2005, Japan. Starring Masahiro Matsuoka, Rei Kikukawa, Kazuki Kitamura, Don Frye, Akira Takarada, Kane Kosugi, Maki Mizuno, Masami Nagasawa, Chihiro Otsuka, Kumi Mizuno, Masakatsu Funaki, Masato Ibu. Directed by Ryuhei Kitamura. Written by Isao Kiriyama and Ryuhei Kitamura. Purchase from Amazon.com.

It's no exaggeration to say I grew up on Godzilla films. They are the very first movies I remember seeing, back when I was naught but a wee sprout growing up in married student housing at the University of Kentucky back in the early seventies. And Godzilla movies have maintained a constant presence in my cinematic history, whether it's been through watching the movies on Saturday afternoon television matinees, crappy EP VHS tapes from Goodtimes Video, or more recently, restored and uncut on DVD. I love pretty much everything about the Godzilla movies, even the ones that make everyone else groan. Yes, that includes both Godzilla Versus Megalon and Godzilla's Revenge. Come on! When you were a little kid, who didn't want to hang out with Minya and go to Monster Island to watch Godzilla kick some ass while listening to brassy jazz-funk orchestration?

When Godzilla 1985 was released to American theaters, I rushed in to see it and, even though I was only thirteen or so at the time, realized that I'd seen my first truly atrocious movie, though I was happy to discover some years later that the film redeems itself nicely in the original Japanese cut, free of extraneous inserted scenes of Perry Mason staring at a monitor while NORAD guys show cans of Dr. Pepper to the camera. When the Godzilla franchise got itself up and lumbering again in the nineties, I was pretty happy. None of the movies were great, but most of them were entertaining, despite bad ideas like the doe-eyed baby Godzilla or the super-speed android with a receding hairline fighting future men who dress like leprechauns in a movie where they erase Godzilla's existence from history then sit around remembering how they erased Godzilla from history. OK, so time travel is always a tricky gimmick. And it's not like the bad ideas were any worse than some of the ideas from the movies in the seventies. At least they had the good sense not to put Robert Dunham in a mini-tunic and then shoot him from a low angle.

When Godzilla Versus Destroyer rolled around, it seemed to me a fitting way to close the series. Some people were disappointed by the ending, but as I wrote way back when I first saw the film, it was apt in my opinion that Godzilla's final showdown not be with some big spiked monster, but with the Japanese military, the one sometimes-opponent, sometimes-ally that has been with him since the beginning. And Akira Ikufube's requiem for Godzilla was one of his best pieces of music. It was a classy, even moving end to the monster, and Toho should have left well enough alone.

But leaving well enough alone isn't in the power of any movie studio, anywhere in the world, and when Toho thought enough time had passed to whet the public's appetite for a new Godzilla film, and perhaps because they didn't want the American debacle Godzilla to be the monster's last impression on the world, they trotted out Godzilla: Millennium, a serviceable enough Godzilla movie that reminds me in a lot of ways of Godzilla 1985. Godzilla: Millennium wasn't a runaway hit, but it was enough to convince Toho to resurrect the series yet again and churn out some of the worst Godzilla movies ever made, culminating in the one-two punch of Godzilla's rematch with Mechagodzilla in 2002's dreadful Godzilla X Mechagodzilla and 2003's Godzilla, Mothra, Mechagodzilla: Tokyo S.O.S., which wasn't much better. The only bright spot in Godzilla's post-millennial romp was Shinsuke Kaneko's 2001 entry into the series, Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack. Kaneko had proven himself something of a wonderchild when he took Daei Studio's ridiculous giant flying turtle Gamera and made three of the darkest, most complex and compelling giant monster films of all time. The second in his Gamera trilogy, Gamera Versus Legion, is in my opinion one of the top four or five monster films ever made.

For the most part, Kaneko succeeded in bringing his magic to the beleaguered Godzilla franchise, which was plagued by bad scripts, bad movies, and a thunderous lack of any interest at all on behalf of anyone but some of us nerds in the United States. At the same time, however, Kaneko's Godzilla film suffers many of the same maladies that have plagues all of the Godzilla movies since Millennium. Chief among those is the temptation to hit the reset button on Godzilla history. Now, it's not like the series have ever been a slave to continuity, but by the time 2000 rolled around, every single film was treating itself as if it was the first sequel since the original 1954 film. And Kaneko's script introduces some of the most egregious departures from established Godzilla lore: mainly, that he was a dinosaur caught in an atom bomb explosion, mutated, and thus becomes the symbol for man's willingness to dabble with destructive powers he cannot control. Under Kaneko's tutelage, however, Godzilla was given a dippy new age origin that explained him away as the embodiment of the spirits of the war dead, then layered on all sorts of mystical nonsense that just seemed to come out of left field.

