Final Wars was made in 2004, the 50^th Anniversary of the first movie appearance of Godzilla aka Gojira. The honor of making this anniversary feature for the Godfather of the Kaiju genre was given to Ryuhei Kitamura, best known for Versus, a Matrix-style Yakuza-Zombies-Samurai mish-mash that's considerably less fun than it sounds. Studio Toho's decision in this regard is questionable, since Kitamura's erstwhile work essentially shows a wannabe Wachowski trend, reveling in incomprehensible fast cuts and (pun intended) Neo-fashion visual overtures, antithetical to the trademark Japanese Giant Monster movie. It's even more questionable given the stellar work done by Shusuke Kaneko in revitalizing this genre with his Gamera films and Godzilla, Mothra & King Ghidorah.

In GMKG, Kaneko came up with a well-presented if not particularly logical hypothesis about Godzilla being the manifestation of the souls of all the lives lost in conflict and bloodshed, and the creatures who oppose him being the Guardians of Gaia. Kitamura's grand scheme consists of...monsters teleported in by aliens for Godzilla to fight. There's some crap about the aliens sharing DNA base M with the 'M'onsters, which allows them to control the critters. Fair enough, Godzilla movies are not about profound plot mechanics, they are about Giant Monsters crashing into each other and leveling the surrounding landscape. But Final Wars does not deliver even on this. More than a third of the film is devoted to standoffs between the aliens and an Earth Defense Force team comprised of mutants, and these are just lower-budget slavish imitations of rubbish metaphysical dialog and wire-fu scenes from the Matrix. Hell, you can't tell me that their lead actor was selected for any reason other than his resemblance to Keanu Reeves.

Godzilla, after his appearance, simply rushes through several monster brawls before his showdown with a refurbished Gigan and Ghidorah. Let's go through this again: the entire middle portion of the film is devoted to Matrix style gunfights / martial arts mixed with corny referencing while the following monster brawls are rushed through. To any Kaiju movie fan this is an insult.

Even technically the film is dire. Kaneko's GMKG devoted all its wizardry to depict a convincing clash of titans, and it worked beautifully, every tackle and takedown carrying a satisfying weight; the action also intelligently incorporated the bystander element with accompanying collateral damage. In Final Wars, thanks to lazy execution, monster conflicts are all too evident as rubber-suits/CGI against miniature backdrops with the people shots looking entirely disparate. Kitamura continues his love for hyperkinetic “I'm too cool for myself” editing, making a blurry mess of the mashups. Keith Emerson's score is an abomination of generic sounds; I suspect a 3 -year old with access to a Casio could have come up with better.

There are trace elements of likeability: Don Frye as an ultra-macho military man milks the archetype for laughs, and there are occasional moments of thrill in the monster fights, like when Angirus the giant armadillo-monster does his rolling-into-a-spiked-ball attack. But otherwise Final Wars is a squib with little bang and lots of whimper.