I watched this to open 2025, on the first of January!
Surprisingly good, actually. It was a Godzilla film that wasn’t about Godzilla, and in fact for basically all but the last quarter of the movie you could replace Godzilla by *insert bad thing here * and not much would change. Funnily enough, the two best things about the film were the anti-war themes, and Godzilla itself.
The anti-war theme was basically hammered into you with a very large hammering device, but it was well done! Not much to say there really - how the trauma infiltrates and chokes the lives of the survivors, the guilt, the fury at being expendable, the contrast with idealistic nationalist fantasies, the collateral damage and selfish and necessary heart-hardening, etc etc.
Godzilla was incredible. I don’t know how they created it, whether digitally or using a real physical model, but it was the scariest version of the beast I’ve seen, with none of the anthropomorphising and associated empathy of many Hollywood versions. This Godzilla was a monster, plain and simple. The eyes in its rage were terrifying, and its nuclear heat blast ray gun jet thing was astounding. If you only watch one part of the film (and other caveats), watch a clip of the Tokyo explosion. I’ve never really understood what it meant for something to be quantified in megatonnes of TNT until that scene.
Quibbles: the dialogue was thin and the acting was so over the top, but that’s fine. I appreciated the intertwining with a PTSD movie, and also how it dropped that entirely and became a proper kaiju flick at the end.