Godzilla vs. Biollante1989

93/100 I have been forced to accept the fact that we are currently in The Spooky Month™, and watch a suitable film to commemorate that fact. Not that this is a very spooky movie, but I'm a wimp, so this is the closest I'm getting to actual spook. What this is, though, is a very good movie. The plot is all over the place, being a mix between a monster flick and an action thriller, but to its credit, it flows from one to the other as well as it can, and both halves work well. Unfortunately, the plot also starts the tired trope of the new villain being made from or absorbing Godzilla cells, so that loses it some points. The characters in this movie work really well. The characters of Miki Saegusa and Sho Kuroki are set up well for future movies, and I actually prefer Miki's more alien characterization here rather than her later personality, which I have...less nice stuff to say about, but that's not related to this movie. Genshiro Shiragami works really well as a conflicted scientist for the Kaiju side, and the Saradian agent SSS9 is awesome. The best character, though, is General Goro Gondo, the one person who's more awesome, to the point where he manages to get a one-liner off on Godzilla before his death. As for the effects, they're mostly average, with the rare poorly done scene like Godzilla's underwater scene. The final battle, though, is a masterclass in tokusatsu with the Biollante effects. As for the monsters, they work great symbolically. This movie's main theme is the dangers of genetic engineering, and Biollante embodies that great. Its also a very tragic monster, with the spirit of the little girl it was born from trapped within a brutal monster. Godzilla and Biollante are also both very similar, with both being living weapons born from science, inhuman on the surface but severely human and tragic at their core. My main problem with the monsters is the final battle, which is way too short and bad. An understandable side-effect of the difficulty handling Biollante, but a bit disappointing. Overall, though, this movie is a fun spy movie and a fun Godzilla movie with an actual emotional story at its center, just as the best Kaiju movies almost always have.