Not that Godzilla films are based on hard science or anything, but they always explained the monsters and the destruction in particularly human terms: everything happened because of something awful we did. Even the more fantastical elements of the old movies, like little Mothra twins and monkey-faced spacemen, seemed grounded in some sort of twisted reality. The mystical mumbo-jumbo that crept in to the later films never appealed to me, but in the end, Kaneko's film is so enjoyable on every other level that we can simply ignore his daft re-imagining of Godzilla's origin and just enjoy the movie.

Kaiju fans were hopeful that under Kaneko's guidance, the Godzilla franchise might recover. Sadly, it was not to be. Kaneko left the franchise after just one film, and Masaaki Tezuka was called in to replace him even has public interest and studio investment in further Godzilla projects plummeted to an all-time low. Tezuka's two films represent possibly the lowest point in Godzilla film history. Yep, I think they're much worse than Megalon, Gigan, and even Godzilla's Revenge. And, like most of the new movies, they embrace the idea that the movie must be based around an elite squad of Godzilla fighters wearing ridiculous-looking plastic body armor. I always hated this plot device, and hated it even more so because the human characters the film chose to focus on were just so monumentally boring and generic. Remember when Godzilla movies had human characters like the corn-eating hippy or the two gay guys raising a smiling android? Those were fun and memorable human characters. But the new films are a long way away from Akira Takarada and Kumi Mizuno, even when Kumi Mizuno and Akira Takarada appear in them. Hell, they're even a long way away from the corn-eating hippy and that psychic girl from the 1990s films. It's as if each scriptwriter is challenged to write characters more bland and uninteresting than the last, then concentrate even more time on them.

And why do they all wear cheap, toy body armor made from plastic? I suppose this might look cool in a video game or in anime, but in live action, all it does is remind you how dorky things are that nerd designers think will look cool and tough. And what the hell good does it do to wear body armor, plastic or otherwise, when you're fighting Godzilla? You could charge in wearing a loin cloth and Indian headdress like Ted Nugent and get basically the same effect, but with a lot less noise coming from corny looking plastic plates clacking against one another. I don't know exactly who it was that felt the need to port Power Rangers sensibilities into the Godzilla films, but damn them to hell for what they did.

Which brings us to 2004. The wheels have pretty much fallen off the cart by this point. But Toho insists on dragging Godzilla through the mud one last time. 2004 is, after all, the 50th anniversary of the original film, so Toho decides they need to mark the occasion by releasing another movie. The public, once again, couldn't care less, but the fans still scattered across the world are tentatively hopeful when Toho announces that they'll be reversing their previous mode of operation and actually upping the budget and length of the shoot for this, the final film (if you're counting, I think this makes the fourth final film). They also announced that it would incorporate foes, weapons, and homages to all of Godzilla's past films. And Ryuhei Kitamura would be directing.

That last announcement is what really phased people. A final film is nothing new for Godzilla fans. He's had more final tours than The Ramones had. And homages and old foes? Also no big shock. Most of the new movies had resurrected previous foes, and some of the recent ones had even included clips from old movies like War of the Gargantuas. But Ryuhei Kitamura? In Japan, he's sort of a failure as a director, but since almost every Japanese movie is a box-office failure in Japan, you can't really hold that against him. He is, however, a solid cult icon in the United States, where his zombie-gangster black comedy Versus turned all sorts of heads, including I will admit, my own. It was a very simple film, but hugely entertaining if not a bit long for what it needed to accomplish. By the time he released the ninja fantasy Azumi, Kitamura had proven a few things. First, that he could helm a larger, more complex movie. Second, that he loved insane flying CGI kungfu stunts. And third, that he could drag any eighty-minute concept out to well over two hours by layering his script with meandering convolutions.

