My job used to be so simple…I’d go to a press screening, be fed like Henry VIII, and see an upcoming film and write a review. Of course this was before the studios got into the straight-to-video game and kucked up the whole megillah. The problem with straight-to-video is, reviewers are unable to warn people about really bad movies enough ahead of time to save them the price of a rental.

Those of you, who’ve been reading my little column for a while, know my love of classic films and their genre. My kids know this as well, and to help take my mind off my misery, they rented me Toho Studios’ latest offering, “Godzilla: The Final Wars”. Needless to say, I was taka farklempt, being a lover of their films. Cheesy as they are, there’s always been a certain charm to a man in a rubber suit stomping around, crushing miniature cities and making a general mess of the infrastructure.

Instead, “Godzilla: The Final Wars” proved to be the most shameless meshugas of bad writing and piracy I ever saw, by far leaving the CGI version made in America to shame. True to form, the premise is standard, with space aliens trying to conquer the world. But, within the first ten minutes of the film, the unabashed plagiarism begins. I counted no less than eighteen movies Toho ghanniffed material from, ranging from ‘Independence Day’, ‘Star Wars’, ‘The Wizard of Oz’, ‘The Matrix’, ‘Stargate’, ‘Hook’, ‘Lost in Space’ and even stooped to rehashing, virtually frame-by-frame, scenes from previous movies of their own. Even the American version of ‘Godzilla’ fell victim, the lumbering CGI iguana being the first monster to be vanquished by the ‘real’ Godzilla, an obvious shot aimed at the producers of the Matthew Broderick debacle.

But they didn’t stop there. The writing was cheesier than ever exacerbated by deplorable art design and character development. The head alien is an absurdity in his own right, coming across like the bastard child of Jackie Chan and Michael Jackson. His best scenes are when one of the many monsters over whom he has gained brain control (Toho trotted out every monster they ever originated except Gamera the flying, saber-toothed turtle,) gets creamed by Godzilla, sending him into a temper tantrum.

Perhaps the most egregious liberty taken is with the cuddly son of Godzilla, who has not only not grown, but has shrunk from his original size of around five stories tall to the stature of Michael J. Fox, and who still hasn’t progressed beyond blowing smoke rings. But instead of being cute and endearing he comes off as mindless and unfocused. One might rationalize that this is actually the grandson of the original Godzilla, and the current adult is the grown son, which leaves the question, “Then, where is the plump, clumsy monster we’ve all grown to love?” She certainly isn’t in this film. This Godzilla is a buff, muscular beast with ripped abs and bulging biceps.
Yes I said ‘she’, since in the film “Son of Godzilla”, they referred to ‘Godzilla’s egg’, and according to everything I’ve ever read about reptilian reproduction, only females lay eggs, the producers of this film notwithstanding.

The only truly entertaining part of this movie is toward the end when Godzilla squares off against her old nemesis, King Gidhora, the three-headed dragon. In a spectacular ‘battle-of-the-breaths’, Godzilla and Gidhora try to halitosis one another into submission, yet another concept stolen from “The Raven” wherein Vincent Price and Boris Karloff shoot energy from their fingers at each other. Ultimately, (and oh, so predictably,) Godzilla vanquishes her foe, and she and her baby swim off into the sunset, (literally,) and in the last few frames of the film, she turns into the camera and roars, as if mimicking Arnold Swartzenegger’s “I’ll be back!”

All in all, this one will be hard to take, even for the most die-hard fans of Toho’s films. The constant, uneven skipping from one exercise in plagiarism and the excessive “looky what we can do’ approach to the CGI effects, make this one disconcerting almost to the point of irritating. Where once Toho was the leader in the use of miniatures and forced-perspective, they seem to have been left in the dust, trying desperately to keep up with the times but falling tragically short. Maybe the days of the monsters are over. To be sure, in this film, only Godzilla and her baby survive, with no other mega beasts to save the earth from. Maybe it’s time to allow Godzilla and her progeny to return to Monster Island and live out their days in peace and quiet. They’ve spent fifty years saving mankind from it’s own folly, and deserve the rest. Let her go out with dignity, as befitting a creature, who, has transcended superstardom and legend and become a part of Cinematic folklore.