a review of 哥斯拉-1.0

This might be my favourite Godzilla movie. With a story like Godzilla which has been told so many times, I appreciate when they try to tell it a different way or with different context. This one follows a very human story where Godzilla becomes part of the protagonist's character development. While some complain that they take too long to get to Big G, I found the character development helped to build the audiences affinity for the characters so that the stakes felt higher during the big moments. The way this movie approaches PTSD and survivor's guilt is very well done and the trauma that must be relived by the protagonist is shown to be almost as bad as the impending physical danger of Godzilla. The acting is great. I feel like they were very smart about where they chose to use CGI and it still felt grounded in the space the actors were in. Some of the methods they thought of for defeating Godzilla using 1940s technology were a lot of fun and a nice contrast to some of the modern high tech military solutions deployed in other films (normally my least favourite part of these). Sure, let's try and give Godzilla the bends, maybe that will do it. This is a prequel to the original 1954 Godzilla and it shares themes with it. I have read that this is the Godzilla they would have liked to make if they hadn't been subject to American censorship, and it covers a lot of the devastation of Japan after the war and how real people were affected by war and used as pawns in it. There is a line in the original where a character says, "First I survived Nagasaki, and now this!" and this has a very similar tone to it. One of my favourite things about it was the contemporary score that intertwines with Akira Ikufube's original Godzilla theme during the climax.