Despite his weaknesses, I've enjoyed the Kitamura films I've seen, but he didn't seem like the right man to helm a Godzilla film. Not as daft a choice as, say, Takashi Miike, but still questionable. His knack is for outrageous kungfu action informed by anime and video games, full of stylized posing and grimacing. Would he be able to leave his taste for overblown kungfu mayhem behind and make a proper Godzilla film? Or would he turn in an absurd mix of video game nonsense and lots of people in plastic body armor striking foolish looking anime poses that, for some reason, some nerds still think looks cool?

Well, it turns out that, for the most part, he turns in the latter. Godzilla: Final Wars is a complete mess of a movie, and like all the recent Godzilla films, it focuses on colossally generic human characters who are part of an elite Godzilla fighting force that wears cheap-looking toy armor and has a tendency to strike even goofier poses than their predecessors. Look, man! Anime poses just aren't cool when real people do them. They're not really even that cool when cartoon people do them, so cut it out. And like all of Kitamura's films, there's a good movie buried under mountains of nonsense and crap and flying kungfu men.

The action begins in the 1960s, when the flying sub Atragon -- yes, that Atragon -- is locked in mortal combat with Godzilla in the Antarctic. Why would Godzilla be in the Antarctic? Holiday, I reckon. Atragon is unable to kill Godzilla, but they do manage to bury him under tons and tons of ice, presumably as an homage to Godzilla Raids Again, the Godzilla movie no one remembers. I suppose Godzilla could melt his way out if he really wanted to, but he seems content to let the ice imprison him and send him into a state of hibernation.

Skip forward to the future. Monsters are commonplace in the world, and it's up to the crew of the latest version of Atragon to wrangle them. We meet Captain Gordon (Ultimate Fighting star Don Frye), who looks like a cross between Stacey Keach and Jesse Ventura, with one of the most majestic moustaches since Burt Reynolds and Maurizio Merli. Gordon is helming one of the latest Atragon type subs and is locked in mortal combat with good ol' Manda, the dragony, sea serpent thing we haven't seen since...when? Destroy All Monsters? Gordon defeats the beast but lands on the bad side of Earth Defense Force Commander Akiko Namikawa (Kumi Mizuno, the legendary Toho fantasy girl from the 1960s, who also appeared in 2002's Mechagodzilla as the Prime Minister) and gets him suspended.

We then take a break from the monster movie so Kitamura can indulge in his addiction to ripping off kungfu scenes from The Matrix as we watch two members of M Unit, this week's super Godzilla fighting squad, fly around in a training facility and execute all sorts of ludicrous mid-air kungfu acrobatics. As tired and trite as it has become, Kitamura still loves that bullet-time "freeze the action and rotate the camera around" effect that I assumed everyone would be tired of by now. It turns out the two soldiers -- Ozaki (television actor Masahiro Matsuoka) and Kazama (Kane Kosugi, son of the legendary Sho Kosugi, and star of all sorts of goofy Japanese sentai and video game fighting movies) -- are actually mutants, but instead of mutant stuff like having a third arm or a deformed psychic twin growing out of their crotches, their mutant power is that they are really good at ripping off Matrix-style CGI fight special effects, then making insanely corny cliched speeches about the power within.

M-Unit, or M-Force, or whatever it is they're called, is full of mutants, and when they aren't training in kungfu, they're using their kungfu to fight giant monsters. Yep, you may be used to things like wave after wave of tanks and MASER cannons rolling across the Japanese countryside en route to being melted by Godzilla, but these guys actually fight giant monsters toe-to-toe. Ozaki, the compassionate one, is assigned to escort a pretty molecular biologist who is examining a strange giant monster mummy that's been found, leaving Kazama, presumably, to sit in his room watching a copy of Casshern as he continues to hone his generic anime brooding and posing skills. It turns out the mummy contains traces of the same substance present in both the mutants and the monsters. The Cosmos, those little twins from the Mothra films, show up to show off their cute new pixie haircuts, and also conveniently explain that the mummy is Gigan, an alien cyborg that was defeated by Mothra some 12,000 years ago.

If this is a lot of plot summary, forgive me. Kitamura makes movies that either have almost no plot at all or so much plot that it's actually like watching five movies at once, with no promise that he's ever going to bother tying any of the plots in with each other. So please bear with me, and I promise that eventually this movie will have Godzilla in it again.

