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ArcaneAzmadi Since: Jan, 2001
05/04/2023 15:43:33 •••

The most wretchedly tedious waste of time to ever be branded with the 'Godzilla' name.

I think there are few series I've ever regretted wasting time on as much as Godzilla: Singular Point. Less than half-way into the series I was already bored out of my skull and only watching out of Sunk Cost Fallacy, hoping that something interesting would happen to make the time I'd invested worth it. In short, it never did.

Even calling this a "Godzilla series" is practically false advertising. Toho's classic cast of kaiju have never been so badly misrepresented, with Rodan reduced to an unending horde of mindless locusts, Anguirus making a cameo where he does absolutely nothing relevant except take up a few episodes before getting killed, Manda is turned into a swarm of sea monsters who are... just kinda there, and Mothra is reduced to a vague Shout-Out. The Big G himself gets it worst of all. It takes half the series for him to actually appear, and once he does he just sits on his ass in Tokyo for no reason, occasionally destroying things. They were clearly taking inspiration from Shin Godzilla's take on the character as a throwback to his "living natural disaster" role, but he's so utterly bereft of personality or agency that his role literally could have been taken by a large, stationary tornado.

The real problem is that the series is barely "about" the kaiju. More than half of the story is squandered on unending science mumbo-jumbo about impossible materials, quantum mechanics, weird signals and endless Technobabble, banging on about Archetype, the Super Dimensional Calculator, the Orthagonal Diagonalizer, the Catastrophe and the Singular Point while barely ever explaining what the hell they even really are. It takes 7 episodes until the series even admits that all this rubbish is even connected to the kaiju storyline. But while the kaiju being reduced to window dressing would normally make it a character-focused piece, the human cast are a lot of personality-deficient bores who do nothing but spout theortical nonsense to each other for 13 episodes, almost never interacting with each other as people and never displaying any motivations beyond "work this out". The supposed Deuteragonists of the series, Yun and Mia, meet for a few minutes in the second episode and spend the rest of the series communicating by SMS until the literal last minute of the end. In the end, the real heroes of the series turn out to be the annoying AIs.

Even when something vaguely exciting happens, it completely undermines itself with Ass Pull nonsense, with the climax of the series being probably the most anticlimactic thing I've seen in years. And then they had the absolute nerve to end the series on a Sequel Hook?!

Do not waste your time. The American Godzilla (1998) was a better Godzilla story than this.

SpectralTime Since: Apr, 2009
05/03/2023 00:00:00

You know, for all that I hate the terrible anime movie trilogy, and for all that I think its themes are genuinely harmful, I can’t deny that at least Godzilla was actually doing things in it, and that at least its largely unlikable cast generally did have personalities.

ArcaneAzmadi Since: Jan, 2001
05/03/2023 00:00:00

There were so many other things about this series that I didn\'t have room in 3000 characters to touch on. Most notably, that it\'s trying to be a more serious, realistic, gritty take on the kaiju formula, but it\'s about as edgy as a bouncy castle. With hordes of monsters swarming all over the world, we never get any sense of serious peril. During the scene where a helicopter rescue team tries to save the two fishemen whose boat was capsized by a Manda, only to be attacked by Godzilla\'s giant swinging tail, in a series with any actual teeth the guy being lowered down on a line would be snapped up and devoured by a leaping Manda, followed by the helicopter being brutally smashed out of the air. Instead, they just fly out of the way with no problems, and even though they say they lost the fishermen, it gets mentioned later that both men turned up and were saved anyway offscreen! Literally only one named character died in the entire series, and the way they were killed off was so stupid that it felt like a very calculated \"OK, we should probably kill someone off now\" decision made to try and artificially raise the stakes. Frankly I was just glad there was one less character to be rambling about Technobabble nonsense.

I could go on, really I could, but I think I\'ve wasted too many brain cells on this series already.

Always expect the worst and you can only be pleasantly surprised.
Hylarn (Don’t ask)
05/04/2023 00:00:00

I mean, I liked it, but you really have to be there for the science discourse


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