Was very excited today to realise that there was a Japanese Godzilla film I TECHNICALLY hadn't seen.
When I was churning my way through the franchise in 2017-2020, I came across Godzilla 1985, and I guess I thought it was just a dubbed version of The Return of Godzilla. At the time it was the only version I could find, and so I thought it was good enough (even though I much prefer subtitles over dubs) and watched it, ultimately finding it decent but definitely not great.
Recently I learnt Godzilla 1985 and The Return of Godzilla were actually quite different, and today when I realised they were both listed separately on IMDB and had quite different runtimes, I figured I needed to watch Return ASAP.
Long story short, it's definitely not the best Japanese Godzilla film, but it's also far from the worst. I liked the political focus for the most part (though this approach was ultimately handled better - and in a more satisfying/satirical way - in 2016's highly acclaimed Shin Godzilla) and a lot of the monster action is highly satisfying, despite some inconsistencies in the special effects.
Pacing isn't always great, and the human characters are typically thin (it's a Godzilla movie; the human characters are like that 80-90% of the time) but I still enjoyed it a lot.
I've missed watching the adventures of my scaly boi, and I think I will rewatch the entire series soon. Picked up that glorious Criterion set on Bluray a couple of months ago, so am looking forward to seeing those older ones in better than DVD quality.
