This is a film of extremes. You get sequences that deserve to be ranked as some of the most incredible in the Godzilla series, but which are preceded and proceeded by seemingly unending tedium.
It seems as though writer/director Hideaki Anno wanted to not simply focus on what is seen "on the ground", but also the procedures and back room politics that go into how such a threat would be dealt with. As a concept that sounds interesting enough, but you have no clue how thin that interest is stretched in what is essentially a 2-hour boardroom meeting. We get shots of absolute devastation as buildings are ripped apart; sandwiched between prolonged scenes of politicians shuffling through rooms trying their best to avoid political responsibility.
I know what you're thinking right now. Yes, you, the reader. I know exactly what is screaming in your head at this very moment as you read these words and the previous paragraph; because it is the defense I've heard from absolutely everyone whenever these criticisms are brought up: "But the film is supposed to be like this! It's a satire of Japanese politics showing how ineffective they are when emergency action is needed!" I know, I get it. The film made this point *abundantly clear* in just the first 10 minutes - and then it continues making this point over and over and over again for the rest of the movie. I'm sorry, but excusing these boring, uninteresting, and grueling scenes as 'satire' does absolutely nothing to make them any less unbearable to sit through. Penn and Teller's video game "Desert Bus" might be a brilliant satire of inoffensive gameplay in the age of moral panic (not to mention of gamers' need to make games as 'realistic' as possible), but that won't stop the game itself from boring you to tears and becoming more like a test of endurance than entertainment. My point is that whenever people say "it's making a really intelligent point" my reaction is "Yeah that's great. Wish they tried making a good movie instead."
This is something that's actually very common to Hideaki Anno's work: He spends so much energy using a sledgehammer to ram his messages into your brain that everything else just falls apart. Characters, for one thing, are so undeveloped that they could've switched lines around between actors in every scene and you wouldn't be able to notice they were meant for someone else. To paraphrase a criticism once made by Mark Kermode, "It is a petrified forest of woodenness". One would think aliens had sucked all the personality from every living human and we were instead watching dozens of automatons trying to calculate the best way to fight Godzilla. The only person who stood out was the American adviser(?) and that's only because she's hot and acts kind of cute.
Okay, so that's why most of the film is 3/10. So why is it 5 instead? It is almost completely because of the middle bit of the movie. Without spoiling anything, the sequence from Godzilla arriving in his final form to when he 'finishes' is one of the best 20 minutes in any Godzilla movie ever made. If you are a fan of the series, this one part is why you're watching. For all the critiques I could level at Hideaki Anno, he is never better than when he portrays a concerted effort against a threat. When Anno actually gets around to showing the mechanics and tactics implemented by the humans, it stops putting you to sleep and pulls you right in. The tension builds and builds, and it all leads to a scene that I would daresay call beautiful. A huge part of what makes this part so impactful is Shiro Sagisu's incredible score. The scene on its own would be devastating enough, but with his composition it becomes something more. You will find yourself in awe and mesmerized by what you see.
To wrap the rest of the movie up, the film quickly devolves afterwards yet again into boardrooms and endless minutes of people yapping. Even the way they 'solve' the Godzilla problem is disappointing. Again, I don't wish to spoil anything, but what they come up with is so ridiculous that it would've never worked in a million years. There's suspending your disbelief, and then there's a plan that's akin to smothering a giant monster with a pillow. Okay, the actual plan is not *that* ridiculous, but they way which they carry it out is absolutely hilarious, and just shouldn't have worked. Given how they've witnessed Godzilla "powering up" his atomic breath, everyone within a mile of him should've been blown to hell, and yet it conveniently doesn't happen this time.
So yeah, boring movie, bad resolution, but with 20 minutes of perfection in the middle. What a weird film....
It seems as though writer/director Hideaki Anno wanted to not simply focus on what is seen "on the ground", but also the procedures and back room politics that go into how such a threat would be dealt with. As a concept that sounds interesting enough, but you have no clue how thin that interest is stretched in what is essentially a 2-hour boardroom meeting. We get shots of absolute devastation as buildings are ripped apart; sandwiched between prolonged scenes of politicians shuffling through rooms trying their best to avoid political responsibility.
I know what you're thinking right now. Yes, you, the reader. I know exactly what is screaming in your head at this very moment as you read these words and the previous paragraph; because it is the defense I've heard from absolutely everyone whenever these criticisms are brought up: "But the film is supposed to be like this! It's a satire of Japanese politics showing how ineffective they are when emergency action is needed!" I know, I get it. The film made this point *abundantly clear* in just the first 10 minutes - and then it continues making this point over and over and over again for the rest of the movie. I'm sorry, but excusing these boring, uninteresting, and grueling scenes as 'satire' does absolutely nothing to make them any less unbearable to sit through. Penn and Teller's video game "Desert Bus" might be a brilliant satire of inoffensive gameplay in the age of moral panic (not to mention of gamers' need to make games as 'realistic' as possible), but that won't stop the game itself from boring you to tears and becoming more like a test of endurance than entertainment. My point is that whenever people say "it's making a really intelligent point" my reaction is "Yeah that's great. Wish they tried making a good movie instead."
This is something that's actually very common to Hideaki Anno's work: He spends so much energy using a sledgehammer to ram his messages into your brain that everything else just falls apart. Characters, for one thing, are so undeveloped that they could've switched lines around between actors in every scene and you wouldn't be able to notice they were meant for someone else. To paraphrase a criticism once made by Mark Kermode, "It is a petrified forest of woodenness". One would think aliens had sucked all the personality from every living human and we were instead watching dozens of automatons trying to calculate the best way to fight Godzilla. The only person who stood out was the American adviser(?) and that's only because she's hot and acts kind of cute.
Okay, so that's why most of the film is 3/10. So why is it 5 instead? It is almost completely because of the middle bit of the movie. Without spoiling anything, the sequence from Godzilla arriving in his final form to when he 'finishes' is one of the best 20 minutes in any Godzilla movie ever made. If you are a fan of the series, this one part is why you're watching. For all the critiques I could level at Hideaki Anno, he is never better than when he portrays a concerted effort against a threat. When Anno actually gets around to showing the mechanics and tactics implemented by the humans, it stops putting you to sleep and pulls you right in. The tension builds and builds, and it all leads to a scene that I would daresay call beautiful. A huge part of what makes this part so impactful is Shiro Sagisu's incredible score. The scene on its own would be devastating enough, but with his composition it becomes something more. You will find yourself in awe and mesmerized by what you see.
To wrap the rest of the movie up, the film quickly devolves afterwards yet again into boardrooms and endless minutes of people yapping. Even the way they 'solve' the Godzilla problem is disappointing. Again, I don't wish to spoil anything, but what they come up with is so ridiculous that it would've never worked in a million years. There's suspending your disbelief, and then there's a plan that's akin to smothering a giant monster with a pillow. Okay, the actual plan is not *that* ridiculous, but they way which they carry it out is absolutely hilarious, and just shouldn't have worked. Given how they've witnessed Godzilla "powering up" his atomic breath, everyone within a mile of him should've been blown to hell, and yet it conveniently doesn't happen this time.
So yeah, boring movie, bad resolution, but with 20 minutes of perfection in the middle. What a weird film....