here, fleshing out this role and conveying a sense of outsiderness but also of deep care - the way he is initially cold to the people around him because he just doesn't know what being a human is, but also the way, immediately after that awkward interaction with his new coworkers, he goes to the library and reads up on human nature. He cares about us from day one. He puts in the effort to learn about us. The "buddy"s are genuine, once he learns how to use them.

I think, personally, the backbone of the Ultra series has always been persistence. This is the core of why Ultraman fights for humanity in this movie. In the end he isn't even really fighting aliens or kaiju - he dispatches all of them easily enough (when he sliced Zarab in half somebody in the back of the theater hooted). In the end he's fighting his own kind. He's fighting Zōffy. Zōffy isn't malicious towards humanity but he doesn't see the value in it like Ripiah does - but he can be made to, and this is another important point: There always has to be somebody to say wait a minute, somebody to stay their hand and stand up. The Ultra series isn't even about a fight in terms of two opponents, on even ground, who desire destruction for the same reasons. It's about the reasons why each side fights, the thought process behind it, and how that thought process might be changed, how peace might be achieved through understanding. I mean, most of the time. Sometimes peace is achieved through slicing stuff into little pieces, but you know what I mean. I also think that the fact that Zōffy was able to be swayed is a mark of how the Land of Light is a more advanced civilization than ours.

And there's something really, really interesting that this movie does that the series never explicitly comes out and does. This is, I'm guessing, only possible because it's a stand-alone movie and not a series that has to worry about how to go on after doing something that could functionally wreck the need for a continuing storyline. This is when Ultraman gives humanity the secrets behind Beta Capsule technology. The relationship between Ultras and humanity - specifically, how Ultras can protect humanity and involve themselves with us without "interfering" - is something that a lot of spinoff media (ask me about Mystery of Ultraseven and how much I hated the first issue when you have two hours to spare) fails to capture, but this movie captures it pretty much perfectly. Ultraman has always wanted humanity to grow into its own; he wants to see us learn how to fend for ourselves, but again, because of the nature of a series he was never really able to say "here is a superweapon please be careful with it". There is in fact so much crammed into this movie that I feel like it could be an entire series. Not a 51-episode thing like they used to be, but just a short miniseries that could tastefully expand upon the themes of the original without having to worry about length. Anyway, like I keep saying, I haven't digested the whole plot into my brain yet. I just know that the way Ultraman interacts with humanity as a whole here is a big part of why I was so into this film.

I actually love the way CG was used here. I of course am a dedicated suit acting fan but the design that went into each individual kaiju (again, there's not as many as you think!) drew my attention. I love the fact that Shin Gomess is made to look like Shin Godzilla as a tribute to the way the Gomess suit in the series was a reused Godzilla suit. I thought Neronga was absolutely beautiful, I loved how there were so many individual parts to him that moved and shivered when he did. Gabora was great too, and again, has facial similarities to Neronga as a tribute to them being the same suit. And my god, Zarab! You can't tell from still images, but he's hollow inside, like the rotating mask illusion! While I do love the original Zarab suit (and the overall design, apart from being hollow, is remarkably unchanged), this is something that could probably only be achieved through CGI. And I remember as soon as I saw posters and trailers for this film I thought that the design of Ultraman himself was really something else. It feels true to the original design both in terms of Tohl Narita's sketch for it and in terms of how the suit actually ended up looking. When Asami sees him for the first time she calls him beautiful and I have to say I was thinking the exact same thing too.

And oh. My. God. Zetton. I'm dedicating an entire paragraph to Shin Zetton because I thought everything about it was just incredible. The way it assembles itself outwards from a central point, the unsettling symmetry of it, how alien it looked but how you can instantly still tell it's Zetton from the antenna. The sheer, unbelievable scale of it when Ultraman flies right up to it and you can see how tiny he is in comparison. And back on Earth, those shots of it just barely visible in the sky, cruciform, hanging over the world like the ticking time bomb it was. I love everything about Shin Zetton conceptually and in terms of aesthetic.

I might come back and add more to this review plotwise once I've lived with it a little because at the moment I'm not thinking too deeply about the plot in specific (besides just "IT WAS INCREDIBLE I LOVED IT") but I want to express that this movie is FUN. I felt like I could barely take in everything at once. I would urge you all to see it on the big screen, but unfortunately it was only in theaters for two nights, so I'll urge you instead to wait until you can get a Blu-Ray or DVD and watch it on the biggest screen available to you. The battles are just incredibly good, pure sci-fi madness, everything is pitch-perfect. I have nothing whatsoever against the use of CGI for a traditionally suit-acted role because I know that care was still put into bringing this Ultraman to the screen, just like always. The fact that they brought Bin Furuya back for the mo-cap should dispel any doubts about that. But overall this was just such a pure good experience. If the rumors about a Shin Jack and Shin Seven are true, I will be in the theater for them too, should they grace our shores.