The new film, GODZILLA VS. MEGAGUIRAS, will be released in Japan in December. I can only hope a big-screen American issue will arrive as quickly on its heels as GODZILLA 2000 arrived here this summer. GODZILLA 2000 didn't make that much in theaters, but it seems to me that it made ENOUGH -- boxoffice wise, the most successful "foreign" film of the year! (Hmmm, can it be nominated for Best Foreign Language Film? I suppose not, since it was dubbed into English. )

Akira Ifukube's Godzilla March theme is slated to be included as usual, as well. To paraphrase Jim Figurski at the Ifukube Info Digest, I don't see why they keep including this -- the Ifukube theme is sometimes profoundly at odds with the rest of the score. It stuck out like a sore thumb during its appearances in Takayuki Hattori's SPACE GODZILLA and MILLENNIUM.

GODZILLA VS. MEGAGUIRAS will be the debut of a new live-action director. Untried fellow, obviously, but the script synopsis I read is actually very promising! Something I usually can't say about Godzilla movies of the Heisei Era (1989-present). (The word "Heisei" refers to the reign of the current Emperor.)

--Kyppy
Writer/Director

Tab wrote the sequel, made Godzilla the "good guy," gave Godzilla back his fire-breathing, and designed a very cool story line involving some insectoid monsters. Unfortunately, the film was cancelled due to Sony's release of "Millennium." They didn't want to compete with the original. So, we are left with a sequel (picking up where the Devlin film left off) - and no movie.

When I was visiting Tab while in Los Angeles, he handed me the script and reluctantly told me Toho was making a film very similar to the one he'd written. I asked if they'd gotten ahold of his writing. He kinda shook his head and said something along the lines of "I don't like to think about that."

Just an interesting factoid...

The simple fact is that Toho Studios is a corrupt and unprincipled organization. They always have been, and as the years roll by, they seem to have become even worse.

I liked the movie well enough, although the script was weirdly thin and there wasn't NEARLY enough Godzilla -- the second act drags horribly as a consequence. (Oddly, the otherwise brilliant recent GAMERA 3 had the identical problem -- too much evil-monster development, not enough of the guy we came here to see.) It might have been a reaction against the tone of the last few films in which there was (at least to me) too MUCH Godzilla. The new SFX director, at least, is more ambitious than the guy who did the last few films. Live-action director Takao Okawara also continues to impress me ... I wonder what he'll become if the industry ever gives him a shot at expressing something he really WANTS to say.

What unnerved me about Hattori's MILLENNIUM score was its complete lack of ANY kind of resemblance to SPACE GODZILLA, which was mainly Horneresque. Perhaps MILLENNIUM was supposed to be more "Hattoriesque." I don't know, the only other score of his I've heard is THE RADIO HOUR, which fit the film well enough, but on balance, I guess I cannot really evaluate his talent, or lack of it, yet. Like Okawara, he's probably still just developing, and like Okawara, the industry over there is not terribly friendly to developing talent. (I know how bizarre that must sound, but it would take a whole other essay to explain how this came about. It's just awful to consider what the Japanese film industry, once one of the most vital and productive in the world -- second only to India in terms of numbers of movies produced, never mind TV shows -- has fallen to.)

As for Michiru Oshima: wait and see. The score is probably already recorded by now.