Laikals The greatest movie ever made..!

ChicDragon It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

Invaderbank The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

pointyfilippa The movie runs out of plot and jokes well before the end of a two-hour running time, long for a light comedy.

JLRVancouver In "Godzilla 2000", the first of the Godzilla 'millennium' series (and 24th overall in the franchise counting the 1998 US version), a redesigned Godzilla faces off against an ancient alien lifeform that resurrects itself after sampling the King of the Monster's tissues. The story is much simpler and streamlined than those of the Heisei era, with fewer subplots and back stories. Yuji Shinoda (Takehiro Murata) and his daughter Io (Mayu Suzuki) are the sole members of The Godzilla Prediction Network (GPN), which monitors Godzilla's whereabouts. The obligatory reporter (Naomi Nishida) joins them for a close encounter, after which Yugi discovers the secret of Godzilla's regenerative abilities. Meanwhile, Mitsuo Katagiri (Hiroshi Abe), the cold-blooded head of Crisis Control Intelligence (CCI), has uncovered a mysterious object in the ocean's depths that, when brought to the surface, turns out to be a 60,000,000 year old alien spaceship. Light 'awakens' the ship, which then travels to Tokyo and begins to absorb data, including data about Godzilla, from the computer network at an alarming rate before spawning an immense alien creature. This sets the stage for the expected monster showdown that comprises the second half of the film. The new Godzilla suit is very good, with a pronounced saurian head and huge rear spines, and the actor within (Tsutomu Kitagawa) carries the weight well forward, resulting in a much more animal-like posture than previous, more upright, versions. The alien creature ('Orga') is also very well done and manages to look less like a person in a suit than most of Godzilla's previous nemeses. I liked the first morph of the creature (which was unlike most of the Kaiju in the series) more than the final version but, as it was CGI, integrating the neo-Ogra into the rest of the film would have been expensive (and many Godzillaphiles dislike virtual monsters). There is also a CGI scene of Godzilla swimming underwater, which was less effective than scenes using suit-mation. Generally the miniatures are great, as are the matte shots used to show Godzilla in the distance, and the final battle scenes are spectacular. The cast is quite good (Yuji's daughter Io is much more appealing (and less annoying) than most of the kids in kaiju films) and the story, although incorporating the typical convenient but nonsensical 'science' characteristic of the series, is interesting. The English dubbed version I watched was OK although some odd turns-of-phrase have been added (e.g. "Gott in Himmel" and "Great Caesar's ghost"), presumably for comic effect. The ending scene is pretty hokey, with the characters speculating why Godzilla helps out when humans are threatened (Yuji's trite answer harkens back to the new-age psychic characters in the previous sub-series). Odd to me that people can still be seeing Godzilla as a friend (or at least a guardian) when he is in the process of wantonly incinerating the city. All in all, a good reboot and return to form for the iconic monster.

Sean Newgent One of the facets I enjoy about the Godzilla franchise is the campy practical effects. Miniatures abound; eventually exploding or crumbling in glorious fashion. In this film, what I recall was meant to be an apology for the American travesty of a film starring Matthew Broderick, JPEGs and green screens clash with terrible CG in one of the ugliest Godzilla productions I've ever seen. Godzilla faces off against a weird UFO very reminiscent of the T-1000 and the battle for Tokyo is pretty unenjoyable purely because of how dumb it looks, even for Godzilla. That doesn't make this a campy delight nonetheless. If only for the shock and schlock value of the special effects should you come to this film. The story is a mess, the villain is unmemorable, and you'll leave it thinking "eh, it was a Godzilla movie".

intp Egad, this was horrible. Unfortunately, the version I watched had only the awful, awful English dub, which featured an insufferable brat kid who delights in calling a female reporter an "imbecile" and such memorable dialogue as, "why does Godzilla always protect us?" with the "moving" (sarcastic) response, "I guess there's a little Godzilla in all of us." More significantly, the storyline was incoherent, dumb and (worst of all) just boring. Basically, Godzilla resurfaces around the same time as an alien ufo that had been underwater for something like 60 million years, for no good reason. The alien (there only seems to be one) decides to somehow use "Godzilla cells" or some such nonsense to adapt to Earth's environment and synthesize a (yep) giant monster body, presumably to use to ravage humanity. Human weapons prove absolutely ineffective. The main human characters are a pro-Godzilla ex-scientist (the one with the idiotic ending dialogue quoted above) and his former friend (who more sensibly wants to kill Godzilla, but that guy turns out to be a moron as well). The brat kid is the daughter of the first guy. Godzilla spends most of the film letting himself get shot by both human and alien weaponry while he just roars, stands there, and takes it-- what is this sh**? What happened to the awesome king of the monsters? Finally, much too late into the movie, Godzilla starts using his atomic breath, which is about his only effective weapon here.Naturally Godzilla ends up saving the Earth from the alien. But there is an idiotic scene afterward where the anti-Godzilla dude just yells at Godzilla and stands there like an idiot while Godzilla swats and kills him! Pro-Godzilla dude yells at anti-Godzilla dude to take cover and tries to save him, but the dork just ignores him and lets himself be killed. What was he doing, trying to prove he was a tough guy? In the dumbest way possible?I'm a pretty big Godzilla fan, but this is not a movie I'll ever care to watch again.

Python Hyena Godzilla 2000 (1999):Dir: Takao Okaweara / Cast: Takehiro Murata, Hiroshi Abe, Naomi Nishida, Mayu Suzuki, Shiro Sano: Inexcusably dumb with cheesy special effects and terrible dubbing. The giant lizard storms through Tokyo and the sight is so hideous that I wondered if Barney was a double. It is an unwelcome entry to a new century and surprisingly worse than the Roland Emmerich 1998 version. We are given no indication as to where this creature came from but before long a spacecraft hovers down on the tallest building. Godzilla knocks out Japan's energy source while the spacecraft feeds off energy from the sun. The two titans will meet in a brawl that any pay-per-view event would be embarrassed to showcase. Director Takao Okawara does a horrible job with really bad acting performances to further insult it. Are they proud of their efforts? Do they feel that they have contributed to a franchise that Emmerich pretty much proved is dead in the water? Perhaps they should all get together and compare notes on who screwed this franchise over the worst. And how about the idiotic dialogue. One guy states, "Therefore I am convinced that this object came from another galaxy." No sh*t Sherlock! Another guy states that Godzilla was protecting them. That hardly seems believable since it was putting the city up in flames. Now they can do the same thing to this pathetic candy-ass film. Score: 0 / 10