The Cosmos Greek Chorus is interrupted by the sudden appearance of ornery monsters all over the world. Rodan appears in New York in a merciful bid to end the worst "crazy jive-ass pimp versus a cop" scene ever filmed. Other monsters appear elsewhere around the world, including Kumonga, Spiga the spider, Anguiras, and even fluffy ol' King Caesar. Oh, come on! No Gabera? Tokyo, by all accounts, gets off pretty lightly as it is set upon by Ebirah, the giant shrimp from Godzilla Vs. the Sea Monster. If you have to get attacked by a monster, that's a pretty easy one. And delicious. The M Organization mutants make quick work of Ebirah in one of the film's better moments, but all this does is lead into the appearance of a giant spaceship. Yes, we're once again meeting the Xians from Planet X, though this time they have left behind their curly-toed elf boots and new wave sunglasses and opted for the fruity tight black leather overcoats favored by anyone who ever set out to imitate The Matrix.

You know, The Matrix really wasn't that good a movie, so I don't know why every sci-fi guy has to dress up like the characters from The Matrix. Have you ever really tried to fight while wearing a skintight leather catsuit and overcoat? There's a reason that after thousands of years of military uniform evolution, we've never adopted the skintight black catsuit and overcoat. Mobsters don't even where that shit, despite their flare for the theatrical. They prefer the flexibility and easy washing care of a track suit. Anyway, the new Xians all look like they just stumbled out of some cheap Hollywood film about vampires hanging out in an industrial-goth club, and of course they all have flamboyant anime hair. Doesn't anyone in the military, human or Xian, have to shave their heads anymore? When did ten gallons of styling putty and three hours of primping time become standard for the military of any planet?

Riding shotgun with the Xians is the Prime Minister (Toho fantasy and monster movie veteran Akira Takarada, showing none of the charisma we all know he possesses), who announces that these aliens have come to our planet to rid it of evil monsters, cure disease, and presumably, release a series of grating Marilyn Manson-style industrial albums. Now, we all know that secretly they are controlling the monsters and intend to kill us, because that's what people from Planet X always do. It turns out that the M-Factor (since X-Factor was previous taken) that makes mutants into mutants also allows the Xians to control them, so before too long they're puppeteering the whole of M Organization except for the noble-hearted Ozaki.

Ozaki and his sexy biologist friend team up with some others who know the truth and realize that the only man in the world with moustache enough to sock it to the Xians is Captain Gordon. As the Xians unleash all the monsters in a bid to completely destroy human society, Gordon goes searching for the only weapon powerful enough to defeat monsters and the aliens who control them: Godzilla.

Remember him? You may have forgotten about him amid all of Kitamura's CGI kungfu antics and posing aliens and people who can't shoot a gun without flipping around twenty times, then crossing their arms and holding the guns behind their backs or something. Jesus, just fire the damn gun and get it over with. This is worse than in Ballistic Kiss when other hitmen would stand around for ten minutes and watch Donnie Yen's hitman character dance about and pretend to be conducting an orchestra with his guns before shooting everyone. When you have a gun, despite what some movies think, it's not cool looking to twirl about and strike poses, then shoot it only when you've assumed the least advisable posture for firing a gun. And for the love of God, holding them sideways was bad enough. Holding them sideways and then crossing your arms at the wrists while you shoot is absolutely preposterous. Unfortunately, this is where Kitamura's interest lies. The inclusion of giant monsters is almost a contractual afterthought. Hired to make a Godzilla film, he made a loud, shallow, unoriginal kungfu space movie, then inserted shots of Godzilla and other monsters from time to time.

Anyway, this is getting really long-winded, so let me summarize, now that Godzilla is back in the picture: Godzilla rampages through one monster after the other until he and Mothra end up facing off against Gigan and King Ghidorah while Captain Gordon, his moustache, Ozaki (who emerges in another Matrix rip-off as some sort of chosen one), and a few other people duke it out with the Xians on board the spaceship. The unbridled monster carnage as Godzilla tackles one foe after another is the highlight of the film and, ultimately, why we are here. The endless CGI Matrix kungfu battles between Ozaki and the Xians where no one seems to get hurt or fight with any sort of point in mind are considerably less welcome.

Oh yeah, through it all, some hunter and his grandson travel around with Minya/Minilla, the pot-bellied progeny of Godzilla. They have almost nothing to do other than show up and comment on the fact that, yes, things are being destroyed. There's also a red herring plot about the wandering star Gorath, and plenty of other stuff thrown in, but if I was to go into detail about every irrelevant or nonsensical point Kitamura lobs into the mix, we'd be here all month. Minilla figures into the final moments of the film, but exactly why and what relation it has to Godzilla is completely unexplained. I guess Kitamura assumes anyone still watching Godzilla movies at this point already knows who Minilla is, so there's no need to explain things when you could just film him driving around in a pick-up truck.

