Godzilla: Ranking the Heisei, Millennium, and Reiwa Era Films: #15 ‘Godzilla: Final Wars’ (2004)

#15 in my ranking of the Heisei, Millennium, and Reiwa eras of the Godzilla franchise.

The Matrix had one of the most negative influences on popular film…maybe ever. I think I’d rather watch terrible Star Wars clones from the early 80s than the desaturated, arch-cool attempts at stylized action that came to define derivative action cinema for about a decade after The Matrix shook things up. At least, that’s not all that Godzilla: Final Wars has to offer. It also has an endless supply of largely meaningless monster fights to string things along with a plot without mystery or any real tension. Toho decided to go in a different direction from Masaaki Tezuka’s approach to the two previous Godzilla films, but I don’t think Ryuhei Kitamura’s efforts were the best way to go about it.

In a world where giant monsters have been ravaging the place for decades, starting in 1954 with the original Godzilla, the powers have come together to form the Earth Defense Force, a cornerstone of which is the development of mutant soldiers, most prominently Ozaki (Masahiro Matsuoka) who, in a lull in action, is assigned to bodyguard the biologist Dr. Otonashi (Rei Kikukawa). This is also the moment that a bunch of monsters appear all over the world at once, quickly mopped up and teleported away by the alien spaceship run by Xilliens, come to Earth with promises of salvation from an incoming burning planet. Of course, they’re not to be trusted, and the movie wastes precious little time establishing that and then uncovering their conspiracy.

Which makes no sense. It’s something about making humanity willingly become cattle for the Xilliens who need human mitochondria to survive…even though they just showed up. And they could easily rule us with their technology and control over our monsters, as well as a few they introduce themselves like Gigan. All this does is end up giving humans enough time to develop a plan to fight back. But whatever, that’s the point.

Dr. Otonashi discovers that the Xilliens are replacing prominent humans with copies. Ozaki and the commander of the flying drill ship Gotengo, Douglas Gordon (Don Frye), who helped secure Godzilla under the Antarctic ice when he was a younger officer, set out to free Godzilla from his icy prison.

Really, the story here is kind of beside the point. It’s just not very interesting. It’s super generic alien invasion stuff mixed with Matrix-like human level action and a large glut of big monster smashy-smashy. It’s edited for those with terminal cases of attention deficit disorder, and it’s kind of nonstop. There’s no real effort at a human sized story (the closest being a very ill-defined rivalry of sorts between two members of the mutant squad that gets even more obfuscation with mind control nonsense), and it’s about plot mechanics and special effects more than anything. It’s exhausting at 2-hours in length, which is an interesting contrast to the incredibly abbreviated feeling I got from the previous two Godzilla films.

The only interesting thing to talk about with Final Wars is its place in the Godzilla universe. It’s essentially a last gasp of the Millennium Era, a nostalgia fest that brings in almost every monster from the Showa Era on (including a monster that looks a whole lot like the one from the American Godzilla movie by Roland Emmerich, which was totally an accident, I’m sure) and pits them against Godzilla for a quick bout before moving on to the next. It’s such a hodgepodge of sights and sounds (almost all of which have very similar over-exposed monochromatic visuals which were much uglier than cool) without any real grounding. It makes sense why the Godzilla faithful seem to have gravitated towards the movie over the years. Sure, the story may be generic garbage, the characters nonexistent, the plot a mess, but it’s got so many monsters doing the smashy-smashy with Godzilla. Huzzah.

And it did so badly at the box office that Toho shut down Godzilla films for a decade, something it had done from Terror of Mechagodzilla in the Showa Era. It’s obvious that at this point in the mid-2000s, the franchise was just tired, with no real direction to go. It mined stylistically from Hollywood in search for meaning, but there’s no core to latch onto. There’s no purpose but a film that is essentially a clip show of the franchise, but with newly shot footage.

It exists in this weird spot between serious and silly, firmly entrenched in nostalgia while offering nothing new besides imitation of more successful recent franchises. It’s simply not good, though there are moments here and there that are worth a chuckle, not always an intentional chuckle.

Originally published here