Forum - View topicREVIEW: Godzilla Singular Point
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chito895
 Posts: 512 Location: Lima, Peru |
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I've never been a big fan of Godzilla, kaijus and tokusatsu, and I really dislike that United States version of 1998 Godzilla. But I'm really taking a like of this genre after watching the SSSS. Gridman and SSSS. Dynazenon, which are glorious. Those are my first tokusatsu series ever.
And aside from the good ol' Godzilla vs King Kong from the 1900s, Godzilla SP has been my first active interaction with the franchise. I certainly wasn't expecting so much technobabble. It left me with some headaches, to be honest! But at certain point, I just decided to stop thinking too much about the fake science and just roll with it. The dub certainly help (Latin Spanish for me!), but what carried the show for me was... the characters themselves! There wasn't so much character development for them as James says in the review, but for some reason I freaking loved watching them geeking out about the science and doing their damn best to untangle all the Singular Points and Archetype shit. And for every Yun and Mei Kamino, there was always a Mr. Ootaki or Haberu to ground things down with meat and stupidness. Even Pelops II and the original Yung AI were engaging in their contrasting personalities. And apart from them, there are even more interesting people that would be amazing to revisit if there's actually a 2nd season. Bones and Orange knocked it out of the park and that's another important reason I enjoy Godzilla SIngular Point so much. This one won't be for everyone, though. In any case, this has become one of my favorite shows of the year. |
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ab2143
Posts: 756 |
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Yeah, the techno-babble went over my head
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Key
Moderator
 Posts: 18458 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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A Math PhD being behind the writing explains a lot about the series, especially. . .
This was also one of my two main complaints about the series (the other being that too little was ultimately explained), and it only got worse as the series progressed. The male co-protagonist (the one JYB voices, forget his name) was easily the least interesting major character in the series. For me, that drained the series' effectiveness as a true monster/disaster movie. Damned if it didn't look great, though. . . |
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whiskeyii
 Posts: 2269 |
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I'll be honest, I watched this series entirely because I had a bad week and wanted to turn my brain off and see a giant robot fight giant monsters, and I was mostly not disappointed. I think you can totally still enjoy Godzilla SP on a surface level and just coast along with the technobabble the same way you would with any old Star Trek episode. That said, knowing that some (most? all?) of this has basis in actual reality makes me wish there were the equivalent of Josei Next Door's or Jacob Chapman's Utena episode-by-episode guides for this show that just broke down all the theory into neat little layman explanations for us non-mathwhiz folks.
That said, I watched this show on hard mode with the sub (those subs were gooooodawful, and this was before the TWIA came out to warn me), so I'm definitely gonna' give this a rewatch with the English dub to see if it's any more comprehensible the second time around. |
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Kicksville
 Posts: 1250 |
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I was looking forward to this for Toh Enjoe's writing, since he wrote two of the best Space Dandy episodes - I suppose I was expecting plenty of technobabble, so it didn't really bother me. Everything else that came with it was fantastic too, and even with a pretty packed year already I'd say this is one of the best shows of 2021.
I never thought I'd say this, but...Jet Jaguar is the best. I want to give them a hug, somehow. |
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Animegomaniac
Posts: 4158 |
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I think of the weapon of not destroying absorbed oxygen in the water but the oxygen in the water molecule itself- you should potentially end up with a highly concentrated amount of hydrogen ions looking to bond with anything in the local area as quickly as possible or in others words, the world's most concentrated acid ever. It'd dissolve even Godzilla right down to the bone. Normally, Electrolyisis would just end up making O^2 molecules and H^2 molecules but maybe some mad scientist would reason out how to "destroy" matter.... converting oxygen and hydrogen directly into energy is a "little" more plausible but 1: there's nothing special about explosions and 2 It wouldn't have stopped Godzilla. Oh right, that's Godzilla, King of the Monsters idea of an oxygen destroyer... I guess? It made a boom and didn't stop Godzilla after all. I had no problem following the science of Singular Point and I've also dabbled in the idea of crafting giant monster stories about them coming from other dimensions just to placate hecklers who shout out "Square cube law!" in order to dismiss an entire genre- they're from another dimension and they look down on your puny ideas of mathematics and "realism". Also, that's not exactly how it works- double the area and you triple the volume but that only applies when converting Object A into object A prime- the same but larger- but it doesn't mean a thing to converting Object A into Object B, bigger but also different. Collapsing under its own weight? That's not how my imagination works, "see something, explain something" over "Let's start with preconceived notions of what's possible and what's not"... perhaps being a 50 or even a 100 meter tall creature it less about what's holding it up but what's holding it together- But Godzilla Earth at 300 meters? No, no, that's just silly. And also a plant which is even worse so... impossible beings from some imaginary dimension, that's fine, go with that. In the end, I saw Singular Point as the world's most epic monster movie and a smart one at that. My only complaint is we never got that one true, huge Rodan the series was building its way to. We could have, should have finally gotten the Godzilla V Rodan movie that Toho never bothered to make in its 65 years. |
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LastPage 3
Posts: 211 |
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As someone who actually enjoys when series get technical about stuff, whether it's science or magic, I wish reviews like this wouldn't treat it as an inherent failing.
