Monster Movie Where the Government is Equally Tough to Deal With.
A huge creature has surfaced off of the coast of Japan, sending the country into panic and chaos. Why did it come here and what does it want? Let’s find out in our review of Shin Godzilla.
At first, this creature was small and looked to be able to be contained. As time passes and action against it proves ineffective, the newly named, Godzilla, is evolving to be a big problem. From plowing through city streets, to zapping military defenses, the only thing Japan can do is plan for future attacks.
Usually in movies, we skip forward to the action, but in this one, we get to see what it takes to set the action in motion. On the surface, this might seem boring to watch people planning things out, but this is where the comical situations come in. Reporting to one person who reports to another, until eventually getting something happen was one of the ongoing jokes. It might seem silly, but this does seem true in a governing system.
While running through all of these procedures, we do meet a lot of characters. It was fun meeting everyone, but there were tons of people to keep track of. Good thing that every person and location that is introduced had a label on screen to let us know who and what is on screen. One character that didn’t work for me was the character from America when they started to intervene. It was hard to believe that she was American because, for one thing, she was Japanese, and second, she went back and forth between English and Japanese.
When following these characters while they planned, there was a lot of dialogue. This movie had subtitles, but because of the nature of the film, there was a lot of reading. I found it hard to keep up, especially when those name tags popped up on screen during dialogue. It didn’t help that my screening had half of the bottom part of text cut off.
The set pieces for the movie definitely stood out. I had a fun time trying to figure out how they shot some of these scenes. Whenever Godzilla was rampaging around, there were plenty of shots of tons of people running around. The graphics were really good too. The damage throughout the city looked real. To contrast this, the creature design looked like a guy in a costume, a fun throwback to the older movies.
In the end, I had a lot of fun watching this one. It did have its problems, but it was a good change of pace from other movies that come out today. The ending keeps it open for sequels and I would love to see more. Although this came out in limited release, I hope more people can get to watch this when it comes out on Blu-ray.