More a feature-length fan film than a studio-financed blockbuster, Godzilla: Final Wars amalgamates all the iterations of Gojira into a free-for-all brawl. It’s a colossally metastasizing, caffeinated jamboree that not only enmeshes every incarnation of the atomic menace but it also showcases acrobatic Shaw Brothers wire-fu choreography with the Earth Defense Force characters.

Ryuhei Kitamura doesn’t bother to disentangle the convoluted plot as the numinous special effects and jaw-dropping wish-fulfillment are the attractions here. Of the humans and Xilien extraterrestrials, Captain Gordon (who was clearly derived from Sergeant Slaughter) is the most intriguingly pugnacious. An arena battle simulation is definitely nimble and but it doesn’t adhere to one’s definition of a kaiju monster movie. It feels like outtakes from a live-action Dragon Ball Z demo reel.

Intermittently, the film threatens to alienate its Godzilla roots. For people with truncated attention spans, the film will be irresistible catnip. Despite a nearly two hour runtime, it unravels at a breakneck pace. For fans of the series, it’ll be a extra incentive that Gigan has been reintegrated since he is one of Godzilla’s most adversarial opponents yet he has been dormant for decades.

Not quenched to be Japan-centric, Kitamura globe-trots to New York for a patently fatuous scene in which Rodan incinerates a Superfly-esque gangster and a police officer with Saturday morning cartoon foley of their hats soaring off. The F/X during this vignette are awfully synthetic but that qualm is relatively minor next to the scale-model destruction of Tokai by the Brobdingnagian crab, Ebirah.

Then he compiles some of the franchise’s less aggrandized creations such as Roland Emmerich’s Anglicized Zilla from 1998 and Godzilla’s diminutive son, Minilla, into a rather amusingly mottled souffle with a few setbacks (the score from Keith Emerson, Nobuhiko Morino and Daisuke Yano is uncannily reminiscent of the countdown music in the Who Wants to be a Millionaire? game show).

Yet another Godzilla movie in this Halloween marathon and like much of the Millenium series by Toho, Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S. doesn’t dither away. Within the span of two minutes, Mechagodzilla is undergoing a restoration and Godzilla himself is awoken from his abyssal slumber to clobber his opponents again.

Despite the reputation that American studio’s VFX are dazzling, the opening sequence with Mothra is a whizz-bang humdinger with Earth’s insectoid protector gliding through the billowy clouds as two fighter jets are outflanked by her while her twin fairies telepathically serenade her arrival. It’s a dynamite scene that doesn’t overextend itself on pyrotechnics and it serves as a scrumptious appetizer for the kaiju action.

The refrain and MacGuffin of the film is that “Godzilla’s bones must be returned to the sea”. The logistical reason behind their submersion is vague other than mankind’s infernal interference with mother nature and ecological weaponization but the film cleverly links back the continuity to Mothra’s primordial battle with Godzilla 43 years prior and the language expert, Mr. Chujo, who was reconnoitering the island upon her breakthrough discovery.

Although some of the composite shots of scientists on the engineering catwalk and the riptide swimming of Godzilla are pretty lackluster, most of the special effects are photorealistic. Luckily for us, most of Godzilla and Mothra’s metropolitan showdown is a coruscant combination of suitimation and tinkered digital enhancements such as when Godzilla squints and grimaces at his winged foe.

For unadulterated escapism, Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S. is a rip-snorting extravaganza of jaegar-versus -leviathan smackdowns sans the fringes of a polyanna romance or political discourse. In fact, much of the groundwork of a greenhorn female pilot succoring behind the Mechagodzilla and the full-scale warriors were probably the basis for Guillermo Del Toro’s Pacific Rim. Proving once again that muses can be unsheathed in the most arcane of scenarios.

From the time-travel aspect to a soldier with a dinosaur exhibit who venerates Godzilla as almost a pagan god who saved him on the battlefield, Godzilla Vs. King Ghidorah is one of the more loopy and exuberant of the Toho series. For that, I concede a standing ovation since it isn’t another belabored exercise in conference room scenes where scientists and bureaucrats are bellicose about Gojira’s resurgence.

It also doesn’t landlock itself from the continuity of the others. It explicitly references the previous skirmishes between the two titans and the aftermath of Biollante’s bacterial warfare. Some purists might quiver at the retconning of Godzilla from apocalyptic, radioactive lizard to a relatively innocuous Pleiosaur off the coast of Lagos but once again, I applaud the fresh perspective.

At times, the film is too rapidly paced with the scenes sublimating and seguing quickly from a human-interest journalist to the discovery of the military discovery of a UFO. However, the critiques of a film that fritters away too much time on the indolent mankind drama are completely invalid here.

In fact, the outlandish elements around the “little green men” from the flying saucer is intoxicating enough that film doesn’t wither when the mammoth critters aren’t cudgeling each other. It’s as if the filmmakers have encroached a 23rd century episode of Battlestar Galactica upon our kaiju festivities with an android and teleportation in tow.

Another quagmire for sticklers will be the cuddly three puppets that interfused and evolved into King Ghidorah but I love the unorthodox origins for such a cataclysmic destroyer. In a shrewd critique on the deus ex machina plot device of time displacement, the government is culpable for a loop in which they must annihilate him and then resurrect a “new” Godzilla when Khidorah is rampant.

Editor’s Note- The version reviewed here is the “uncut, uncensored” version of the film.

If the operatic, saturnine orchestral score from Reijiro Koroku is any indication, Godzilla 1984 was intended to be a return to the Godzilla of 1954- brooding, solemn and prescient about the doomsday device that could catastrophically inseminate Armageddon. It’s a very noble attempt to encapsulate that atomic-age atmosphere of dread but at this point in the franchise, the film shouldn’t be so joyless and enervated.

Aboard a Japanese fishing vessel, all the crew members are desiccated corpses but Godzilla isn’t the culprit. A sea louse has devoured the inhabitants en masse. What should be a nerve-trembling experience is hamstrung by the meretricious, rubbery effects of the Shockirus who is clearly gliding on cables and wires.

Much like the other forays in kaiju films, the first quarter is a plodding, expository slog as cabinet prime ministers and journalists quarrel back and forth about their responses to the monster phenomenon again. Even when the citizens are confabulating about Godzilla’s resurgence from a volcanic eruption, there is no race-against-the-clock tension or sense of urgency. It’s a redundant section that every suitimation must belabor through in order to be sufficed with wanton destruction on the Japanese skyscrapers and landmarks.

On the positive side, I’ll always prefer practical suits over titivated visual effects. A stuntman peregrinating over cities and the cars below is always lambent. The version I watched for reviewing purposes has redacted the North American addendum of Raymond Burr reprising his role as Steve Martin. The downside is Godzilla is off-screen for a protracted chunk of the beginning.

However, his re-entry at the power plant at the 35-minute mark is impressively anticipatory as the camera tilts upward from his feet. Despite the few ingratiating aspects, Godzilla 1984 is a soporific clunker when the title reptile isn’t disintegrating scale models of factories and nuclear reactors.