[GoldenXtreme]

This time I watched a trio of kaiju anime. Guess who was given access to someone else's Netflix account?

Gamera Rebirth - This is probably my favorite of the three things I watched, though I wouldn't exactly call it good. It has an interesting combination of Showa and Heisei Gamera traits. The way things are emphasized from a child's point of view is very Showa (and I won't lie, there being a main character who was a kid from an American army family like there were in many of the old movies made me laugh.) But it also has a streak of violence and mysticism that are more like the Heisei films. Undeniably the show looks pretty awful, characterization is kept pretty light, and the later episodes kind of fell apart with their semi-coherent plot about kaiju being some kind of ancient population control measure and people on the moon. It wasn't great, but it was a clear passion project by the staff. On a personal note, I think Zigra was my favorite of the reimagined kaiju!


The Godzilla Anime Film Trilogy - This is writyen by Gen Urobuchi so the sheer edginess of off the charts from the very beginning. To the point it almost became funny from being so bleak. I don't think I *hated* this film trilogy to the degree many Godzilla fans do, but I don't really get why they exist. Kaiju are depicted so sparsely that it could really be any old space opera and while some of the philosophizing could be interesting at times, each movie got a bit worse than the previous one so I was hardly impressed by its grand plot in the end. The third movie in particular was a complete drag, with the world's most boring and dragged out kaiju battle and some bonkers ending where the protagonist does a suicide attack on Godzilla because apparently technology is so evil its worth abandoning your pregnant wife over. Characters themselves are also very flat and archetypical, which really interfered with how seriously I could take the plot. Probably would have been better as a single film experiment.


Godzilla: Singular Point - Oh my gosh, I have not seen such awkward dialogue and such endless streams of hard sci-fi technobabble in a long time. It was kind of funny, but ultimately resulted in a plot I could honestly only follow in broad strokes as things got progressively more reality warping. The subtitles would probably have been fine in a show with a more reasonable plot, but were awkward enough that they just undermined the comprehensibility of the plot even more. It certainly had more kaiju action than the anime film trilogy, but I'd say they were about the same quality overall. Why's it so hard to make a decent Godzilla anime? This should be the easiest thing ever, c'mon!