Godzilla: The Planet Eater - Reviews
Posted: Sat Nov 10, 2018 2:53 am
I realize this will be premature for most people, but I thought I'd what I did for the previous movie and pull my thoughts out of the spoiler thread and start a separate topic for anyone who's seen it (either in Japan this month or after its global Netflix release), so they can discuss reactions rather than speculation.
Please keep everything but personal reactions in spoiler tags, though be warned that you're in danger of having certain things revealed just by being in this thread.
------------------------Review/summary below------------------------
Plot summary for context:
(Viewed at an ~N2 Japanese level, so I got most of it, but I'll note where I feel like I missed a bit of context, and everything is subject to some scrutiny as I'm not fluent.)
Edit--The summary here is also completely accurate, and seems to be from a higher-level Japanese speaker, though it's spread out over several 4chan posts. But if you clicked just to get an overview of the film, you can combine details from both and get a pretty complete picture.
Personal thoughts:
I like that a number of believable motivations are offered for each character, and indeed tension and layered character conflict have been the strengths of these films and Gen Urobuchi's writing, as far as I know it, in general. Multiple reasons are given for Haruo's decisions, all plausible, and I think each rings true in some way. In particular, elements like his guilt over having betrayed Yuko in some way, who was comfortable with resolving to change her definition of humanity in line with the Bilusaludo's goals, are a nice touch. Ghidorah is also an absolute nightmare. I don't think he's ever been scarier. The film seems to land as him being a scientific anomaly beyond current understanding, but he really does feel in presentation like a Lovecraftian eldritch horror. The scenes building up to his fight with Godzilla are genuinely creepy.
However ... I think the second film remains the strongest of the trilogy. Compared to the Bilusaludo's arguments in the second movie, the goals of the Exif are rather too transparently villainous--unless you're really swayed by pat nihilism, and even then, there isn't a compelling reason to accept their voluntary embrace of entropy over survival. I found the combat sequences more exciting in the second movie as well. Haruo's more or less done changing by the time his movie rolls around, only getting to show the resolve he had already arrived at by the end of the second (to just live, though in the end he still does bare his pride and grudge to some extent).
Finally, this has the Gen Urobuchi curse. Or at least what seems to be a common weakness between these movies and Madoka Magica, which is the only other work by him I've seen or read. Namely that, while he's excellent at building tension, and presenting layered character motivations and letting them play off of one another, it amounts to very little of weight. Much like that series, for all the believable tension he mines, by the final act it shows itself as having little to offer in terms of prompting us to reconsider our world. There's a pep talk in here on surviving, and letting things be, but anything applicable to your own perspective on life or modern fears is about as shallow as could be.
That still puts it above the vast majority of other hard sci-fi takes on Godzilla though (to the extent that the series largely breaks down into approaches that prioritize social/political commentary, spectacle kitsch, and hard sci-fi, with the latter having by far the weakest track record, I think). The second entry, which is the tightest piece of self-contained sci-fi between the three, and which places those conflicting character motivations that are a genuine strength of the writer's on center stage, is the one I'm likely to come back to in the future, and makes a dip into the trilogy worth it on the whole. And by no means did I have a bad time watching this movie, even though I wish, as I'll probably always with with its writer, it were able to focus its tension and character-writing into a sharper point.
Oh--I've read a few Japanese reviews since. One reviewer took issue with being unable to become invested in the anime trilogy in general due to how far removed it is from reality (when the kaiju genre is really premised on one fantastic element dropping into the ordinary), and called Urobuchi strong medicine, so ... I suppose, really, if you've been turned off on these movies on premise, nothing is going to change here. I do agree with the sentiment that the film is held back somewhat on offering anything of genuine substance due to its completely fictional setting (and likely simply the particular weakness of its writer that is his inability to focus interesting character interactions into any kind of challenging or compelling theme), which is why I tend to prefer both the more grounded and complete kitsch Godzilla entries over the hard sci-fi ones, but we've already had a number in the franchise that eschew any kind of reality, and none have been half as competently executed as this run was, so it's a point I identify with somewhat but think has little ground to stand on speaking of the series or genre as a whole.