The score is easily the worst of any Godzilla film. Tapping none other than prog-rock synth addict Keith Emerson to provide much of the score, Kitamura relies primarily on the ultra-generic techno-dance crap that he's used in so many other films. That and pointless, outdated bullet-time shots tie this movie in a lot closer to House of the Dead than I would ever want to admit. When we're not assaulted with lame video game techno fight themes, Emerson sounds like he worked out the entire synth score in under five minutes on a Casio keyboard he found in thr trash outside of Radio Shack. It's thin, uninspired, and lacks any of the power of the old Ikufube scores. Thanks to Kitamura for using the old Ikufube fight anthem, but the rest of the techno dance garbage was just wretched.

So what are we left with? Well, for starter's Godzilla's bloated swansong was a bomb at the box office. Kitamura was charged with resurrecting a dead franchise, and given that and the fact that almost all domestic Japanese films not prefaced by the credit "A Hayo Miyazaki Film" bomb at the Japanese box office, it was a suicide mission from the outset. Kitamura's name is enough to excite U.S. fans, but that's about it.

Most of this review has concentrated on what's wrong with the film, so let me take a break and address the things it does right. Well, sort of.

First, the special effects are heads above anything we've seen in any of the other recent Godzilla films. Kitamura piles on so much CGI that making it realistic isn't even the point. He goes for escapist fantasy a la most of the big sci-fi films these days, and after the experience of Casshern, Japanese effects houses seem to be up to speed. The monster action is great, and the designs are all good. Rather than redesigning most of the monsters, Kitamura sticks to the more classic designs. And when he does do a redesign, as with Ghidorah, it's subtle and effective. Godzilla's march through the legions of monsters is also some of the best no-holds-barred monster wrestling we've had since Destroy All Monsters, the movie which seems very much to be the template for this one. The scenes of global devastation are some of the most effective scenes a Godzilla movie has pulled off since the original.

On the flipside, however, Kitamura's complete lack of restraint means he blows through each monster battle too quickly -- sometimes in seconds, so no single battle every stands out. Ultimately, it plays like a series of clips advertising longer monster fights somewhere else. Kitamura could have cut twenty minutes of awful Matrix kungfu and replaced that with longer monster clashes that actually develop a story and character, and this would have been an infinitely better movie. He obviously has no real interest in making a Godzilla film. As I wrote earlier, the kungfu spaceman antics are where his interest lies. As such, not a single one of the monsters is given any sort of personality. They are just props, and although watchign Godzilla tear through them is fun, it also has no meaning whatsoever. As Godzilla's final war, there should have been more emotion invested in the monsters, or at least in Godzilla. Instead, they're treated much the same was as any other prop, and it seems Kitamura can't wait to hustle them off screen so he can trot out his next Matrix imitation fight scene. I know some people try to pass this slavish imitation off as "clever parody," but if it's parody, it fails, and parody or not, that doesn't make it any more interesting to watch. If Kitamura wants to poke fun at sci-fi film conventions as he goes, that's A-OK. He should just make sure that what he's doing will be interesting, and he needs to understand that WE GOT IT THE FIRST TIME. If this is parody, he delivers it with of the subtlety of Mr. T wielding a sledge hammer in a crystal shop.

Where as many of the previous Godzilla films have seemed little more than substandard kiddie films, Kitamura, it appears, set out to make the world's nerdiest Godzilla film. That is to say, he's making a film specifically for Japanese sci-fi film nerds, and American fans of Japanese sci-fi at that. He knows that trotting out Atragon, or a cameo by Hedorah, is going to get all us pathetic nerds excited, and he's right. It is fun. This isn't really a bad thing, but he can never make up his mind what sort of film he wants to make. Monster intrigue is continuously undercut by his need to showcase bullet-time infested fight scenes that have nothing to do with anything, and he'll follow an intense and well-planed moment with something like having a wacky pimp's hat fly off with old radio show "fooop!" sound effects when Rodan flies by. As is often the case since Kitamura move don from the lean, quasi-plotless forest of Versus into actual storytelling, he can't settle on a single story to tell, and so crams four or five of them into a single movie, to the detriment of all the stories involved.

