:
Shusuke Kaneko,
Shusuke Kaneko
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: Not Rated
: Columbia TriStar
: Action, Foreign, Science Fiction , Japan, Killer Critters, Kaiju Eiga
: 105 min.
: English, Japanese
: English, French
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After sandblasting away years of camp and bad scripts from the Gamera franchise to form a couple of tight-scripted, vastly entertaining flicks, Shusuke Kaneko gives the same treatment to the granddaddy of kaiju eiga characters: Godzilla. The film opens with Godzilla waking up from his underwater hideaway. Unseen since his 1954 attack on Tokyo, the monster is spotted by a Japanese submarine. Though government officials seem reluctant to confront the problem, Navy Admiral Tachibana (Ryudo Uzaki), who witnessed the rampage when he was a child, is more than a little alarmed. Meanwhile, Tachibana's daughter Yuri (Chiharu Niiyama), who works at a struggling TV station, is making a documentary in the mountains of Niigata Prefecture. One night, they experience a massive earthquake and that next morning they learn that a gang of motorcycle punks were crushed in a mountain tunnel and witnesses reportedly saw some sort of fire-breathing creature in the rubble. Later, a group of campers in southern Kagoshima prefecture are crushed by some Thing that crawled out of Lake Ikeda. Soon Japan is awash with monsters -- including Baradon, a monster that looks like a pug terrier with Mickey Mouse ears, and King Gidora, a three-headed beast with a lethal 50-meter tail -- busting up things north, south, east, and west. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide
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| Enjoyable, but not great
by ColonelKong
February 17, 2004 - 11:24 PM PST
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2 out of 3 members found this review helpful
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Not bad as far as the '90s/'00s Godzilla movies go, but nothing spectacular either. Definitely a little weaker than Kaneko's superb Gamera trilogy, which had a certain edge to it that I felt was somewhat lacking here. Of course, writer Kazunori Ito and SFX director Shinji Higuchi, two important people involved in making those films, weren't involved in this one.
Somewhat refreshingly, Godzilla is once again a bad guy monster in this one, and Ghidorah is one of the good guy monsters, which is going to seem rather odd to longtime Godzilla fans such as myself (I did like that Kaneko used the same Ghidorah sound effects as the '60s Godzilla movies). Aside from some slightly cheesy CGI, most of the special effects work is pretty solid. Kaneko's regular composer Koh Otani contributed a good score that has a nicely menacing main theme and that doesn't rely on Akira Ifukube's Godzilla theme (which doesn't show up in this movie until the end credits). If you're renting this film because it's by the same director as the Gamera trilogy, you're bound to be a little disappointed, but it did a pretty good job of entertaining me for 100-odd minutes.
Oh yeah, it includes a pretty funny jab at the Roland Emmerich Godzilla movie during the opening scene. |
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GreenCine Member Rating
(Average 6.62)
32 Votes
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