Finally! A direct sequel in a series of reboots! And this one is awesome. Yeah, I know. Awesome is an overused word. Too bad the conclusion of this epic story is ruined with bad dubbing. It’s the only way I could get ahold of this movie.
Not only do Godzilla and Kiryu return, but Mothra is here, too! If they included King Ghidorah and Rodan, it would have been Godzilla vs his most classic and recurring enemies. But I think Mothra was enough.
Now, why is Mothra here at all? Well, apparently she’s upset that the original Gojira’s bones have been ‘desecrated’ and want them to be put back to rest. I have no idea why Mothra is concerned at all about Gojira’s bones, but it gives her a reason to be in another movie, so I guess it’s fine.
The fairies say if the bones aren’t returned to the sea, Mothra will wage war on humanity. That’s a little extreme, isn’t it? That’s like if the spirit of Fred Flintstone came back all pi$$ed off because we put dinosaur bones on display in museums. It doesn’t make much sense in the long run.
There’s a lot to nitpick about this movie, but it’s mostly in the crappy dialogue, which was probably made worse with the dubbing. I have this movie on digital download, and the only down side to that is the fact that Amazon doesn’t offer language settings, so I can’t watch it in Japanese with subtitles. It would be a lot easier to watch and take seriously, for one thing, and I wouldn’t have to listen to the awful dubbing. Even if I watched it in Japanese, some of the dialogue would still be questionable.
But what am I doing complaining about the human characters in a Godzilla movie? Shouldn’t I just watch the kaiju? Well, yes. I think I was used to the good characters from the last movie, and expected too much.
As for the fight scenes, they’re great. The special effects were just as good as the previous film, if not slightly better. Mothra looks alright as well, and so do her twin babies. It’s just like the first Godzilla vs Mothra where her kids continue the fight after she dies. Mothra can never catch a break. She died in the first Godzilla vs Mothra, she died just two films before Tokyo SOS, and she’ll die again in the next movie, but we’re not there yet.
At the end of the big fight is when the humans really got stupid. They all keep hammering morals into the audience’s heads. They say how ‘life should only last as long as nature allows it’, and ‘humans shouldn’t interfere with the souls of the dead’ as well as ‘humans need to learn from their mistakes’, and ‘all Mecha-G wanted to do was rest’ and they keep going on and on forever! Right until the end credits! I’m sorry, I don’t care how good the action was, that really takes me out of it! And when people were done watching the movie, did they contemplate over the morals they were told? I guess interference with the forces of life and death is a big issue. It ranks right up there with nuclear destruction, doesn’t it? I guess that means I’ll have to shut down my personal necromancy project, because this movie really showed me the way!
I try to look past the dubbing for a lot of these movies. Sometimes it works, like in Godzilla vs Monster Zero, and a few of the Heisei movies, but other times it doesn’t. This is one of the times it doesn’t work. How did I go from actually liking and caring for the people to hating them? Well, first off, they didn’t have a majority of the main actors return, so they changed the focus from a Kiryu pilot, to some Kiryu mechanic. That’s not cool at all! Get Akane back! Yeah, I actually remember her name, not like this guy though. The dubbing is the main issue here. The voices don’t work for me! Especially on that stupid kid! It sounded like the voice actor for the kid was pulled from whatever stupid children’s anime he was working on at the time. They all have their share of stupid moments and bad lines of dialogue. Any emotional moment was a stupid moment that only made me pray Godzilla ate them. It was bad.
The big charm of Godzilla x Mechagodzilla 3, other than the great fights, was the fact that the humans are actually likeable. I thought this movie would follow in its footsteps, but I was disappointed… partially. The special effects and action, as I mentioned before, were pretty good. For what this movie is, it’s not god awful, just a big letdown in comparison to its predecessor. Godzilla is still as bad@$$ as ever, Kiryu looks even more epic than he did before, and Mothra is… okay. I could honestly make a separate article for why Mothra sucks. I do like Mothra, but that bug has some serious temper issues. I’ll save that for another time.
Kiryu’s whole story could have been really tragic, in a way. They could have made something as ridiculous as his origin and story arc a lot better than they did here. They had to ruin that with the hammering of stupid, inapplicable morals into people’s skulls. I was hoping for an epic conclusion, but it didn’t happen. The movie is still entertaining, but not as much as it had the potential to be.
Just for giggles, here is a list of other nitpicks.
1. The fairies say that humans should depend on Mothra to defend them against Godzilla, but if that’s the case, where the heck was she in the previous film? And why are there constantly references to her causing destruction in the past? I think Mothra just wants the glory, another point I’ll touch on in my ‘Why Mothra Sucks’ article.
2. A guy in the movie says that whenever Mothra’s symbol is drawn anywhere at any time, she will come to its location. So, the fact that this movie is the first time in decades that anyone’s seen her, means they expect me to believe that NOBODY drew her symbol within the last 40 years. I just drew the symbol on a scratch piece of parer after he said that, and there is still no giant butterfly at my house.
3. I just now realized this… there should be no Kiryu… because there shouldn’t be any Gojira bones to build him around. Why? If you go back to the original film, you will see during Gojira’s death scene that his bones are completely molecularized, just like his skin. They disappear from the place they fell, I’m not kidding. One might say that the bones probably fell somewhere else, or something stupid like that, but if you go back to the part where Serizawa shows Emiko his experiment, the fish he tests it on are 100% gone, bones too. So, technically, there should never have been bones to build Kiryu on. That is probably one of, if not the BIGGEST plot holes in Godzilla history.
Overall, Tokyo SOS was disappointing. Maybe, if I get my hands on it, I’ll watch the subtitled Japanese version, but for right now, it’s the English version. Why does nearly everything cool in Japan have to be ruined by America?
FINAL RATING: 30 / 50
STORY: 2 / 5
ACTING: 2 / 5, for the dubbing, not the onscreen actors themselves.
CHARACTERS: 0 / 5
SPECIAL EFECTS: 5 / 5
ACTION: 5 / 5
SOUNDTRACK: 5 / 5
TONE: 2 / 5
ENJOYABILITY: 3 / 5
REWATCH VALUE: 3 / 5
OWNING VALUE: 3 / 5
With that, we are nearing the end of the Godzilla Countdown. The next movie, Godzilla: Final Wars, was actually the last Godzilla movie made in the last 10 years, and it was intended to be the last. After that, I’m still not done with the countdown. I plan on reviewing a couple of the video games, the comics made by IDW, then, finally, a surprise. I know I didn’t get to 4 of the Showa movies, and I do plan on getting those, hopefully soon, and review them. But we have 4 more reviews to go before it’s done for the most part, so sit tight.
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