Godzilla Singular Point: Season One Review (Anime Series)

Godzilla Singular Point: Season One Review 

 

Until last month, I had never watched an anime TV series before. It might sound crazy, but it’s true. I just never got into anime when I was a kid, but I have nothing against it. Of course, leave it up to Toho to convince me to getting around to finally sitting down and watching a whole season of an anime from beginning to end.

I still can’t believe it’s taken this long for Toho to make a Godzilla anime series. Big G has mainly appeared in feature films, but he’s been on TV in the past, too, such as Toho’s live-action series Zone Fighter from the 1970s, the Hanna-Barbara Saturday morning cartoon just called Godzilla, and Godzilla: The Series, which was a cartoon follow-up to TriStar’s 1998 Godzilla (and was actually better than the movie). In 2018, a trilogy of animated Godzilla films hit Netflix, and though they were done in an anime style, they still count as films, not a TV series. Now here we are in 2021 and Godzilla Singular Point is upon us. It premiered in Japan back in April with new episodes airing weekly, but here in Canada we had it dumped on Netflix all at once in June. I’ve finally watched it all and can now share my thoughts.

Let me start at the beginning. I was pretty excited for this show because…well, Godzilla, obviously, but more specifically, it was set to feature monsters from the Showa era (1950’s-70’s), some of whom had not been seen in all those intervening years. I also thought a Godzilla TV series might have a leg up on the typical Godzilla movie formula in being able to achieve more human character development by telling a bigger story over a longer period of time. The trilogy of animated Godzilla films were dull, overly serious, and lacking action, but Singular Point looked visually appealing, fun, and inventive.

The theme music started up in episode one over the opening credits, and wow did it get me pumped up. The opening title theme is called “in case…” by BiSH, and it is so awesome I didn’t skip the credits once (not that I ever do anyway, but still). It was frustrating in a way, too, because the music would always get me hyped up for the episode, but rarely did I ever reach the same level of hype during anything that happened in any of the actual episodes…

Godzilla Singular Point was a bit of a mixed bag for me right from the start, but it kept me watching thanks to some intriguing story points laid out early on. A couple of engineers trace the broadcast of a strange old song to an abandoned house, as does a graduate student who is an expert in imaginary creatures and made-up science, but the creatures don’t remain imaginary for long: a whole flock of pterosaurs from another dimension (referred to individually and collectively as Rodan) invade Japan, and with them comes this strange red dust, which ends up correlating with them and the other monsters that appear. Luckily, the boss of the engineering students, a crazy little old man, has a secret weapon: his large robot Jet Jaguar.

The roster of monsters is quite unique, and all the redesigns are awesome. Rodan looks more like a real pterodactyl than ever before, similar to the concept art for Godzilla King of the Monsters, but he still has his classic roar. However, the Rodan don’t really do all that much, and spend most of the series in a smaller-than-usual form. Anguirus was my favourite of the old monsters brought back with a new look, and the episodes featuring him were among the ones I enjoyed the most. Jet Jaguar looks recognizable, but was given spindly robot arms this time, which I didn’t love. His form changes throughout the season, which I appreciated (he even gets wheels at one point) and he goes from being a remote-control mech to a robot with A.I. It was fun to have him back, but the monster I was most surprised to see was Gabara, who only appeared once before this in one of the worst (if not the worst) Showa-era entries, Godzilla’s Revenge. Somehow, they made Gabara, one of the worst kaiju, look fearsome and act formidable, though he’s not called Gabara this time, and is actually billed as a new kaiju, but clearly that’s the monster it’s supposed to be. Other classic monsters appear briefly as well, such as the giant serpent Manda and the giant spider Kumonga, and the monsters are spread throughout the series fairly well, though they rarely feel like direct threats to the main characters or humanity as a whole.