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SHD
Posts: 1759 |
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Am I the only one who didn't mind the technobabble? Sure, it was prominent, but given that in the end it mostly equals magic, and also its eventual aim is "whatever as long as we can make it look cool", and also given that the show more or less starts with a scientist barely batting an eyelash as an unknown but obviously intrusive and potentially very dangerous software takes over her laptop, and then later does stuff like actually compiling and publishing a thesis for her (I sure would've loved something like that way back)... in short, it started out on a note that was so unrealistic (for me) that I thought there was no point in trying to take it seriously. I'm sure it was well thought-out and made some kind of sense, but frankly I mostly just tuned it all out, when something important came up it was emphasized and repeated anyway.
Edit: also, as for the characters, I agree that there wasn't much in the way of characterization. I actually didn't really mind that though - what I found annoying and what would be my criticism of the show that I otherwise enjoyed a lot, is that Mei and Ootaki, but especially Mei, looked and acted like they were from a completely different show and wandered into this one by accident. They act in ways that are completely incongruent with the world around them, and Mei in particular has too much of that "anime girl" thing going on, with her silly hairdo, her cute-but-weird monster accessories, her outfit... there's eccentric scientist, and then there's "only in anime", which just didn't really work when the show was otherwise going through great pains to be down to earth. Last edited by SHD on Sun Jul 11, 2021 5:23 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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JoelBurger
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Technobabble isn't an inherent failing, but this show had issues with how it was presented and executed. So much time is spent doing nothing but expositing on the technobabble the show is built around, which ground the pacing to a halt (and as others already noted, made it feel like there was no urgency or danger when characters are more concerned with theory than the world ending around them). It also made it so that the characters seemed less like human beings, and more like machines designed to spout exposition periodically. |
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micah007
Posts: 205 |
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I enjoyed the series and the technical aspects but I can understand how alot of the science heavy ideas could be difficult to begin to understand if you aren't up to practice in real life advanced math and science. I think the presentation of these aspects could have been much better in many areas, like the medium of delivery not being through text conversations that quickly run through complex topics and ideas. The slow burn plot was a nice change compared to the recent idiotic American movies, something that I think the 2014 Godzilla movie was correct to adopt, and I did think Godzilla's eventual appearance was more impactful because of that decision. This is a series that I would actually rewatch because of the effectiveness of the initial episodes especially in building a mystery. I also can't believe I like Jet Jaguar lol
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ZelosZoidberg
 Posts: 726 |
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Is it just me or does the character on the right look like Gintoki from Gintama but with glasses?
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MFrontier
Posts: 13881 |
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I wonder if the dub is the more ideal way to watch the movie otherwise it sounds like you get saddled with text after text after text...and I'm not sure I trust Netflix's subs.
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Zeino
Posts: 1098 |
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I didn't like it at all. There are elements here to make a great story. Unfortunately it is like Toh Enjoe decided that he wanted to win the category of "most obfuscating expository dialog per hour" in a non-existant award ceremony, and given the genre is anime, the result is a ridiculous amount of this being conversations between two or more people spewing technobabble or talking about how intelligent somebody is for solving something they already knew (which begs the question why don't you put her up to speed from the beginning, you idiots...), etc.
The kaiju as a terraforming event idea was great and with great visuals, the action scenes were great - the what, 25% of it all that they were, the relationship with Godzilla itself was a bit tackled on (and again, Godzilla series with what, 1/3 of the time dedicated to Godzilla?) but again, well done with the animation and stuff... but all of that doesn't justify the unending bla-bla-bla-bla. "Godzilla: Shut Up Already" is what it should be really called. Last edited by Zeino on Mon Jul 12, 2021 3:53 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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casenumber00
Posts: 167 |
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Yeah it did have a lot of technobabble, high math was never my strong suit, and huge leaps in the plot happened in 15 seconds when characters were talking a mile a minute but, after all that, what really got me to drop it was somewhere around 3/4ths the way through I was watching the genius glasses girl jumping timezones and countries over a few episodes but the male characters were STILL fighting all the creatures at a marina. These guys seems to just be as smart as the girl but were relegated to fighting instead of earnestly unraveling the mysteries. I was surprised but the show had overall great animation, cinematography, pretty good story but all these little negative things added up for me where I wasnt enjoying it anymore.
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YesNoMaybe
 SubscriberPosts: 182 Location: Columbus, OH |
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Well, I Really like it; I am so hoping for a second season!
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