Today, we're wrapping up the Godzilla anime trilogy with Godzilla: The Planet Eater? Does it end with a satisfactory atomic blast, or a black hole of disappointment?
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PLAYLISTS:
ANIME: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDHg5f27n5HQHnNL-1V8bgLgdLoiWPK9e
VIDEO GAMES: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDHg5f27n5HSv30mJuu4JCSq4ys7IeBzC
MOVIES: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDHg5f27n5HTAg10e_pJ_DsHS59Ttrjue
MARATHON: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDHg5f27n5HTXfiRQuHgfYUsm17SCV3su
Ending Music: "Robo-Western" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Remarks from the Future: The last of the instances where I stayed up until 4 in the morning for the sole purpose of watching one of these and writing a script right then and there. I hoped that when I rewatched the whole trilogy the next day that my enjoyment of the film wasn't a result of the delirium of being up so late. Thankfully, the film did hold up under a sharper, more critical lens. The film is very light on beats, in that there are tons of scenes of humanoid characters explaining what's happening, rather than just letting the audience enjoy it (a problem shared with the same year's American release, the otherwise excellent Godzilla: King of the Monsters).
The ending still sticks out to me as being very poorly thought out, even if the poetic intent was there. By nature, humanity will find a way to advance, with or without nanometal, and thus made the final sacrifice feel like Urobutcher forgot to kill enough characters throughout the trilogy, and decided to make up for it with that particular death.
The lack of any proper development for anyone other than Haruo, Metphies, and to a strange extent, Yuko is a double-edged sword. On one hand, this practice means that the leads get more focus, but on the other hand, this means that all the side characters become little more than plot devices. The film doesn't even have Shin Godzilla's excuse that all the humans involved are meant to be a colony of plot devices to symbolize the entirety of Japan being the protagonist against the titular antagonist.
The film is still the most solid of the three, even though overall improvements could have been made to the trilogy at large.
