Godzilla Raids Again Review

Godzilla fans it's been a while since i've reviewed a Godzilla movie and even longer since i've reviewed a live action Godzilla movie and well this month your in luck because there'll be at least two of them. I thought that since the new American Godzilla movie is out at the end of the month that I would take a look back at one of the older movies and since i've already reviewed the first movie in the franchise im here to give you my review of the second movie Godzilla Raids Again.

The plot of the movie is so simple it's laughable at how simple it is basically two pilots see Godzilla fighting on an island and for no given reason the big man decides to attack Japan again. Yeah I wasn't kidding when I said it was very simple because what I just described to you could also be used to describe any movie in the franchise it's the barest of bones as to what a Godzilla script even is i'm not even making this up it's so bare bones both in terms of story and characters.

Returning from the first film is Takashi Shimura as Dr. Kyohei Yamane and Haruo Nakajima as Godzilla both of these actors are honestly really good I enjoy seeing Haruo kick all the a*s as Godzilla I mean there's not really much you can do inside a suit and it was fun catching up with Kyohei again and Takashi just has this screen presents which makes him enjoyable to watch and that's something that the new cast are missing.

Speaking of the new cast we have Hiroshi Koizumi as Shoichi Tsukioka , Setsuko Wakayama as Hidemi Yamaji , Minoru Chiaki as Koji Kobayashi , Yukio Kasama as Kohei Yamaji and Katsumi Tezuka as Anguirus. Yeah the acting from the newer cast members isn't that good it feels like they were just doing this just to get a paycheck and if i,m being honest the only actor i felt was trying was Katsumi Tezuka and that's saying something because he's in a monster suit for the whole movie.

The actual Godzilla suit doesn't look that good in this movie for some strange reason they gave Godzilla a really long tail which just doesn't look right at all.  I honestly think that the Godzilla suit in this movie looks cheap and that's not something that I want to be saying at all about any movie. I will say that the Anguirus suit look pretty decent this was his debut movie so of cause it's not going to look quite right the first time out.

Now if you thought that the 2014 reboot was the first time that Warner Bros had released a Godzilla movie you'd be wrong because they dubbed the movie and they redid the score and then re-released the movie under the title of Gigantis the Fire Monster. I can't say if they shot new scenes or not but it wouldn't surprise me if they did because that's something that happens alot with American adaptations of Godzilla movies.

Back to this movie tho it's so freaking long like much longer then it really needs to be the movie is just over an hour and twenty minuets long and it really should have been much shorter like maybe ten minuets shorter and it would have been a solid run time. This movie also has a pretty bad issue when it comes to pacing there are alot of times in the movie where nothing is happening and that really does hurt the film.

For some reason this movie uses a lot of sped up footage and I freaking hate that technique to me it's just a cheap thing to do and it's all over the place in this movie. There's also an issue with the editing for example in one case a group of villains are being chased around what I assume is a nuclear plant and for no reason they just go flying into something and they blow up and we don't even see what caused them to go flying in the first place.

Now i'm not going to lie some of the fight scenes are honestly pretty good but alot of them are just plain bad and I think it's because those suits make it hard for the actors to move in and the director didn't know that when filming the movie. The fact tho that they chose to keep in fight scenes which look bad isn't a good thing but is something an amateur would do but I can't and don't hold the film makers to that because this was the second movie and they didn't really know what the suit was capable of.

I have to talk about the characters because like the story they are so bare bones it's pretty laughable if i'm being honest. Throughout the whole film we know nothing about the characters and that doesn't change literally the only thing we know about them is that two of them might be getting married and that's it. To top things of the human characters aren't that interesting everytime one of there scenes was one I was counting down the minuets until Godzilla came back on.

The Godzilla movies are special effects movies that's been the case since the first film and it's still the case to this very day. So it saddens me to say that the effects in this movie while i'm sure was impressive for the time they haven't really aged well and for a Godzilla movie that's not something that you want to say because of how well known this franchise is. The best example of the bad effects in this movie is the opening shot where you can tell that it's a model shot even tho it would have been very easy even for those days to fly a plane and film it for real it's an effects shot that looks really bad.

Overall this is a bad movie but I don't know if it's the worst one in the franchise nor do can I say for sure that it's the worst Japanese Godzilla and so this movie gets a 3.5 out of 10 from me.