Godzilla: Final Wars

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Updates, as you know, can be good things or bad. In the case of the Godzilla films, the attempt to contemporize one of the most popular classic monsters of all time leads to more disaster than that gigantic dinosaur-like creature creates when he stomps about town.

Part of the fun of the original and more successful sequels was the camp factor. You're not going to fool anyone that it's not a guy in a dinosaur suit flailing his arms and squashing miniatures. It was hokey, but hey, it was fun. But when you urbanize the whole thing by adding pimps and winos and the kind of language that pimps and winos use, throw in ninjas and aliens and a Jesse Ventura clone as a maverick military type, then augment those classic-but-hokey Godzilla effects with some half-convincing computer animation, you get a stylistic mish-mash that rivals the one that "Godzilla: Final Wars" gives us in the plot. That is, whatever passes for plot. It's mostly all action in the early going, then an attempt to explain what's going on in a plodding and actionless Act 2, followed by more frantic battles in the final act. The actors are, by turns, serious and seriocomic, so it's never quite clear how we're supposed to take all this.

Kazuki Kitamura goes from sinister to silly and back again—all at the speed of light—so it's hard to find the leader of Planet X anything but curious. Akira Takarada is more consistent-but-cardboard as the U.N. Secretary General. So is Masahiro Matsuoka as the primary Earth Defense Force fighter we're focused on, and Rei Kikukawa as the obligatory molecular biologist.

Godzilla gets top billing in a monster catch-all that includes brief appearances by the dinosaur-like Gigan, King Caesar, Monster X, Hedorah, the dragon-like Monster XII, the serpentine Manda, crablike Kumonga, gigantic Mothra, the mantis-like Kamacuras, the lizard-like Zilla, the pteredactyllic Rodan, and my personal favorite, the spikey, armadillo-like Anguirus that can roll like a ball. The most comical among them is Minilla, a miniature version of Godzilla who looks like a cross between a greenish-blue Barney and a Teletubbie.

Gigan vs. Godzilla is one of the last battles on a fight card that includes battles between people and aliens led by a cyberpunk named "X," Godzilla vs. Monster X in a parallel fight, and random good guys in a space-age submarine who go up against Manda, a fiery hot underwater Chinese dragon of sorts, among other things.

In a rip-off of on the old "V" television series, where aliens wore human shells in order to take over key positions in government, a group of aliens hovers over the world in a huge spacecraft to talk "peace" with international leaders. But it turns out that these guys, led by that fellow X who throws tantrums on the order of a junior high school student, are actually controlling all the monsters except Godzilla. What are they controlling them to do? Destroy, of course. The Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, and just about every iconic measure of human civilization comes under attack. Complicating matters? Not only is earth overrun by mutant monsters, but apparently whatever radiation produced those monsters also engineered a few human genetic mutations. These mutants form a fighting force that rival anything a group of ninjas can throw at you. But they're still as funny as the monsters, and the plot is still one big mutated, convoluted muddle. Oh yeah, let's also throw in another planet that's headed for a collision with earth, with the aliens trying to convince them that they need to focus all their firepower on the planet. When all is said and done, Godzilla is supposed to save the day, though the high-maintenance monster, once awakened, has a tendency to trample things in the process. And the poor creature has to compete with several human battles this time around, which really waters down what should have been a singular climax. Instead, it's the video-game style never-ending climax when the action kicks into gear, and a dull drone of exposition when it's in idle.

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