Oh, I'm skipping it. Fool me twice and all that.

Well, I basically had to watch it simply because I'm deep into the history of Godzilla films and all that. In fact, I'm probably gonna watch them all again soon just to really see how and why this thing is the way it is beyond, ya know, Toho spreading a script too thin and all.

It's weird that they decided to make a one film script into three movies but padded it out with the least entertaining shit. Budget issue or something?

I've no idea. The climax with the most movement occurred in the first two films, and this whole Ghidorah thing almost feels tacked on, which is a difficult thing accomplished seeing as how the movies had two different alien races for their respective monsters. (Mechagodzilla and Ghidorah.) So they're clearly planned early enough for something cool to happen, but the final kaiju battle still kinda flops with a boring and motionless thud.

Boring and motionless thud is the core of the creature design for the project.

To be fair, Godzilla did lethargically swipe his left arm a whole two times at one of Ghidorah’s spaghetti necks. It didn’t do anything because Ghidorah’s a god and it phased right through, but I was surprised that Godzilla’s CGI model was even tooled to move that way to begin with.

I thought they bought a rubber Godzilla ‘14 toy and rotoscoped it.

Animezilla is defying expectations in the most boring and uninteresting way ever.

Just got done watching the uncut version of Godzilla 2000 Millenium for the very first time. Shame they concentrated a lot on the human scenes because they tend to get clunky and on the verge of boring while one is impatiently waiting for the inevitable monster duel which should've been top priority from the get go.

Takao Okawara was a pretty mediocre director and he never got a handle on managing his human players. His contributions (Godzilla vs Mothra, Godzilla vs MechaGodzilla II, and Godzilla vs Destoroyah) are among the weakest of its decade and the franchise. I find the human element in his work severely lacking and that isn't helped by declining quality of Kawakita's special effects or the increasingly lazy scripting with each film. By the way, Sony's version of Godzilla 2000 is Toho's preferred version of the film.

Zeta_One wrote:By the way, Sony's version of Godzilla 2000 is Toho's preferred version of the film.

Really? I didn't know that. The more you know!

So, all of Godzilla 2000 feels clunky and rushed, not just the human elements. It’s most obviously made only as a response to Godzilla 1998, and it feels as though much wasn’t thought past that initial response. The movie is there to retort Roland Emmerich’s animalistic presentation of the classic monster with “Godzilla’s not an animal, he’s a force of nature!” and only really thought out the “Storm Chaser, but it’s with Godzilla instead” aspect of the movie.

Outside of that, I actually liked Takao Okawara’s work in the 90’s. Sure, his human elements are weak and the stories kinda lame, but the cinematography is actrually pretty impressive throughout. Even the camera movements and angles they’re able to pull off in Godzilla 2000 have yet to be replicated in any other Toho film with practical effects.

Even so, none of the 90’s Godzilla movies hold a candle to the 90’s Gamera trilogy, which is where the real impressive 90’s Kaiju action is.

If I had to pick one of Okawara's Godzilla films to lock in a vault for all time due to sheer awesomeness, I would actually pick Godzilla vs. Mothra: The Battle For Earth. It has one of the human stories I actually feel a lot of affection for and don't think it made for unwanted filler until the monsters dueled. I barely remember Destoroyah aside from the Emiko Yamane cameo and the burning Godzilla in the beginning.

I may have some nostalgic bias as I saw G2000 in theaters as a kid but I think it is really good and underrated (the American version specifically) & I actually like the family cast.
2nd best of the Millennium films for me after GMK.

Zeta_One wrote:His contributions (Godzilla vs Mothra, Godzilla vs MechaGodzilla II, and Godzilla vs Destoroyah) are among the weakest of its decade and the franchise.

Isn't Space Godzilla universally agreed to be worse then them?
I find vs MG & Destroyah to be fantastic.

Zeta_One wrote:By the way, Sony's version of Godzilla 2000 is Toho's preferred version of the film.

Gus Hanson wrote:Really? I didn't know that. The more you know!

The pacing & sound editing is vastly better. I tried watching the Japanese version, virtually every single sound was different and less effective.

FreakyFilmFan4ever wrote:but the cinematography is actrually pretty impressive throughout.

This is very true for 2000, more then any other film they put Godzilla in the distance of the shot effectively, there are some problems with his size fluctuating drastically but it's more then made up for.

FreakyFilmFan4ever wrote:Even so, none of the 90’s Godzilla movies hold a candle to the 90’s Gamera trilogy, which is where the real impressive 90’s Kaiju action is.

