#12 in my ranking of the Heisei, Millennium, and Reiwa eras of the Godzilla franchise.
I’ve always been reticent to getting into anime, and I think Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters is a good example of why. The storytelling is too episodic, the emotions too arch, and the focus is more about world-building than actual narrative. There are things to enjoy, but the connective tissue from one moment to the next is so reliant on lore and thin characters acting within small boxes that the whole package just doesn’t entertain nearly as much as I think it should. At least there’s a strong effort at making interesting and understandable spectacle that takes over at a certain point.
Humanity has been driven off of Earth with the rise Godzilla destroying everything globally. Using the help of a pair of alien races, the Exif and the Bilusaldo, humanity boarded a small fleet of spaceships and traveled faster than light to nearly 12 lightyears away. Time dilation means that while only twenty years have passed for humanity, 20,000 have passed on Earth, and hope has dwindled to the point where a desperate act must be taken. This is where Captain Sakaki (Mamoru Miyano) comes in, threatening to blow up part of the ship because of immigration of old people to the harsh planet below. Arrested, he becomes key in a plan to go back to Earth and fight Godzilla based on an anonymous essay floating through the ship.
You see…this setup is deeply, deeply frustrating. It’s so dense with stuff that never seems to actually matter. The two alien races? Why can’t they just be humans of different beliefs? They look exactly like other humans. The anonymous essay? Does the limited amount of mystery around it, which we’re given the answer to before the rest of the characters, add much of anything to the film? Not really. Does Sakaki need even more incentive to act angry other than his backstory of Godzilla killing his dad? It’s overstuffed while the visuals in this part are just intentionally bland with everyone wearing the same gray clothes as they meander around gray hallways.
Things get more interesting when they do get back to Earth with a plan to try and take advantage of a weakness their research has detected in Godzilla. It’s science-fiction gobbledygook about a natural shield he has that they’re going to take down through a complicated process developed by Sakaki. The plan ends up needing 600 people at three landing zones…and the three landing zones are narratively only used so that there can be an action scene near the beginning of the process where Sakaki has to help his group get to the others with Godzilla nearby.
And yet, the action is where the film is its best. I mean, it’s still not good, but it’s actually something to latch onto. There are monsters to fight off, clear goals to accomplish, and clear stakes at hand. It’s just…the goals kind of make no sense in the grand scheme of things. Seriously, I don’t get why there are three landing zones, especially since the entire final action spectacular is just everyone together fighting off Godzilla.
But the action is big. Godzilla feels huge. Things happen. It’s lightly amusing, and the escalation and flow of the action is clear. It’s solid stuff, and a good way to end the film on. A film full of extra little ideas and subplots that will hopefully come to greater fruition in the two ensuing entries in this intended trilogy.
And yet, it doesn’t feel like the first entry in a trilogy. It feels like the first bunch of pages of a manga. There’s hardly anything one could call a beginning, middle, and end, unless you cut off the first 20 minutes of exposition that is largely just a prologue and count the mechanics of landing on Earth and fighting Godzilla as a story. I mean, the only character with a hint of characterization is Sakaki, and he amounts to being angry at Godzilla. It’s thin, at best.
So, it’s…fine overall, really buoyed by the action-heavy climax with enough movement and variation to keep things mildly interesting. The world building could fulfill some promises later, but I’d rather the first entry feel complete on its own to some degree instead of the first episode in a limited television series.
Oh, well. I’ve seen worse.
Originally published here
English (US) · 