Here's what you need to know; after two decades drifting aimlessly in the cold expanse of space, the last remnants of Humanity make the fateful decision to return to their home world. There's just one problem, the reason they abandoned Earth in the first place is still alive, and in the twenty thousand years it's had alone on Earth, it's become a more formidable threat than anything the returning humans could have prepared for. Now the war for Earth has begun, between a hopeless and ill prepared human force and the king of this strange new planet; Godzilla.
After a few weeks of people constantly telling me to watch The Haunting of Hill House, and the mounting desire to just get Netflix, I finally did it, I set up a Netflix account, and the first thing I watched was not The Haunting of Hill House or any of the Marvel shows or even this, it was Jack Whitehall: Travels with my Father, which I watched with a friend over a stack of Domino's Pizza. Fast forward a few nights and I decide it's finally time to sit down and watch Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters, the Netflix exclusive Godzilla anime, because such a thing somehow came to exist. And as I'm sure you know, I am obsessive about Godzilla, so I was very interested to see just what this film would offer.
Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters has a fascinating first few minutes that set up a film that I'd very much like to see, setting up the very good basic premise of the film. To sum it up, mankind was at war with Kaiju in its final years on Earth, a war that it lost miserably at the claws of the King of the Monsters, resulting in what was left of humanity opting to leave Earth and let Godzilla have it, a decision that we later learn was a very, very bad one. More interesting than that though is the intrigue the film the plays with regarding Humanity's new life among the stars, a life that is cold and lonely and dark, where food is a luxury and where the weak die, this is a scary idea that the film never develops, only hinting at the psychological and societal effects of losing Earth, it's nihilistic and kind of heart-breaking in concept, but that's all it is, a concept. I really like the first few minutes of this film however, as we are shown through flash backs the evacuation of Earth, a sequence that packs a harrowing punch thanks to it's amazing use of music and through its demonstration of just how malicious this Godzilla is, making him a frightening creature, at least at first, and making Humanity's decision to leave an emotional one, one that you feel. Also considering that Humanity had to share the ship and its resources with two other alien species, it's amazing that the ship wasn't torn apart in a race war in the twenty years they've been adrift. I'm not going to lie, I found this idea really intriguing however, Humanity losing its home and in a way, losing what made it human in the first place, no longer able to take air for granted, no longer able to feel the comfort of home, and the shame of surrender, not because Earth was taken by Godzilla, but because they packed their bags and ran out of fear. It's a shame that the film doesn't really play with this story as much as it could have, and while you'd think that's because they need to get back to Godzilla, to the fun shit, you wouldn't nesseccarilly be right.
Before I start talking about where this film really disappoints me, there are some things that are worth mentioning, first of all, I am conflicted about the film's presentation. When I first saw the trailer and saw the CG anime style they were going for, I thought it didn't look that good, it looked cheap and janky and I thought I wouldn't like it. As it turns out though, I do and don't; the animation does indeed look cheap and janky, and the visual style of Anime translated to CG animation looks about as weird as I'd expected it to, but it didn't end up bothering me all that much. In fact, when you're not looking at a person, but instead looking at the very cool sci fi machines the humans bring to Earth, the animation is actually surprisingly good, this style ends up working with Spider tanks, not so well with people, and even less so with monsters. Also, the film looks dull, from a colours standpoint it is so lifeless looking; the jungle they land in is just a huge grey and green expanse; there are no vibrant colours, there are no funky animals, it's just dull green ground on a dull grey sky, and for some reason the humans seem to like that colour scheme because that's also what the inside of their ships look like, lots of greys and lots of greens. Like a few things we'll be discussing, this film has so much potential and opportunity to do some crazy shit; why can't there be indigenous animals like deer or wolves that have evolved over the years into monsters, or pretty plants, giant flowers, carnivorous bastards like that thing from Jumanji. Something tells me this was down to the film's tight production budget, hence the recycling of assets and everything on earth looking the same, but given the complete lack of vision the film has in other areas, it's very possible that they just didn't try. At least the machines are cool; the spider tanks are cool, the landers are cool, the mechs are cool, it does appear that whoever designed and animated them was having fun doing it, why the rest of the film is so dull then, I don't know. I don't talk about music that much in films either, but this film has one of the weirdest soundtracks I seen as of late, with some tracks being really good and others being complete garbage, some tracks fit the action and are effective, others are just noise, and I swear that one track in particular uses the Nintendo DS start up sound, I'm sure of it. The film also features a pop song recorded specially for the film, something that's been coming back in recent years for some reason, and this one; White Out, isn't bad, I wouldn't play it at a party, but I have walked to work listening to it a few times, it's a bit of a guilty pleasure.
