This film leaves me at a loss for words, not because I don’t have anything to say about it, but because I don’t know how to critique this film without sounding just downright mean. I think the best thing I can say is, this movie is a wonderful template on how not to make a Kaiju film, and I hate saying that, because throughout this film I got glimpses of genuine effort and desire on the creators’ part to make a good movie. It’s just that they fell flat in so many areas. For fear of sounding cruel, I’m just gonna bust this out.
The script is dull. Really, really dull. The monster doesn’t show up until the final third act, and for the first two acts, there’s not really anything there to keep viewers engaged. There’s no big plot twists, no big surprises, no pressing conflict or drama, nothing. There’s hints of those things, yeah, but they’re so predictable and anti-climatic it’s like having a coworker come into work exasperated saying “You would not believe what happened on my way to work today . . . I got stuck in traffic.” It’s just a slow, boring story and it takes way too long to unwind. What’s more, there’s too many characters who aren’t given much to do. Quite a few of them could have been combined with other characters or excised completely and that right there might have helped tighten things up. It might have helped to make the characters more interesting, which was badly needed, cause they’re dull too and they almost just fade into the equally dull scenery. It’s impossible to use the word “dull” too many times in describing this film. Seriously, you could skip to the final third of the film and not really miss out on anything.
But is there even a point skipping all the way to the third act? I have genuine doubts. There’s a few things to enjoy. There’s people everywhere running in a panic, tons of military action from ships to infantry, chaos, abounds (though a lot of it looks like stock footage from training exercises or something). I think the most amazing thing about this film is the number of extras they were able to get for it. It’s like the whole country of Denmark just showed up for this thing and every person decided to commit 110% to their role. But that’s honestly the only impressive thing about the final act. The monster is laughably bad, both in design (it basically looks like a dragon from a medieval illuminated manuscript) to execution. The thing changes scale repeatedly, half of the models move without any sense of substance or weight, the slime attack it uses looks like it was hand drawn onto the film by a first year animation student who’s about to flunk out of art school. There’s a scene where the monster eats some poor kid, but I’m not even joking, the “kid” is just a series of photographs superimposed on the film. Ugh. I don’t know what to say. This movie is like eating a veggie meatloaf, where you know what it’s supposed to be, but it falls so short you really can’t be bothered.
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People put effort into this film. There is genuine effort and I want to appreciate that fact. It’s just maybe this type of film was too ambitious of a project for the talent and budget available. This gets a 0.5/5 guys. Maybe you’ll wanna see it if you’re the type to enjoy “bad movies” but I really don’t think there’s enough here to even warrant that.