Godzilla 2000

    Rubber suits fought. Buildings crumbled. Tokyo shook. Ugly Japanese people pointed up off-camera. CGI was little and almost non-existent.
    *happy sigh* Life is good.
    Let's get the ratings out of the way, mon frere.

    Gore: 3
    Schmaltz: 4 rising sharply to 7
    Character development: 4
    Sturgeon Principle: Vibrato (it's crap. But it's fun crap.)

    Plot? Sure there's a plot. It had something to do with Japanese people running around doing something. Characters? Sure there were characters. I think one of them was named Kenny... wait, no, there weren't any male Kids in this film. Okay, I'm being glib -- this is one of the few Godzilla films where I actually paid attention during the Human-driven scenes. Toho has outdone itself here, my friends; the plot's something straight out of a college hack's pizza nightmares, but the characters can keep it well interesting for us.
    Plot summary? You must be mad. This plot's like a Jinga stack: pretty to look upon, sometimes eerily beautiful, but if you nudge it even a little bit the whole thing collapses with a loud crash. This isn't "Romeo and Juliet". This isn't even "Titus Andronicus". This is pure and simple the high point of the low art of giant monster movie making. So that said, I will now present the Ten Things I Learned From The Latest Godzilla Movie!

• Ten -- A man's level of intensity is in direct relationship to his capacity for Evil. Thus, the scattered yet happy-go-lucky scientist can never have even a single evil bone in his body, while the minister with a stares that rivals Antonio Bandaras' must babysit for Satan on alternate Tuesdays.
• Nine -- The Godzilla Watcher's Network kicks *ASS*. They have a distributed network of information nodes that consists entirely of people you'd expect to be reading an issue of Wired. They're also more efficient than the government. Go for it, Godzilla Watchers! Frobozz Salutes you!
• Eight -- Human technology has come a long way, baby. Once, all of our weapons of war looked like cheap toy models. Now they look like those really expensive toy models you make out of vynal!
• Seven -- Shit runs through a goose more quickly than any other animal. In fact, the Japanese Self-Defense Force appears to have conducted Shit/Goose testing even after the treaty of 97.
• Six -- We no longer need to send annoying children on any alien spacecraft that we find in the hopes that Gamera will follow them into space and sort things out for us. We can now get our clocks cleaned by alien spacecraft from the comfort of our own planet.
• Five -- Godzilla can radiate enough to wipe out magnetic media, but he never ever ever ever causes a single case of cancer!
• Four -- iMacs... Sonys... Palm Pilots... and... Windows 98j... can all exist... in the same movie at one time... AAAAAAH! THE LIONS AND THE LAMBS ARE LYING DOWN TOGETHER! RUN FOR THE HILLS, IT'S THE ARMAGEDDON... oh crap, King Ghuidra is in the hills...
• Three -- No Bullet, er Missile Can Kill Godzilla! (with apologies to Sam Raimi and Sharon Stone).
• Two -- Alien space men are really just like Terran hackers. They'll reprogram any computer they can break into. It doesn't matter why... they don't need a reason why. They just do it because they can!
• One -- A Japanese man can hang around with a reporter who has a love/hate relationship with him, can scale twenty stories in under five minutes, can survive a building blowing up around him, has a fortress of solitude, and can solve scientific problems in seconds. It is clear that this man can be none other than... SUPERMAN, the MAN OF STEEL! And you all thought he landed in Kansas, fools!

    So, I liked this movie, you ask? Yes. Yes I did. Utterly. The Big G is back... oh. Just... slip out after Godzilla wins (trust me, there could be no other outcome. If Godzilla had died in this film, a billion billion web-sites would already have covered this to the point of bursting). The last five minutes attempt to convey a beautiful, poignant thing. However, this is a Japanese thing, so it makes no bloody sense at all to me. The final line of the film attempts to portray Godzilla as the saviour of mankind while the footage is of Godzilla trashing town. Perhaps it was meant to be said in irony -- if it was, it was Japanese Irony and thus, I missed it. Trust me. You don't need a remake of the famous ending speech from It Conquered The World, which is exactly what this is. Avoid.
    I give this five lighthouses!
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