Leading the charge for most of the film is Haruo, one of three names that I don't need to IMDb in the film, and I'll be honest, he's not all that great. His motivations are very clear, his sole intention being to get revenge on Godzilla, but the problem is that's all he has, that drives him for the entire film, meaning we get very little in the way of any kind of relationships he has or doesn't have with his crew, or what kind of fears he harbours, his entire character is getting revenge on Godzilla, so when the film tries to force him, the most unstable, irrational and emotionally driven character in the whole film, into a leadership role, it makes absolutely no sense. But Haruo, despite being a boring and one-dimensional character, is actually the most well developed one in the crew. Metphies is a religious leader, and that's his character, Leland is a cowardly leader who *spoilers* goes out like a hero, there's a second alien race in the film, and all of the members of that group are so flat as to be interchangeable, there's a girl who's probably going to be a love interest, and who wants to be big and strong like her heroes, so that's a love interest and naïve kid double bill right there. Outside of Metphies, Haruo, Yuko and Leland, I honestly don't know any other names, and I sure as shit couldn't put faces to them even if I did. Godzilla films having boring heroes is nothing new, even the 2014 film, which I still regard as one of the best ones, stumbled with its characters, but this isn't simply a stumble, this is a fall, down a flight of stairs, out through the front door and down the street, this is Shin Godzilla levels of boring, and as such, when they 'win,' I wasn't very invested, and when the rug inevitably gets pulled out from under them, I still wasn't very invested.
Sadly, the disappointment does continue as we now talk about the film's monsters, or rather, its lack of monsters. For a film titled "Planet of the Monsters," it's very disappointing how when they arrive on Earth, there aren't many monsters. Before the film came out, I'd heard that Rodan, Orga, and probably others would be in the film, and yet despite indeed featuring monsters like Orga, Rodan, Kamacuras and Anguirus, and even more obscure ones like Dogora, they're all relegated to cameos in the film's prologue, which is a complete waste, and worse, Rodan and Anguirus are unrecognisable in the one image they're shown in, and not just because they're skeletons, but because even as skeletons, they just don't look like their classic counterparts, but since I know what Mechagodzilla and Ghidorah look like in this trilogy already, it's not worth getting mad about Rodan's design, there's bigger fish to fry. Fortunately, all the other cameos; Orga, Kamacarus, Dagahra and Dogora, look pretty good, it's just a shame that they weren't in the bloody film. What we do have in the film is Godzilla and a bunch of bat things, and again, it's weird that for a film called "Planet of the Monsters," the crew only encounter two monsters, and sadly, neither of them are very exciting. The Bat things, which are called Servum according to the wiki, are the most numerous monsters the crew encounter in their mission, and while the film could have been smart and built a bit of tension with these things' first appearance, they just kind of show up with barely any build up, making the resulting action sequence feel gratuitous and suspenseless. Why the planet's ecosystem is so dull and absent of any kind of diversity is a mystery to me, and it feels like a huge missed opportunity to give us a "Planet of the Monsters" that only has two kinds of Monster on it, especially when Toho has bug kaiju like Kumonga, Megaguirus and, oh I don't know, Kamacuras, in its arsenal, kaiju that would fit pretty well into this film's alien jungle setting, or how about Biollante, a plant Kaiju, or is one already too much. Instead we get the Servum, bat things with none of the nostalgia of a classic monster and none of the weird, fun wackiness of something like Legendary's MUTO's. But as far as monsters go in this film, there's obviously a big one that I haven't discussed yet, and if you don't know who that is, how have you gotten this far.
