Well, I've just finished watching what has been hyped as the 'final' (at least for a while) Godzilla movie, available to American viewers on beautiful widescreen DVD from Sony Home Video. It's a pretty entertaining movie, overall; hokey in parts, mostly full of superheroics and manga-paced action; but what do you expect from a modern Godzilla movie?

The plot begins with the establishment of a worldwide defense force whose job it is to protect Earth from the likes of Godzilla and other giant monsters that keep popping up; in fact, at one point (thirty years or so before the present story begins) the defense force succeeds in trapping Godzilla in the Antarctic. In the present day, several different monsters are showing up all at once and causing havoc. The Earth forces fight admirably, but at the last moment the monsters are teleported up into a gigantic UFO; the aliens manning it explain that they are our friends, and in fact they're here to help save our planet from a looming threat. Long story short, their intentions aren't all that nice: they want to use us for food. Godzilla has to be awakened from his slumber to defend the world, there's lots of fighting and shooting of laser guns, etc. You know the drill.

The best part of Godzilla: Final Wars is recognizing the different references that show up onscreen and within the plot. For one, there are the monsters: different monsters from different eras of the Godzilla film series show up, some with more screen time than others. (Even the 'American Godzilla' from the 1998 film - the one with Matthew Broderick that sucked - makes an appearance, though he doesn't really make us proud of him here any more than he did in his first offing.) There are also various pointers to different science fiction flicks: the similarities to Independence Day are fairly obvious, but there's also a smattering of The Matrix and even Signs thrown in here and there. And unless I miss my guess, a few Japanese media personalities take on some cameo roles.

The film isn't perfect; there could have been a lot more screen time for the monsters, especially given the fact that there were so many different kaiju in this film, probably the most we've seen all at once since Destroy All Monsters (a personal favorite). Much of the plot is moved forward by the human cast who, while interesting, are still just humans, if you get my meaning. Sure, there's a fair amount of martial arts, laser guns being fired, personalities in conflict, sci-fi gadgets, etc.; but what we came for are the monsters. Couldn't King Seesar and Rodan have enjoyed a few more minutes in front of the cameras?

On that note, we all know that within a few years - ten at the most - we'll be getting a brand-new batch of Godzilla movies from Toho. How's about we finally see the dustup we daikaiju fans have waited decades for: let's see Godzilla take on Gamera. We won't mind if it's a draw; it's perfectly understandable that both companies, Toho and Daiei, would forbid their own monster properties to lose such a match. We just want to see what happens when those two mutated reptiles battle it out. And for me, I would shed a tear of joy to see a beautiful CG-animated Gurion up on the screen.