Very disappointed :(

An Exercise In Nonsense

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

In all honesty, I usually enjoy the campy, b-movie charm of the Godzilla movies. The great miniature work and the monster fights usually make up for nonsensical plots or cliché human characters. But nothing makes up for a boring Godzilla movie in my book. If you're making a movie about giant, fighting monsters the biggest sin you could commit is be boring. The perfectly simplistic plot still gets dragged out for most of the run time, where we're only introduced to a new kaiju in the last 30 minutes. The rest of the time we can watch Godzilla battle it out with a flying saucer. Riviting. You know your fight scenes lack any sense of emergency when all your villains basically die standing around being useless. The human characters are annoying. No one likable. The potentially charming father-daughter scientific duo never does anything besides being pretentious, self-important assholes. Honestly the movie could have been way better, have they focused on Godzilla and the monster fights. The effects (explosions, destruction of buildings, atomic breath) were great (save that flying saucer) along with the new suit. If they gave two shits about choreography or pacing the whole thing would have turned out fine. I understand that this movie was Godzilla's great return after 1995 and a lot of people may have major nostalgia for it, but in my personal experience with the franchise, there are way better flicks out there.

Not the best start to a new series of Godzilla movies, but it'll do. It did have some work to do after the shitstorm that was the American Godzilla. It mostly makes up for that. We get a guy in a suit, looking better than ever. The film also brings us some CGI, with a wonderfully dodgy looking spaceship. I praise this film for not holding back on its imagination. I wish people would stay away from the American dubs. I've never seen one, and I've enjoyed the series thoroughly. This film had everything I'd come to expect, but seemed scared of being too outlandish. Hiroshi Abe also ruined a lot of the movie by having ONE look. Was it fear? Was it determination? Was it confusion? I'll never know.

Sure when I was a kid I loved this movie to death, and I should also mention that this is currently the only Godzilla movie I saw in theaters. Now that I'm older I have got to admit the fact that this is a pretty damn cheesy movie. First lets talk about the effects. First of all, there pretty good and are in fact one of the main redeeming factors of this movie. Okay well except for the CGI parts which do look awful. But other than that there pretty good. Now lets talk about the plot. I do hate saying this but is is flat out dreadful. By far the worst part of the movie. But surprisingly it's actually so bad that it's actually kinda good. Now let mention the acting it's.......OK. I mean, What do you really expect?

Oddly enough, this picture references two Stanley Kubrick movies: a trigger-happy general quotes STRANGELOVE'S Buck Turgidson on casualty estimates (at least in the American dub), and from certain angles the silver spaceship strongly resembles the genital sculpture with which Alex commits murder in CLOCKWORK ORANGE. I'm no purist, but I like GODZILLA 2000 because it's the same as it ever was. Like that beer from the glass-lined tanks of Old Latrobe, Godzilla movies are a vaguely unsatisfying commodity. With Rolling Rock, you have to put up with watery taste, lack of kick and flatulent hangover. With Godzilla, you must endure the insipid reporter, precocious child and idiotic dialog. But Rolling Rock will eventually get you drunk, and if you wait long enough Godzilla will stomp Tokyo.For my money this is the best Godzilla suit design - the villainous, toothsome saurian head is a vast improvement over the cuddly teddy bear of the 60s and 70s, and the body is significantly more athletic. We don't need a comic Ali shuffle anymore to convey the Lizard King's agility, because he no longer looks like he might fall over just out of awkwardness. And the flaming halo around his mouth before he breathes fire is a very nice touch. What's remarkable is that the special effects for these films didn't change much for almost fifty years. After this one, the Toho movies started using a lot of CGI, which is okay with me; but this is mostly old school, models and practicals on wires, with the computer effects reserved for energy blasts and morphing. 2000 has a marginally more sophisticated greenscreen technique than most of its predecessors, and a big enough budget to knock down a variety of structures without repeating itself. In fact this late entry is one of my favorites as far as exploding miniatures are concerned. The sets are complicated and intricate and look great on fire. The scenes of rampage and of battle are well-photographed and nicely edited. One questionable leap forward is the footage of real tanks spliced with shots of those wonderful plastic toys. Unfortunately, this movie lacks the surreal absurdity of the old Toho B-plots. The space invaders aren't arbitrarily simian; nobody falls in love with a cyborg; there are no doll-sized Okinawan Andrews Sisters. Also, Godzilla's new clothes seem to have sucked up the money the older movies spent on a stable of rubber foes - Godzilla fights only one enemy here, not counting the Japanese people, and it's not much of a fight. As Naomi Nishida says, "Boy, that's ironic. It woke up after 60 million years, and then Godzilla destroyed it the very next day."But for the first time in awhile, Godzilla is not your friend. After the original movie, he spent two decades inexplicably protecting humanity while we shot at him; this Godzilla is a mysterious threat not looking to do us any favors. Here, he brings down a meddling Interior Minister (another CLOCKWORK ORANGE reference?), then systematically burns the city over credits. Kind of like Alex after he wakes up from enforced politeness, Godzilla is ready to cause trouble again.