Godzilla: City on the Edge of Battle (2018)

Director: Hiroyuki Seshita, Tetsuya Yamada

Written By: Gen Urobuchi, Sadayuki Murai, Tetsuya Yamada

Toho’s animated saga reaches the midway point as the real Godzilla, awakened at the previous film's climax, reigns unchallenged.

The few survivors of POTM regroup under the protection of a group of primitive human descendants who have taken to living beneath the Earth’s surface. These humans seem to display some striking anomalies and worship a mysterious egg, all that remains of their ancient benefactor.

The surviving Bilusaludo recognize the mysterious metal these primitives use to craft their weapons and uncover the remains of Mechagodzilla, now evolved into a sentient city, cloaked in a metallic mist. Reactivating the city, a plan is hatched to destroy Godzilla once and for all, but the cost may prove too high for our human survivors.

There are some interesting concepts at play here, rather than just recycle Mechagodzilla for another ruckus, the writers give us something unexpected with a sentient nano-technology effectively making MechaGodzilla smaller than ever before and a far more insidious threat.

As a follow-on from my previous post, I now recognize the alien Bilusaludo, perhaps the reason I struggled is that they all seem to look exactly the same. Anyhow, these techno-nutjobs end up being more of a threat to the planet than Godzilla himself.

Speaking of which, the Earth is a big place, now that the survivors know where Godzilla is couldn’t they just park on the opposite side of the planet? Or just live underground with the surviving humans? The governing body’s plans to ‘live on the moon’ and raid the Earth for supplies seems a little impractical no?

I’m still not a fan of this Godzilla either, it’s certainly intimidating but it has no personality. Every previous iteration of the King of the Monsters has something that sets it apart from the others, be it a subtle suit design or mannerism. The AniGoji just seems to be ‘big’ and that’s it, I wish they’d played more off of its supposed ‘Plant’ aspect, perhaps leaning more into a Biolante-inspired design.

We are still leaning hard into the Sci-Fi aspect, with some big set pieces and ideas that would prove too costly to put into a live-action film but this feels like a step down from the previous installment.

Ultimately we are left with a tease of what is yet to come, a single name, an eater of worlds, Ghidorah.

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