I'm finally getting to the end of the Godzilla series. I was thinking tackling the rest of the Japanese monster movies after that but I'm taking a break and going back to other genre's of SF movies. Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S.is the 27th movie and it was released 12-13-2003. It continues from the previous movie. The government is repairing Kiryu while wondering if there is a reason to continue with the expense. Kiryu is the Mechagodzilla built over the real Godzilla's bones. The Mothra girls come to an old guy they had meet before and tell him to warn the government that they need to chuck the dead Godzilla's bones in the sea. The bones are attracting the big guy will keep coming back for them. Mothra will turn against the human's if they continue on this path. A giant dead sea turtle washes on shore. Looks rather Gamera like. We see the slashes on his next from some giant claws. Ooohhh, huh. The humans are kind of annoying, all noisy, and they don't listen to Mothra. Godzilla does show up and the old man and his grandson call Mothra for some help. It's a nice looking CGI Mothra that show sup. Looks really great. MechaGodzilla shows up and there's more fighting. The huge battle eats up a lot of the movie but is pretty entertaining. MechaG takes over it's own control and grabs Godzilla. They drop into the sea and the movie closes, after some human nattering, with a shot of a secret store of monster DNA. Oh, oh. The movie is more entertaining that the story it tells. The people don't have a lot to do and you've seen it all before. The effects in general are pretty nice and the soundtrack doesn't bother me any. There's a US edition from Columbia TriStar. It's letterboxed, looks pretty good, and has both Japanese audio with English subs and an English Dub version. I don't care for the dubbing very much. I've also got a Video Daikaiju bootleg dvd that is fan subbed that's pretty close to the US version. Worth a gander for the monster fa. The weak story line is bouyed up by the great battle scenes which make it better than average.
The 28th and currently last Godzilla film, Godzilla: Final Wars, came out in 2004. Ryuhei Kitamura is the director. I wouldn't have guessed he'd be directing a Godzilla movie, he does a fairly good job, expecially with the monster action. His script isn't anything special, back to the invading alien theme. Monsters seem to be popping out of the ground all over the world. They are trashing lots of stuff and the earth looks to be in trouble. Some aliens appear, they collect the attacking monsters, saving the earth. It's too good to be true of course and soon enough the aliens are outed. They are inhuman critters, in men suits, out to get their munch on. People are one of the alien's main food groups. Damn, that's some payback for being an animal eater, huh. It's slightly in the future of the rest of the series and it turns out that this Godzilla universe has mutants with special powers. They were rounded up and are now working for the Earth Defense Organization. That will be important in the fight to get rid of the aliens. There's a good bit of action and that was fun enough. I watched the bootleg dvd I had and part of the English Dub I got off of On Demand. There's a US version I hadn't picked up yet. I'm not in a big rush.
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