Short version:
I give it two spooky Ghidorahs out of three. I like, but don't love, the anime trilogy, and think the second entry is the strongest part. The third has its strengths too, but is subject to Urobuchi's usual weakness with endings that fail to imbue all of the layered and interesting character tension with anything of thematic weight. It is still, on the whole, the most competently executed and interesting hard sci-fi take on Godzilla we've gotten to this point.
Please keep everything but personal reactions in spoiler tags, though be warned that you're in danger of having certain things revealed just by being in this thread.
------------------------Review/summary below------------------------
Plot summary for context:
(Viewed at an ~N2 Japanese level, so I got most of it, but I'll note where I feel like I missed a bit of context, and everything is subject to some scrutiny as I'm not fluent.)
Spoiler:
Personal thoughts:
I like that a number of believable motivations are offered for each character, and indeed tension and layered character conflict have been the strengths of these films and Gen Urobuchi's writing, as far as I know it, in general. Multiple reasons are given for Haruo's decisions, all plausible, and I think each rings true in some way. In particular, elements like his guilt over having betrayed Yuko in some way, who was comfortable with resolving to change her definition of humanity in line with the Bilusaludo's goals, are a nice touch. Ghidorah is also an absolute nightmare. I don't think he's ever been scarier. The film seems to land as him being a scientific anomaly beyond current understanding, but he really does feel in presentation like a Lovecraftian eldritch horror. The scenes building up to his fight with Godzilla are genuinely creepy.
However ... I think the second film remains the strongest of the trilogy. Compared to the Bilusaludo's arguments in the second movie, the goals of the Exif are rather too transparently villainous--unless you're really swayed by pat nihilism, and even then, there isn't a compelling reason to accept their voluntary embrace of entropy over survival. I found the combat sequences more exciting in the second movie as well. Haruo's more or less done changing by the time his movie rolls around, only getting to show the resolve he had already arrived at by the end of the second (to just live, though in the end he still does bare his pride and grudge to some extent).
Finally, this has the Gen Urobuchi curse. Or at least what seems to be a common weakness between these movies and Madoka Magica, which is the only other work by him I've seen or read. Namely that, while he's excellent at building tension, and presenting layered character motivations and letting them play off of one another, it amounts to very little of weight. Much like that series, for all the believable tension he mines, by the final act it shows itself as having little to offer in terms of prompting us to reconsider our world. There's a pep talk in here on surviving, and letting things be, but anything applicable to your own perspective on life or modern fears is about as shallow as could be.
That still puts it above the vast majority of other hard sci-fi takes on Godzilla though (to the extent that the series largely breaks down into approaches that prioritize social/political commentary, spectacle kitsch, and hard sci-fi, with the latter having by far the weakest track record, I think). The second entry, which is the tightest piece of self-contained sci-fi between the three, and which places those conflicting character motivations that are a genuine strength of the writer's on center stage, is the one I'm likely to come back to in the future, and makes a dip into the trilogy worth it on the whole. And by no means did I have a bad time watching this movie, even though I wish, as I'll probably always with with its writer, it were able to focus its tension and character-writing into a sharper point.
Oh--I've read a few Japanese reviews since. One reviewer took issue with being unable to become invested in the anime trilogy in general due to how far removed it is from reality (when the kaiju genre is really premised on one fantastic element dropping into the ordinary), and called Urobuchi strong medicine, so ... I suppose, really, if you've been turned off on these movies on premise, nothing is going to change here. I do agree with the sentiment that the film is held back somewhat on offering anything of genuine substance due to its completely fictional setting (and likely simply the particular weakness of its writer that is his inability to focus interesting character interactions into any kind of challenging or compelling theme), which is why I tend to prefer both the more grounded and complete kitsch Godzilla entries over the hard sci-fi ones, but we've already had a number in the franchise that eschew any kind of reality, and none have been half as competently executed as this run was, so it's a point I identify with somewhat but think has little ground to stand on speaking of the series or genre as a whole.
Short version:
I give it two spooky Ghidorahs out of three. I like, but don't love, the anime trilogy, and think the second entry is the strongest part. The third has its strengths too, but is subject to Urobuchi's usual weakness with endings that fail to imbue all of the layered and interesting character tension with anything of thematic weight. It is still, on the whole, the most competently executed and interesting hard sci-fi take on Godzilla we've gotten to this point.