The good things here, in a standard 90-minute movie, would tip the scales in Final Wars favor, but Kitamura is physically incapable of making a movie under two hours, and while I generally like long movies, most of what pads out Final Wars is just needless bloat. Extended computer-assisted fight scenes and motorcycle chases, not to mention a solid thirty minutes or so devoted entirely to characters striking inane anime and Power Ranger poses, puff up the film's running time without ever adding anything of value. The acting is as bland as the characters. Even old pros like Kumi and Akira can't do much with the tissue-thin characters with whom the film chooses to spend so much time. Kane Kosugi does nothing but brood and mumble, which seems to be what nerdy film writers think passes for cool and intense.

At the same time, in his defense, goofy padded plots are nothing new to Godzilla films. Nor is having Godzilla MIA for much of the film. But the human characters in the older films always carried their end of the plot, at least for me, and became characters you could remember and even care about, however ham-fisted they may have been. The new films, Final Wars included, seem to work on a cockeyed equation that demands that the thinner, more generic, and duller the characters, the more time we must spend in their company. I really don't mind the human aspect of a Godzilla film when that human aspect is engaging or includes boat theft and all-night go-go dancing contests, but Final Wars just has nothing to offer us in terms of characters, then offers it to us in abundance anyway.

The only exception is Don Frye, and I'm not just saying that because his moustache is as thick and mysterious as the African interior circa 1850. Frye isn't really a good actor. Most of the time, he delivers his lines like he just woke up and stuffed a mouthful of Skoal into his cheek. But it works for his character, he looks cool, and something about him is likeable and charismatic, and that makes his turn as the gruff, tough, but lovable Captain Gordon the only convincing acting job in the whole film. There hasn't been a decent white dude in a Godzilla film since Nick Adams called Kumi Mizuno "baby," but Frye won me over.

For me, even a bad Godzilla film is better than most good films, and while I do consider Final Wars to be a pretty bad film, it's a hell of a lot better than those last two Mechagodzilla films. I really didn't like it, but I have a sneaking suspicion that, as time wears on, I'll grow fonder of the mess and hold it in the same regard I hold some of those films from the 1970s. It's just going to take a while for me to get over my initial distaste at just how incredibly goofy all the posing and flipping is. When you can manage to make something seem goofy in the midst of a movie where a radiated dinosaur is punching a walking blob of pollution in the face while two pixies ride around on a giant moth, then that's really an accomplishment.

This spastic movie is as much a disaster as the carnage left behind by Godzilla, but there's still something in it that keeps me from thoughtlessly tossing it on the trash heap alongside other recent, bloated Japanese sci-fi films full of posing guys and people in dorky costumes that are supposed to be cool but just come across as soulless chores (Casshern, I'm looking in your direction -- if I can ever manage to finish you, that is). Ryuhei Kitamura knew people weren't interested in the stock Godzilla formula. So he attempted to recast the Godzilla film against a backdrop of the hyperactive and over-stylized kungfu action he loves so much. It didn't work for me, but I appreciate his effort to meld the old with something new (not that stealing Matrix fight scenes is anything new at this point, but you know what I mean). What this movie really lacks in any sense of heart or charm. It's just big and loud, with no real purpose, and nothing of the endearing air of the older movies despite trotting out every monster it could think of. Kitamura mistakes fanboy in-jokes and self-referential nostalgia dropping as something clever. Ultimately, in a desperate rush to trot out guys in leather Cenobite wear, Kitamura and Toho completely dismissed one of the most important defining aspects of Godzilla movies, and of all the fantasy films Toho made: there is no cornball message. No, "Now you have learned the errors of your ways" or warning about pollution or the dangers of kidnapping tiny twins who control a giant vengeful moth. There can't be a cornball message, because Final Wars ultimately has nothing to say and has no point. It's all posing and flashy editing. So maybe that's the stern warning about the future: this movie teache sus the dangers of what happens when people start making movies with less plot and cohesive narrative than video games.

Kitamura needs someone to keep him on a leash and tell him when something is a bad idea, because stripped of all the juvenile Power Rangers kungfu poses and CGI fight scenes, there's a good Godzilla film in here somewhere, and he ruined it.

Labels: Country: Japan, Science Fiction: Kaiju, Series: Godzilla, Year: 2005