It's obviously Godzilla, and Planet of the Monsters' portrayal of the big G is something I'm conflicted about. I do prefer this design of Godzilla to the one used in Shin Godzilla, which, when he stopped looking like a lungfish, looked like a scab with legs that had broken into the Patty vault. But while Shin Godzilla was completely proportionally off with his dinky arms, curvy hips and comedically long tail, anime Godzilla is off in the complete opposite sense, he's apparently been hitting the gym every day for the last twenty thousand years because he's fucking huge. But not only is Swolezilla the most hench Godzilla to ever even lift, he's also a plant, and what's even weirder than Godzilla being a plant is that this is never brought up in the film, it's never explained, and it never serves any purpose to the plot. Other differences include how Godzilla's atomic breath no longer fires from his mouth, but is a concentrated beam of energy that charges around him like a bubble, which, don't get me wrong, is a cool thing to look at, but like Shin Godzilla's atomic breath being purple, it just feels like change for the sake of change, and the same is true of him being a plant. But the biggest issue with this Godzilla is how boring he is. This Godzilla is big, but while a film like Pacific Rim or the 2014 Godzilla succeed in selling the size of their monsters while also making their battles very entertaining, Planet of the Monsters' approach to showing size is just to make Godzilla move really, really slowly, the same is true of Shin Godzilla, but to a lesser degree, and the obvious issue is that it drags. But this would be less of an issue if Godzilla did anything in the film, but he doesn't. In the film's prologue, Godzilla is portrayed as purely malicious and evil, yet when he finally shows up again half way through the film, all he does is walk forward and spam his atomic beam at Haruo and his crew, in fact the first casualties of the battle don't even come as a result of Godzilla, but as a result of the humans desperately scrambling to get away from him. It's annoying to watch in some ways because this is an anime which makes so many things possible, and which makes Godzilla's complete lack of personality insufferable. This is also the fourth Godzilla to be entirely CGI, and yet despite being a complete bastardisation of the monster, even the 1998 Sony Godzilla has more character and is more involved in the plot of the movie, even though in that film it's treated comedically that he's less dangerous than the army trying to kill him, that's right, even the Sony Godzilla, a dumpster fire of a film, was more true to Godzilla and more compelling in its portrayal.
This becomes a huge, huge problem in the film's battle sequences, of which Godzilla features in two; the first one where the humans end up crashing one of their own ships in a mad dash to escape, and the second where they attempt to trap and kill Godzilla. In both of these battles Godzilla behaves the same; walking forward and spamming his atomic beam while the Humans buzz around him like ineffectual bees on hoverbikes. This makes Godzilla in this film little more than an obstacle for the Humans to overcome. It also occurs to me now, while I watch the film on my phone while writing this, that Godzilla no longer firing the beam from his mouth removes another facet of his personality, his mouth; Godzilla now firing the beam from his face rather than out of his mouth makes his already lifeless face look even more lifeless, especially since this Godzilla doesn't do any biting thanks to the lack of monsters and his own sloppiness. It's actually rather fitting that he's plant, because, like a plant, he has no personality to discern, he doesn't interact with his environment in any exciting or compelling way, he just kind of stands there and gets shot at, which isn't exciting, even less so since, despite being called "Planet of the Monsters," there are no monsters on Earth big enough for him to fight, making the already boring primary threat of the film even more boring. This is all in the shadow of the prologue in which Godzilla mercilessly attacks the evac shuttles, refusing the let Humanity escape even as they attempt to leave, and since those seventy seconds of are so effective and haunting, everything else that he does, literally everything, is a snooze. This obviously also makes the battles not all that exciting; with Godzilla just kind of standing there, with the boring Servum attacking the landing shuttles, and with monsters like Orga and Rodan completely wasted in the film's prologue, meaning we don't get to see them either. This film somehow manages to waste all its potential with regards to the monsters; featuring cameos that waste a stellar line up of Toho Kaiju, and only featuring two monsters in the actual film, one that's boring, and another that's offensively boring. There's a reason I keep bringing up the film's title in quotations; "Planet of the Monsters" does not deliver on the monsters, and what little it delivers on the planet is underdeveloped, meaning that by the time the film's credits role, once you have the exciting Stinger for the sequel, the film you just watched is rendered basically pointless, because you realise that the heroes have missed the point for the entire film, just as the people making the film clearly missed the point of what they were doing.
This planet can go to hell
I suppose you know how I feel about this film, but in case you don't, or just skip to the end of my reviews because you can't be arsed to read the whole thing, I am not a big fan of Planet of the Monsters, and that annoys me way more than I thought it would. The film's opening prologue is great, setting up a heart-breaking tone and a compelling narrative, both of which the film wastes by being boring. It's characters are underdeveloped cut-outs that fail to be compelling, it's world, despite being outstanding on paper, is wasted by being underdeveloped and poorly executed, its action is dull and suspenseless, its visuals are dull and inconsistent, its ending makes the entire film pointless, and worst of all, it ruins Godzilla, it turns him, both figuratively and literally, into a lifeless, boring, innominate tree. There are things in this film that could work if they're done right, but that isn't this film, it's a feature length prologue to a trilogy that's already off to a boring, uncompelling and dull start. And to my horror, when it comes to the biggest thing in a Godzilla film; Godzilla, the 1998 train wreck which turned Godzilla into an asexual mutant Lizard created by the French, demonstrated a better understanding of what Godzilla is and how to make him entertaining. I went in cautiously optimistic, but I'll be going into the sequel in abject dread, because this film is pants and I wouldn't recommend it.
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