Leaning into the cosmic horror of an alien death cult summoning a vastly powerful and unknowable space demon is an exciting turn that makes this the most watchable third of the trilogy. So that’s Planet Eater! It’s easily the best of the three films, but that’s not that high of a bar to clear. We sorta kinda got the Ahab ending I was hoping for! be “fans” of whatever intellectual property they’re adapting, but they should at least not have obvious disdain for the heart and soul of the source material. I think it’s silly for audiences to demand that directors, writers, actors, etc. TEASING the dino-shaped super robot was a dick move though, and the motivations behind keeping him out of the movie seem misguided at best. The living city is a cool and trippy sci-fi idea. Just to clarify, I’m not mad that Mechagodzilla doesn’t materialize in the form of a dino-shaped super robot. Toho: In what universe does it make sense to not have monster fights in your monster fights movie? It’s like if Rocky Balboa was just two hours of him managing his restaurant (actually that sounds delightful, bad example but you know what I mean). If you hate this stuff why are you directing it? Shizuno: it’s a good thing you avoided “silly-looking monster battles” so you could instead focus on the very well-written and not-at-all flat, flavorless and unlikable human characters. As a result, Mechagodzilla was never revealed in full in the film, only in promotional material. Co-director Kôbun Shizuno rejected such ideas, as he was never a big fan of monster movies, and wanted to avoid silly-looking monster battles, as per the request of Toho Studios. Writer Gen Urobuchi and director Hiroyuki Seshita, both fans of the Godzilla series, toyed with ideas like Mechagodzilla City coming alive at the film’s climax, either turning into a monstrous, 1 km tall robot, or transforming its various components into replicas of Mechagodzilla’s head and attack Godzilla. Like, why tease that and then mecha-blue balls everybody? It’s one thing to have concept art for a character or scene that ends up on the cutting room floor, but Bandai went ahead and made and sold action figures of this dude which strikes me as pretty shitty. That weird, wicked MG design never shows up in this movie. I don’t know if this is the best time to dive into it, but I’m gonna. That said, there’s still plenty of junk to ramble about! Put on your spacesuit, slather yourself in bug-dust, and pray for the second coming of Ghidorah, because we’re finishing this fuckin’ trilogy!īefore settling on the fairly normal title above, title translations for this flick included Godzilla: The City Mechanized for the Final Battle and the hilariously horny-sounding Godzilla: Battle Mobile Breeding City. A lot of the behind the scenes/deep dive stuff I normally do was already covered in my PotM review, anyway, so there’s just less junk to ramble about. Since both sequels were handled by the same creative team as Planet of the Monsters, and since they all collectively tell one big, over-arching story in the same unique world, I’m rolling my reviews of the two movies into one slightly lighter than normal article. It also helps that the movies genuinely get progressively better! Powering through them both on my own wasn’t something I looked forward to, but knocking ’em out with a bud was a pretty fuckin’ fun afternoon. Big ups then are in order for friend of the blog Ariccio, who graciously hosted a stream of Godzilla: City on the Edge of Battle and Godzilla: The Planet Eater. I’m the one fucking bizarro-world film fan that would rather write about stuff I love than dunk on shit I hate (which to be fair, I don’t hate PotM, just its cruel narcissist protagonist). I wasn’t exactly crazy about Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters, so the prospect of two more full feature films in that world didn’t have me champing at the bit to do more watching and writing. Why have I had blogger’s constipation block? The big reason hadn’t dawned on me until VERY recently: IT’S BECAUSE I’VE BEEN SUBCONSCIOUSLY PUTTING OFF REVIEWING THE SECOND TWO GODZILLA ANIME MOVIES. That stuff’s all true and accurate, but I couldn’t put my finger on why the holdup went on for so long after I worked out the job stuff. The months after that are on me: adjusting to a new job, trying to make time for my people, balancing my other creative endeavors, and wrangling my stupid trash brain all left me without the normal level of chutzpah (and just, you know, time) I need to crank out reviews for your brain and eyeballs. So the monthly reviews haven’t exactly been uh, monthly in a while, have they? A solid six months of the hiatus (starting last July) I can pin on getting, struggling with, and moving on from a job that was not a good fit.
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