Just 90s yes, if you including all of the Heisei era, I would say Biollante is equal with Gamera 2-3 and better then Guardian.

Also trivia, we were suppose to get a American made sequel to Godzilla 2000 set in Hawaii with him battling a lava Bat monster, cast would include Bruce Campbell, Jamie Lee Curtis, Christopher Lee & Leonard Nimoy.
Details here - http://www.scifijapan.com/articles/2014 ... hat-wasnt/

movieartman wrote:Isn't Space Godzilla universally agreed to be worse then them?
I find vs MG & Destroyah to be fantastic.

Godzilla vs Mothra is usually listed only second to Godzilla vs SpaceGodzilla as the bottom of the barrel of the 90s films. And I never understood the love for Destoroyah. Yeah, people are moved by Godzilla's death. But it's attached to a underwhelming movie. It tries to evoke the original Godzilla film though it fails to even match the moodiness of The Return of Godzilla or Godzilla vs Biollante. The Oxygen Destroyer panic goes nowhere, the acting is weak across the board and the characters are reduced to commentators early on, and a lot of the special effects work is sloppy. Speaking of special effects, it's difficult for me to be impressed by anything after Godzilla vs Biollante when the Gamera films were doing spectacle so much better (with less money) while also delivering a satisfying complete film experience.

Godzilla movies tend to work best when they're family films. I don't mean that they're movies made for the young family demographic, rather that the better Godzilla films tend to be about family. (Shin Godzilla is the only exception as far as an amazing Godzilla movie not being about family, and that's only if you don't think of the team as becoming family over their time in the film.) Ishiro Honda's Godzilla movies in the Showa Era almost always had familial elements to them, focusing on how the family structure survived and adapted over the period of change that were the decades after WWII. Just to list a few, Godzilla focused much of its screen time to how the traditional Japanese family was irrevocably altered after the American occupation, Ghidorah the Three-Headed Monster and The Invasion of Astro Monster make a good double-header exploring various adult sibling relationships in families with weakened or non-existent parental hierarchies, Godzilla's Revenge is a harsh criticism on the effects of families living in a society where both parents need to work in order to support their only child, and Terror of Mechagodzilla leans hard into the subject of an adult needing to support her aging single father despite his deteriorating mental state.

Most of Takao Okawara’s work in the Heisei Era is best enjoyed if you realize that these movies are focusing on Godzilla's family this time around, and not the human families. That particular story arc is actually a hella strong one, perhaps even strongest in the franchise. I just hope you can care enough about Godzilla's family to not mind the generally weak human characters.

Glad to see someone support a theory of mine. For some time now I've suspected that a lot of the love for the Heisei films (specifically the ones from the 90s) comes from how they emphasize Godzilla over everything else. That, the largely consistent Godzilla design, and the pseudo-continuity is what makes the Heisei films so popular. Nostalgia doesn't hurt either. Honda commented on the weaker acting in the Heisei series and went as far as to call the films products of hackneyed thinking. On the subject of Honda, he was prevented from making the domestic dramas he wanted so I think he compromised by using Godzilla films to get as close to fulfilling his dreams as he could. But I think that gave his genre films a sense of humanity that a lot of the recent ones are missing. I also prefer the cinematography in films like Godzilla (1954), Rodan (1956), and Mothra vs Godzilla (1964) over the '90s films.

FreakyFilmFan4ever wrote: And just to make it even more infuriating and gross, Haruo doesn't even figure out which of the twins he's with until she's naked in front of him. Like, the movie goes WAY out of its way to prove that these are, in fact, undeniably, the Fairy Twins from the Mothra lore, despite Mothra not being important to anything with this movie whatsoever, has its main character fuck one of the twins, all while explicitly stating that Haruo really couldn't be bothered to care which one it was, and the movie doesn't even seem to notice that it did that, or that it makes the main character out to look like a little bit of an asshole. This is Bruce Wayne fucking Commissioner Gordon's daughter levels of infuriating. This is as bad as the time Batman boned Batgirl. This is DC's animated The Killing Joke movie for the Godzilla franchise.

Huh? Didn't the second movie establish that Haruo could tell the twins apart? During the sex scene he recognizes Maina as soon as he wakes up. He looks at her and the first thing he says is: "Maina." That's when he realizes it was Maina who saved him in the first movie. She responds and only then does she start removing her clothes. Also, Maina didn't awkwardly fumble around like her sister did. She appealed to his pathos and Haruo accepted her advances.