Tuesday, February 19, 2019

Godzilla: Planet Of Monsters

Well that was different.



Not bad by any means but certainly a novel approach in many aspects to the Godzilla series. The first thing I gotta bring up is, this animation style is something I have a hard time putting my finger on. It's this weird pseudo-3D animation, like imagine if the CG Clone Wars series was animated like it was still 2D, this animation style is relatively new and the first instance I knew of it was the Tron Uprising show. It's stilted like it's drawn but looks nicer, it's such a mixed bag and I'm really not sure if it works regardless of subject material or context. But beyond that how's the movie? Well it might have the most futuristic and original story of the whole series and that's actually saying a lot, kaiju erupt across the world like in Pacific Rim and they royaly screw the Earth over to the point where the humans literally have to GTFO of the whole planet, they build this makeshift spacecraft so they can escape. 20 years pass but if Interstellar has taught us anything, time is a bit fluid in space so 20 years for them, is 20,000 years on Earth so our heroes must attempt to reclaim the world from the King Of The Monsters in his most powerful and monstrous form ever. Like seriously Final Wars and Shin Godzilla are absolute wimps compared to this Godzilla, he looks like it's really been over 20,000 years with his massive build, he looks like if a mountain aspired to be Godzilla or like a giant gnarled rainforest tree, dude looks seriously old and yet so powerful and it's pretty rad. There's not much in terms of story or character, but hey this is the basis for a series so they had to focus more on world building than intricate plots and complex characters, so I can totally understand it. But the characters aren't bad, more or less imagine if you will, if the buisnessman and politicians in older Godzilla movies were in their 20s and actually went out to fight. And granted our main character does have a serious rage boner vendetta aginst Godzilla but the reasoning is kinda weak, just oh he stole our world from us so I want to kick his ass. Good luck with that son.  So yeah, very different from our usual gaggle of various monsters, kaiju battles, and boring human scenes but they never go too far, it's still a Godzilla movie straight from Toho but with more creative and risk taking ideas. I do really think though the best part of the whole movie is the undeniable fact that Godzilla is a full fledged god of destruction, the way people talk about him, the way he is potrayed in both his design and incredible show of power really does solidify this hopeless, dread filled, absolute friggin' no win scenario for these people and it is great! It does bring to mind a certain quote or more a story from one J. Robert Oppenheimer when confronted with his own mass destructive creation, "....most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.'". I suppose it was inevitable to think that.

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