Godzilla: The Planet Eater [2018]
The final part of Gen Urobuchi's Godzilla anime preview released on Netflix, Godzilla: Hoshi wo ku Mono is... it's a very interesting movie. And it's... it's mostly a disappointment to me, personally. Neither Planet of Monsters nor City on the Edge of Battle are masterpieces, but both managed to tell neat little individual stories about the unique post-apocalyptic setting they've placed Godzilla in.
And this final conclusion is... it's confused, really. The first half is decent, with the revelation that Metphies of the Exif has been slowly manipulating events to summon the ancient god of the Exif, Ghidorah, an extra-dimensional god-like being that will come and consume the world. And... and while the bizarre logic leaps that Metphies jumps through to justify this is weird, it's not too out of place. The previous movie had dealt, respectively, with a natural threat borne of Earth in Godzilla; and the dangers of letting tehcnology run amuck in the Bilusaludo's Mechagodzilla City. But this movie's attempt to make a religious apocalypse is... confused at best.
While everyone on Earth is recovering from the events of the previous movie and has mostly been converted into the cult-like religion of Metphies, the crew of humans and aliens abroad the Aratrum are being split apart in a pretty interesting political quandry on how Haruo has to be judged, and whether him killing Galu-gu is justified or not. But this relatively neat little sub-plot of the Aratrum and the human/alien politics ends up basically being slammed shut when Ghidorah comes, with no real resolution beyond "well they all sort of died".
Speaking of plotlines that are very confused, after losing Yuko, Haruo ends up... sleeping with the Mothra twins? Both of them? There's a genuinely weird bit where he basically realizes which twin has been taking care of her, and apparently the Mothra twins are all about 'life', which means they would jump the bones of the arriving humans to "connect life"? That's got some very unfortunate implications, really, and the fact that Haruo basically gets over Yuko to go for whichever Mothra twin is pretty weird.
But then everything goes haywire, plot-wise, as we're just thrown into a lot of pretentious drivel about god, and how "humanity will create monsters like Godzilla, which in turn will invite the god of destruction", and it's... it's nowhere as deep as the movie thinks it is, and hardly justifies the sheer amount of screentime devoted to Metphies waxing lyrical about the arrival of Ghidorah. There are a lot of bizarre visions, and when Haruo eventually confronts Metphies and gets taken into his world of visions, it's just... it's just so bland and repetitive, y'know? I get it, I get the concept of what Metphies was trying to sell, the fact that his cult-like religion hinges so much on worshiping destruction. But from a narrative point of view, it's basically Haruo being horrified at the revelation of how insignificant everything is, and then shouting "no!!" really really loudly. It's nowhere as smart as it thinks it is, and while the voice acting is great, the trippy visuals don't really justify spending a good half of the movie on this.
Credit where credit's due, Ghidorah's initial arrival when the golden heads emerged from the wormhole is pretty awesome, and how it destroys the Aratrum, with conflicting readings as space and time gets ripped apart -- particularly the bit where the readings show that the bridge and the engine room have no life signs, while the people in said rooms are absolutely confused. That was some great usage of sci-fi tropes as a horror piece.
But then Godzilla himself is basically reduced to a plot device that ends up barely moving from where he was at the end of the previous movie. And Ghidorah himself shows up, and the movie makes such a huge deal about how Ghidorah "can't be touched, but can touch", and... and Ghidorah and Godzilla just stand there in place, with the former biting the latter, throughout almost the entirety of the fight while Metphies and Haruo have their bizarre mental fight.
And then Haruo essentially kills Metphies, allowing Godzilla to touch Ghidorah, because that's a bit of a bizarre video-game logic going on where once the summoner is killed, Ghidorah is vulnerable? Then Godzilla just basically one-shots Ghidorah in a fast and not exactly exciting action scene. Not everything has to be huge kaiju fights, but this one is especially disappointing.
Oh yeah, Mothra also shows up for all of one minute in the hallucination world, with the Huotoa lady managing to summon its essence to, uh... break Haruto and Metphies's weird shared hallucination thing? Like, not everything has to be smashy-smash-fighty-fight, but the way this movie handles its confrontation is honestly just a lot of overblown, flowery dialogue that doesn't really end up saying all that much.
And then we get an overly long epilogue where they really try to hammer home the "WAR IS BAD, IT LEADS TO THE CREATION OF GODZILLA AND THE SUMMONING OF A SPACE DRAGON GOD" moral, and a whole lot of stuff about existentialism and whatnot, and it's... it's something that's honestly been done a lot better with plotlines that make so much more sense in other anime before, I'm sorry. The only thing that keeps this from being genuine drivel is the amazing voice-acting, and god bless Miyano Mamoru for really making Haruo's emotional dialogue work as well as it did. Eventually the humans basically end up getting absorbed into the Huotoa tribe.
And as a bit of an epilogue, with the prospect of dr. Martin reactivating the Vulture and potentially causing the birth of another Godzilla-style monster and inviting Ghidorah into their world in the future, Haruo ends up taking the Vulture, the nanometal-infused comatose body of Yuko, and going for one final suicidal confrontation against Godzilla and dies. What? Like, that's a genuinely baffling ending, which really seems to try imply something more grandiose and poetic than it is, but watching the scene a couple of times, it's got nowhere of the huge punch of, say, Haruo's decision to turn on the Bilusaludo in the previous movie. It's just got a huge shrug from me.
Overall, they really tried to aim big, but the very confused and forced themes and morals, and a movie that's 90% plot contrivance and bland monologues end up making this 90 minutes that I genuinely feel was nowhere as enjoyable as the previous two movies. It's such a shame -- with a more polished script, the themes in this movie might've had made a lot more sense, but the fact that it's just a huge, long 90-minute speech about how war is bad... because an insane cult will summon a demonic dragon god. The morals of the movie is offset by the fact that so much of Ghidorah's arrival hinges on Metphies's wacky cult rituals, and the fact that nothing is conclusively resolved with Godzilla himself is something that is really bizarre. For an anime trilogy that has Godzilla in the title, he really doesn't do much in the second and third movie, and that's perhaps the biggest flaw the anime trilogy has.
Random Notes:
- Despite my gripes about this movie, that scene when Ghidorah first shows up and destroys the Aratrum is genuinely awesome, and probably the single scene from this movie that's not boring.
- That whole "which twin did Haruo fuck while delirious and asleep" bit has... has a bit of a rape-y vibe going on, huh? That and the fact that these indigenous people are just so happy to offer themselves up to "connect life" honestly makes me feel all sorts of uncomfortable.
- A possible interpretation of the final scene is just Haruo hallucinating Metphies's speech because all the shit he's been through is definitely enough to drive him crazy, which would make him going on a suicidal run against Godzilla extra-pointless.
- The scene where Haruo and Mothra Twin #1 gets a hallucination of Mothra Twin #2 being killed and turned into soup by Metphies is pretty horrifying. Less horrifying is the revelation that it's all just a hallucination, which makes this whole scene extra pointless.
- So, uh... the only named survivors at the end of the movie are Godzilla, Dr. Martin and the Mothra Twins, huh?
No comments:
Post a Comment