You know, this requires a little explanation. I don't know if I've ever mentioned this on here, but Godzilla is, and always has been, one of my favorite things. My formative years included a lot of old movies, and of those my favorites were always Kaiju films, and my favorite Kaiju films were the classic Godzilla movies. I don't know what it was; maybe it was the goofy suitimation, maybe it was the scale of destruction, or maybe even the bad dubs good for a laugh, but I've always adored the Godzilla movies. And with Shin Gojira, I was super pumped for a new generation of Japanese Godzilla films, to go along with the modern era of big-budget American Kaiju films. And then they announced the anime.

I was so fucking excited, you guys. An animated feature-length Godzilla film is one thing, but THREE of them? Set in the distant future, with war-mechs? Holy Shit, that sounded amazing! So much potential, so much more that can be done in animation than what could ever be accomplished with suits and wires. It had every right to be amazing.

And then Planet of the Monsters came out. And it was trash. It was boring, contrived garbage that spent almost every second of its screen time rambling and getting nowhere, with little to screen time for the headlining Monster. It focused more on establishing some bullshit, awful political drama between three races (Humans, a hairy all-male race of purist/technologist losers who are basically just the Roegadyn from Final Fantasy, and shitty fucking Space Elves) than on ANYTHING of interest. And it introduced our "hero", a whiny idiot who pretty much spends all of his time whining, failing, getting his allies killed, willfully AND accidentally betraying them, and getting knocked out across the two films so far. Nobody in the film has any chemistry, and both the dub and sub voice acting *sucks*.

The design for Godzilla is moderately interesting. Yes, it's the biggest, but it's also pretty much the ugliest and least interesting. It's Godzilla as an Ent. He's slower than ever, dumber, and lazier. He sleeps through almost the entirety of two movies. The other monsters (not Daikaiju, since none of them are big enough to qualify) are hardly present for any significant period of time. And the absolute biggest sin, to me, is the use of god-awful J-Pop in place of ANY of the classic Godzilla music. Not once does the classic March of Monsters/Godzilla's March appear in two of the three films. This is inexcusable. Period.

I will say that the second of the three films has more action; I'd put it at about a 4-5 out of 10, with the first film being a solid 1. I'm going to stick it out and watch the third one when it hits in January, just because I'm not a goddamn quitter. But this has really soured me entirely on the concept of animated Godzilla ever being worth a damn. This was put into the hands of idiots who don't understand how to make something worthwhile with Godzilla. I've already seen what King Ghidorah is going to look like in the third film, and I have hopes that the action will make up for the amazingly unlikable cast, the rote Sci-Fi/faux fantasy tropes and the incredibly shoddy animation throughout. If it were a real Anime and not the hideous pseudo-CGI they went for, it would have at least LOOKED better. As it stands, everything about it is just solidly unfortunate.

This may seem like a lot of petty bitching, and it probably is, but it just kills me to see something I love as much as Godzilla get handled so badly. At least I have King of the Monsters to look forward to, and I can already tell it's going to be better in the first 45 minutes than the entirety of this bland trilogy. I know there are going to be fans of the anime, but I just can't get behind it. I'm going to watch something better than that to cheer myself up. Like the Legendary King Kong, or Pacific Rim.