>>9594206Hedorah was ambitious and wonderfully creative. One of the most unique kaiju ever made, really. The movie he hails from has great ideas that would fit in a Godzilla film of any era, including today, but Banno, cool as he was, sought to do far too much with this one movie. While it tries to appeal to young audiences, it clashes while focusing on the subject matter of pollution by being as in-your-face gruesome as possible in a forward documentary style of presentation. This style, however, is both affective and startling-- at first. It quickly becomes overused and muddled over by different ideas introduced, leaving the film without much more to say than "pollution is bad", losing any real impact or depth in its core message (save for brief instances such as the infamous "and yet another?" which was quite clever). The are unaddressed pacing issues as well which are accompanied by the score's over-use of droning resonant harmonics, only serving to disorient and alienate viewers in being a little too eerie for its own good while slowing down any of the film's inertia to a monotonous crawl it will try to pass off as a "slow-burn". The score is also incorporated in a choice manner, for the leitmotif of Godzilla, for instance, is lethargic with sedated horns and hokey strings being plucked, making the character's entrances or moments of excitement anything other than blasé. The conventions of storytelling are also at an all-time low when it comes to the human-based narrative. Characters lack the depth and flashes of personality in the archetypes present in earlier Fukuda or Honda films, although they are likable enough, yet one can't help but feel they are more profiles from a story synopsis than characters with identities, for they do little more than expel exposition when it is convenient or silently move from blurry story beat to blurry story beat with no arcs whatsoever. It's perfect for a kid on a sick day at school to have fever dreams of as they vomit.
