Godzilla: Final Wars 3/5 Reviewed by Mike

I have a lot of memories of growing up as a child, but let me tell you some of my favorite ones: Curled up next to fireplace, with a warm fire raging next to me. Outside, the air is cold, the wind is blowing the rain harder and harder onto our front window. I have a large bowl of salty popcorn. It's saturday afternoon, and me and my dad are watching Godzilla on the TV pounding the living snot out of some wierd-looking monster who moves like he was covered in molasses, and it's skin looks stragely like fabric--even the spikey parts. I'm loving every horribly-dubbed minute of it.

Godzilla will always hold a special place in my heart, and so I had to check out Godzilla: Final Wars, which came out in Japan in 2004, but has only recently been available here in the states on DVD. This has been touted as the last Godzilla movie ever, hence the title. Whether or not thats true, only time will tell. But what we have here is an attempt to make a final blockbusting event movie to end the Godzilla series with a bang.

The basic plot is simple--an alien race (from "Planet X" of all places), appearing benelovent at first, has sinister plans to take over the earth by taking control of the monster population (I think this happened to the Justice League at least 4 or 5 times). The Earth Defense Force, whose soldiers are mostly super-powered mutants, try to stop the aliens by awakening Godzilla to fight off all the other monsters.


Make no mistake, this film is every bit as cheesy as its predecessors, which is one of the reasons I love it so much. I can't explain why, but I have a love of B-movies like this--it knows its a B-movie and revels in it. First of all, Godzilla takes down the Hollywood version of Godzilla without breaking a sweat. That was pretty sweet. Then, he proceeds to systematically wipe out a huge cast of several of the classic old monsters--he even uses some cool new soccer moves to do it. Yes, the effects are cheesy--its a bunch of people in suits, with a little CGI mixed in. Yes, the music is horrible, yes the dialouge in nonsensical, yes the acting will make you gag (or laugh until you gag), yes the characters might as well not have names--all this is what makes the movie fun. It never takes itself seriously for a second. This is a Godzilla movie for fans, and lovers of the genre. If you like cool monster movies, you oughta give this a try. If you buy it, it even comes free with a copy of the casio-keyboard, synth-horn soundtrack (awesome!)

There were a few things to this movie's detriment--the plot revolves too much around the humans (mutants? aliens?) and not enough around the monsters. Theres a lot of badly done (yet very funny) kung-fu sequences, that seem to rip off both the Matrix, and Dragonball Z. Although these sequences are often funny, I was anxious to get back to more Godzilla fights, which sadly I wish there was more of. The fights that are there are pretty sweet. When the final monster morphs into a cool version of the three-headed Gidrah monster, I couldn've been happier. This is one of those great movies to pop in after a long day--when you need to relax, and stop caring about the world for a few hours.

See this movie if:
-You love Monster movies
-You kindof liked the Matrix movies, but secretly wished they were more like Dragonball Z... with monsters...
-You want to reconnect with your inner child, who loved cheesy monster flicks

Don't see this movie if:
-You want to see something serious
-You don't have a strange love for badly-done-on-purpose B-movies
-You can't see past the bad effects and bad acting for the fun romp that it is