And then there’s Godzilla himself, the most famous monster of all, the one whose name is right there in the title, the one who started this whole franchise in the first place and has kept it sustained for decades. I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but the Americans did a better job with Godzilla in 2021 than the Japanese did. Let me explain. Legendary’s American Godzilla took on Kong earlier this year in Godzilla vs. Kong, and it was a crowd-pleasing royal rumble with Godzilla returning as the bad guy, battling not only Kong but another classic foe. He appears for the first time early in the film, poses a real threat, and has multiple memorable moments. Overall, I thought he was used the best in GVK out of all three of the MonsterVerse entries so far.

At the start of Singular Point, Godzilla is dead. He’s just a skeleton in a basement, and stays that way as the other monsters start popping up. A living Godzilla doesn’t appear on-screen until halfway through the season, and even when he does, it’s a very brief appearance at the end of the episode. Many moviegoers complained Godzilla wasn’t shown enough in the 2014 Godzilla, but 2016’s Shin Godzilla didn’t show him much more, and not as many fans complained with that one. Historically, Hollywood can’t hold a candle to Toho’s Godzilla efforts. I think complaining that there’s not enough Godzilla can finally be fully justifiable with Singular Point. He shows up way too late. They had 13 episodes, and they kind of blew it. The redesign is good, he’s very powerful, and this version feels like a faithful follow-up to the one from Shin Godzilla, with multiple forms and a different style of atomic breath that’s still cool and ultra-destructive. But, my problems go beyond just him not being in it enough.

Godzilla is not a primary threat for the majority of the show. He’s just another monster when he first shows up, and while he causes some damage, he poses no unique threat to any of the main characters, and we see so little of him, he barely has time to make an impact at all before the end. A staple of the Godzilla series is seeing him fight other monsters or destroy the military. Even though the military attacks him and there are other monsters present, neither of these things happen much at all. Godzilla just doesn’t have enough awesome moments to shine and never is used to his full potential.

So with it being a TV show, are the characters given more time to develop and become likable and carry the monster-free scenes? Unfortunately, no. The characters are not relatable, nor are they badass or funny, they’re just…uninteresting. They talk way too much, and the stuff they talk about makes up the bulk of what I disliked the most about this show. It’s all this pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo, and it just goes on and on. I don’t know how many times the term “Orthogonal Diagonalizer” is uttered. I still don’t really understand what an Orthogonal Diagonalizer is. There’s just way too much fake science being talked about scene after scene—in fact, there’s just too much talking period. I found myself zoning out constantly because I couldn’t understand the importance of what it was the characters were talking about.

One of the prominent characters isn’t actually a human at all, but an A.I. that often manifests as a cute cartoon dog, and it sometimes gets pretty annoying. They do this thing repeatedly where a conversation is shown on a smart phone screen and text rapidly exchanges with emoijis while characters talk over it, and it’s sort of an interesting way to give us something to look at while they exchange expository dialogue, but that gets repetitive after a while, too, and to be completely honest, by the time I got to the final couple of episodes, I didn’t really understand what was going on anymore. Singular Point is a very heavy sci-fi plot with far too much of it told to viewers by characters who are not particularly interesting to listen to. I was lost in the final episode.

Sad to say, but to wrap this review up, I must admit I didn’t really like Godzilla Singular Point all that much. Sure, there were some cool visuals and the overall visual aesthetic looks good, the monsters were entertaining enough when shown, and the music and sound
design were great all the way through, but the story and human characters left a lot to be desired. Every episode seemed to end on a cliff hanger, and many of them strung me along to the next episode, but by the halfway point in the next episode I would be checking the time to see how much longer was left. The cliff hangers were rarely resolved in a satisfying way, anyway. The worst example was the episode that ends right before a fight scene between Jet Jaguar and Anguirus, and then the next episode doesn’t even get to the fight until like ten minutes in! If there is a second season, I might consider checking it out, but I definitely will not be waiting on the edge of my seat for it. I have no idea if I should recommend it to fans of other anime shows, but I think hardcore Godzilla fans should still give it a shot. I’m glad I did, even if it didn’t really do it for me in the end.