Despite being a somewhat consistently inconsistent run of films, Toho’s Millenium Era of Godzilla movie had each been fairly fun affairs, but if truth be told, the run of films that started in 1999 only really had one true standout – Shusuke Kaneko’s innotive Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All Out Attack. Considering that Godzilla’s 60th anniversary was rapidly approaching, Toho Studios realized they needed to pull their socks up and do something special that stood out as much as Kaneko’s fan favorite entry.
Enter Ryuhei Kitamura: director of energetic, cult oddity Versus, who was posed to give the King Of The Monsters a spectacular blow-out for his prestigious anniversary with an infusion of his breathless, visual style and relentless action beats. Surely this loose canon of everything-but-the-kitchen-sink, Japanese filmmaking could whip the Big G into shape to give fans the anniversary celebration they were expecting – but how you ultimately take his effort really depends on what you’re expecting, as the experience is somewhat akin to a hyper-active child screaming the plot at you while having an unfortunate brush with epilepsy.
The plot (as if it matters) is thus: it’s THE FUTURE and years after burying Godzilla alive in Antarctica, mankind has reached a stable kind of acceptance with the whole rampaging giant monster thing in general. Also, a tiny percentage of the human population have evolved into mega athletic super humans rather callously dubbed Mutants and they’ve been utilized as a fighting force to defend the world against various bad things – all which then immediately happen.
Before you can say the word “throwback” a huge selection of Kaiju from the Toho back catalogue appear all around the globe and start wreaking havoc until an alien race called the Xiliens suddenly arrive and beam the Monsters away while claiming that they’re here to save us all. However, anyone in the audience that’s over five years old knows that this claim holds more crap than a Glaswegian public toilet and that the leather clad aliens are – shock, horror – actually here to dominate us into submission with Kaiju attacks and the mind controlled Mutants. A disparate group of tough talking action stereotypes that include rogue Mutant Shinichi Ozaki, U.N. biologist Miyuki Otonashi and the impossibly starched moustache of flying submarine captain Douglas Gordon, realise that the only way they’re going to stem this tide of rampaging monsters is to summon the only Kaiju tough enough to get this gargantuan rabble back in line – Godzilla.
However, Godzilla’s been entombed in Antarctica for many years, and his rage at humankind was pretty savage then, so once he starts tearing through a gaggle of monster foes and alien invaders, who’s to say he’s going to stop there.
As Godzilla brutalizes his way up the Kaiju food chain in order to tussle with the likes of a redesigned Gigan and the mysterious Monster X, a hunter and his grandson has stumbled upon a much smaller version of Minilla who has a mission of his own to embark on.
If Toho wanted a bold, new vision to celebrate Godzilla’s 50th anniversary, you can’t say they didn’t get what they paid for as Ryuhei Kitamura’s Godzilla: Final Wars casts a breathlessly kinetic eye back over the early 70s stage of the Showa Era – a time when logic and realism were hardly a high priority. Taken in that respect, to complain that the movie is an exercise in quantity over quality is kind of missing the brief; yes: it’s a very, very silly film which isn’t that much more than an updated, greatest hits package, but the fact that the movies is just an excuse to parade out and redesign over a dozen monsters in order for Godzilla to mop the fucking floor with them is just too much for the average Kaiju fan to resist. In some respects, a lot of the Kaiju here hadn’t been seen on screen in absolutely ages (Anguirus, for example, hadn’t been fully utilised since 1974) and others, such as Ebirah and Hedorah had only a single screen credit to their name before Final Wars went all out. Kitamura is obviously going for is a kind of slick, modern version of the campness of movies past – all the monsters are all rendered with suitably rubbery suits while the action goes full goofy with a rolled up Anguirus being kicked around like a football. On top of this, Gigan, a ludicrous looking cyborg-chicken, Kaiju assassin, gets a thoroughly bitchin’ remodel with dual chainsaw arms and the movie even takes a cheeky jab at the 98 American version when the CGI “Zilla” shows up only to get beaten down in record time while Sum-41 inexplicably blared on the soundtrack. Even better, this version of Godzilla stomps arrogantly from scene to scene, opening Kaiju sized cans of whup-ass like a titanic, infallible, Stone Cold Steve Austin and you feel that the film barely stops short of featuring people holding up signs reading GODZILLA 3:16 – it’s stupid, for sure, but it’s a fun beer and pizza stupid.
Or, at least, it should’ve. You see, making the most unhinged Godzilla movie didn’t seem to quite be enough for Kitamura who insists on cramming in a convoluted sci-fi plot involving space ships and wire-fu mutants for seemingly no other reason than he desperately wants to stage some over edited, Matrix Reloaded-style action sequences but with excessive use of an orange filter and way more guyliner.
While human stories never tend to hold up well in Kaiju movies, the harder Kitamura tries to push his less entertaining human plot, the more this endearing torrent of idiocy tends to get on your nerves. Masahiro Matsuoka gives us a standard, tormented hero while Kazuki Kitamura’s wildly villainous performance as the Xilien Controller devastates just as much of the sets as the monsters – however, it’s porn ‘tashed, ex wrestler Don Frye who makes any sort of impression, most likely because he looks like Haggar from the old Final Fight video games, dresses like M. Bison from Street Fighter 2 and hilariously has all the acting range as a plank of wood. Oh, and fuck knows what the daffy Minilla subplot is all about….
Toho was obviously aiming for something memorable for Godzilla’s landmark birthday and you can’t argue that they didn’t achieve it, even if it may not have been exactly for the reasons they were hoping for. However cramming 15 classic Toho monsters into one film and having them beat the tar out of each other is undemanding fun that while messy, is certainly enjoyable and it’s a very fond farewell to a character that would then proceed to lie dormant for another 10 years.
If the movie had ditched around fifteen to twenty minutes of the vapid human stuff and just let the monster fo their thing, then it could have been something special. However, as noisy, goofy and sometimes incoherent as Godzilla: Final Wars may be, it wasn’t really the movie that fans wanted at the time – but taken as an overview of Godzilla’s entire 60 year history, it does just fine.
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