Godzilla: Final Wars (2004)
Everyone's favorite "King of the Monsters" returns to do battle with his greatest rubber-suited foes. Directed by Ryuhei Kitamura.
This movie, created to celebrate Godzilla's 50th Anniversary (the original is from 1954) is a very entertaining film about everyone's favorite rubber-suited monster. Fully aware of the series inherent cheesiness, the film attempts to reference as many Godzilla films as possible, all while having a great time and showing some excellent special effects.
There's not a whole lot of coherent plot here: Earth has been menaced by Godzilla and his like in the past, and have created an Earth Defense Force which does battle with these monsters. Furthermore, human mutants have appeared and are specially trained to fight these beasts - they have what is termed the "M-gene" (or something).
Aliens arrive, attempt to take over the Earth, and reveal that they have the power to control all of the monsters on Earth and the mutants (who all share this "M-gene"). Well, all monsters but one: Godzilla, King of the Monsters! Who has been frozen in the South Pole for a couple of years. We follow the exploits of a crew as they race to free Godzilla so that he can destroy all of the other monsters.
The captain of the expedition can only be described as Jesse Venture playing Stalin in a bio-pic. That's his look. It turns out he was the one who originally defeated Godzilla. But really, the plot is secondary to the real purpose of the movie: monster slugfests. Godzilla fights them all, including the CGI Godzilla from the 1998 American re-make, which he quickly dispatches.
While I really enjoyed this movie, I could only imagine how much more appreciative I would have been if I had actually seen any of the other Godzilla movies. I've watched part of the original, but that's it. And while it didn't take away any from the film, it certainly did make me wish I could have seen some of the original fights. But the audience, composed mostly of diehard Godzilla fans, was really into the movie, so it appeared to be a big hit.
This movie, created to celebrate Godzilla's 50th Anniversary (the original is from 1954) is a very entertaining film about everyone's favorite rubber-suited monster. Fully aware of the series inherent cheesiness, the film attempts to reference as many Godzilla films as possible, all while having a great time and showing some excellent special effects.
There's not a whole lot of coherent plot here: Earth has been menaced by Godzilla and his like in the past, and have created an Earth Defense Force which does battle with these monsters. Furthermore, human mutants have appeared and are specially trained to fight these beasts - they have what is termed the "M-gene" (or something).
Aliens arrive, attempt to take over the Earth, and reveal that they have the power to control all of the monsters on Earth and the mutants (who all share this "M-gene"). Well, all monsters but one: Godzilla, King of the Monsters! Who has been frozen in the South Pole for a couple of years. We follow the exploits of a crew as they race to free Godzilla so that he can destroy all of the other monsters.
The captain of the expedition can only be described as Jesse Venture playing Stalin in a bio-pic. That's his look. It turns out he was the one who originally defeated Godzilla. But really, the plot is secondary to the real purpose of the movie: monster slugfests. Godzilla fights them all, including the CGI Godzilla from the 1998 American re-make, which he quickly dispatches.
While I really enjoyed this movie, I could only imagine how much more appreciative I would have been if I had actually seen any of the other Godzilla movies. I've watched part of the original, but that's it. And while it didn't take away any from the film, it certainly did make me wish I could have seen some of the original fights. But the audience, composed mostly of diehard Godzilla fans, was really into the movie, so it appeared to be a big hit.
posted by Mike at 6:36 PM
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