Director: Takashi Yamazaki
Cast: Ryunosuke Kamiki, Minami Hamabe, Yuki Yamada, Munetaka Aoki
Have I Seen it Before: Nope.
Did I Like It: I’m really annoyed with this film. Deeply, so.
I got to November and I was really quite sure that I had my top five movies of the year all figured out.
Now? Now, I’m stuck either giving Tetris (2023) or Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023) the bad news that one of them gets relegated to the top ten with the likes of jokers like Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 3 (2023), or worse yet, The Flash (2023)*. It is easily my favorite action or sci-fi film of the year.
Not only is this one of the best movies of the year, it’s also moved me from being a relative Godzilla agnostic to an absolute believer in the King of All Monsters. I want to see all of the movies in the series now, and I might even try to get back into the recent American series. Matthew Broderick is probably still on his own.
I can’t readily think of a film that so winningly depicts the Japanese post-war experience, and that’s before we get to the giant lizard of it all.
And, man alive, has that lizard never looked better. There are sequences where’s he’s a frightening face that won’t die coming through the water. There are times where I’m relative sure that he’s just a guy in a suit. And it all works as a piece. Yes, even the lurching figure lumbering his way through Ginza works. I was surprised, too.
It might have helped that the crowd I watched it with was just about perfect. Monday afternoon. Maybe half a dozen people including myself. Spoilers, but when Shikishima (Kamiki) makes his escape from his plane just as Godzilla’s head explodes, we all cheered. All of us.
Please go see this movie. Do it with a crowd.
*This is why I don’t do a top ten list. It will force me to really reckon with how I feel about The Flash. This movie cost about 5% of what The Flash cost, and now my head hurts.