Review Detail

I'm torn, I really am! I wanted to give this a straight 10 across the board, but for one reason I didn't.

The start of the film is a bit... awkward. It jumps immediately into the battle of san francisco between Godzilla and the Muto's. There is no real explanation for A.J.'s inclusion (or the Scarlet Witch's) because there is no... nothing. I feel like something could have been done here, but I suspect for every inclusion to make that scene make sense... you will need another scene to make the added scene make sense. I do not know, this was my second fan edit I've reviewed.

What I do know, is beyond that beginning... the film is dramatically superior to G:KOTM. It just is. It skips most of the interminable human scenes, and only keeps those that make sense... give real context, and it some of Stranger Thing's girl (who isn't so bad, but her mother is a drag on the theatrical version, and... a giant idiot to boot). In this reworked version ST Mom is... less of a crazy person and more of an econut. Doing this "vaguely" for her son, the less explanation... the better, because it didn't make sense in the o.g. film.

Additionally, he reframes the narrative so that some things make more sense. In the original film, Chandler's character ... makes no sense and is also just an audience viewpoint. He doesn't DO anything. Here, by wisely placing some scenes ahead of others, Chandler's character goes from being a waste of space, to actually predicting what his ex-wife's eco-terror group will actually do. To boot, it makes the military undermine him and wisely uses all those scenes of the uniformed troops skeptic attitude against them.

They all die pretty much, because they laughed at him and didn't listen. If only they listened, they could have gotten to Ghidorah sooner. These small changes in scene placement, make a drastic improvement to the mostly perfunctory human storylines. In addition, they HELP pacing. No more does Godzilla just teleport (even with the help of hollow earth tunnels) around the Earth... but his journey actually takes some time... but remarkably it doesn't actually slow down the pace of the movie. In fact, it HIGHLIGHTS the big battles even more so.

With the inclusion of the opening scene, you effectively get 4 big battle scenes in 2 hours. That's better than what ANY of the Monsterverse films actually give in terms of battle to time ratio. Not only that, but the battles here... because of the cut human scenes - don't feel to drag on like they did in the original film.

With the visual edits (color gradation differences, from my eye - I am not exactly sure on what the editor did, I simply noticed the atomic breath was more... colorful but I suspect he adjusted the gamma or something so that I could see more of the KOTM battles, which were shrouded by too much confusion/darkness in the theatrical version) this is just enjoyable.

All in all, it makes you kind of go "what?" when you realize that this fan edit, is remarkably better than the original theatrical film, and it was all done by one person.

Final comment - it also removes the "what the f?" death of Dr Graham by Ghidorah, which creates a small hole as her character just disappears. This (unfortunately placed and executed) death served a point in the film to highlight Ghidorah's pettiness and evil and while I understand it's removal, it does introduce a ... plothole to some extent.