KEVIN GREENE-ILLUSTRATOR

My friend Tony bought the last Godzilla movie "Godzilla: Final Wars" off of Ebay and we hunkered down Friday to watch it. I knew going in that this was going to be a different kind of Godzilla movie. I had heard some things about it......Oh boy. I wanted to like this movie, I really did but, man....it's tough sledding thru this flick. The human aspect of all Godzilla films is always a tough part of the film to deal with. You just kind of want them to shut up and get back to the monsters. There have been varying degrees of success with the human story. Maybe it's because I have fond childhood memories of them but the human characters in the olders films like " King Kong Vs. Godzilla", "Monster Zero" (my man Nick Adams) and " Destroy All Monsters" have been way more interesting than in the latter films. I do like the psychic girl that was in pretty much all of the late 80's and 90's movies. Some of the human stories in those were somewhat interesting(Except for in "Godzilla Vs. King Ghidrah". The actors are awful and the movie makes no sense at all). But this new movie...wow, this has got to be, easily, the worst human story ever in a Godzilla film. It's laughable. The villain ( who, in the movies' only surprise, bumps off the guy you thought was gonna be the big bad guy) is a preening, childish, overly made-up, vaguely homosexual ( not that vaguely, actually) dope. He looks like the Marvel Comics villian Nightmare, as drawn by Kevin Maguire. This guy is ridiculous. And the dubbing just accentuates his dumbness. At one point the voice actor let out a laugh that floored me and my friend. The whole movie is this lame Matrix rip, with dopey fighting that you accept in a B grade Kung Fu flick but not in a Big G movie. And the music? OH....MY...GOD. Now, this is coming from a man that has Godzilla soundtracks, including the master Akira Ifukube, so believe me when I say that this is easily the worst Godzilla score ever. The absolute worst. The music is synthesizer garbage, 80's C movie grade. It truly is horrific. The closing titles theme sounded like 2 kids that learned a few chords on a old broken Moog.
Now I always cringe when I see an American in a Kaiju movie and this got a cringe factor of 7 or 8 (The bad guy and android from the aforementioned "Godzilla Vs. King Ghidrah" set the all-time mark with an 11 on the cringe scale.). The Atragon-type ship in the movie has an American captain, who's mustache does the better part of the acting. This guy gets points because of the hat and the sword but loses with the S L O W fighting speed he showed and the dialogue. Wow.
I'm not going to explain the plot. It's "Destroy All Monsters" made dumber. Don't ask how the Matrix type parts crop up, you really don't want to know. You really, REALLY don't.
Now, the monsters. Not enough of them but there never is. There's a great sequence of Rodan, Anguirus and others (King Seesar, anyone?) ripping up major cities all over the world. Rodan, destroying New York, however, is marred by a truly regrettable set-up of a purple-clad pimp with a purple car, black of course, having an argument with a cop as a homeless man, black again, chortles his approval. It's really embarrassing to sit thru, especially when you are an African-American. I am always amazed at how this country, and New York in particular, is portrayed around the world. I had to just laugh at it, it was that ridiculous. This is cool, however: When the Big G re-emerges about 40 or so minutes into the flick he is truly in a bad mood towards everyone. No one is spared. Godzilla is an unstoppable force of nature in this film, almost is vicious and brutal as he is in "Godzilla, Mothra & King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack", where is is just Destruction Incarnate. He just wipes out monsters left and right, including his lame-ass American counterpart, which is actually humorous. And there is a monster surprise at the end, which was nice, because it probably answered a question that fans would have. Effects are pretty good across the board and the monster designs are pretty nice. It was cool to see all the old monsters get updated. But the movie is all over the map. There's an old man and his Grandson running around with Minya, baby Godzilla and it's just ludicrous. At one point they are all crammed into the old man's truck ( which apparently, is the toughest, best gas mileage vehicle in all of human history) and Baby Godzilla has a seatbelt on...lol...Yeah, he might get really banged up in an accident, this mutant lizard...lol...Oh boy. Watch monsters, fast forward thru humans. And to use my man Shawn Atkinson's method of rating films, if I paid $10 to see this movie it would really be worth about $3...and that's pushing it....