Anime The most wretchedly tedious waste of time to ever be branded with the 'Godzilla' name.
I think there are few series I've ever regretted wasting time on as much as Godzilla: Singular Point. Less than half-way into the series I was already bored out of my skull and only watching out of Sunk Cost Fallacy, hoping that something interesting would happen to make the time I'd invested worth it. In short, it never did.
Even calling this a "Godzilla series" is practically false advertising. Toho's classic cast of kaiju have never been so badly misrepresented, with Rodan reduced to an unending horde of mindless locusts, Anguirus making a cameo where he does absolutely nothing relevant except take up a few episodes before getting killed, Manda is turned into a swarm of sea monsters who are... just kinda there, and Mothra is reduced to a vague Shout-Out. The Big G himself gets it worst of all. It takes half the series for him to actually appear, and once he does he just sits on his ass in Tokyo for no reason, occasionally destroying things. They were clearly taking inspiration from Shin Godzilla's take on the character as a throwback to his "living natural disaster" role, but he's so utterly bereft of personality or agency that his role literally could have been taken by a large, stationary tornado.
The real problem is that the series is barely "about" the kaiju. More than half of the story is squandered on unending science mumbo-jumbo about impossible materials, quantum mechanics, weird signals and endless Technobabble, banging on about Archetype, the Super Dimensional Calculator, the Orthagonal Diagonalizer, the Catastrophe and the Singular Point while barely ever explaining what the hell they even really are. It takes 7 episodes until the series even admits that all this rubbish is even connected to the kaiju storyline. But while the kaiju being reduced to window dressing would normally make it a character-focused piece, the human cast are a lot of personality-deficient bores who do nothing but spout theortical nonsense to each other for 13 episodes, almost never interacting with each other as people and never displaying any motivations beyond "work this out". The supposed Deuteragonists of the series, Yun and Mia, meet for a few minutes in the second episode and spend the rest of the series communicating by SMS until the literal last minute of the end. In the end, the real heroes of the series turn out to be the annoying AIs.
Even when something vaguely exciting happens, it completely undermines itself with Ass Pull nonsense, with the climax of the series being probably the most anticlimactic thing I've seen in years. And then they had the absolute nerve to end the series on a Sequel Hook?!
Do not waste your time. The American Godzilla (1998) was a better Godzilla story than this.
Anime A treat for scientists.
A lil bit about me, for context. I'm in the field of literature and information science, and while I'm not exactly a fan, I enjoy the Godzilla movie here and there. After the disaster that was planet of monsters trilogy, I thought it could be good to at least try something different, so I gave Singular Point a chance. If it was better, it would help me forget the previous trilogy of movies, if it was worse, it would still help me forget it.
What I found was a whole series that made me squee every couple of minutes, because it nailed points of my research spot-on, and explained them (or tried to) in a better way to the audience than I did with some classes.
In fact, the spine of this movie is actually a very important question in the field of information science, "When do data becomes information, and when does information becomes knowledge?", so far, the answer is 'Context', you need intent and a specific context in order to process raw data into information.
Normally, the toho movies that I watched dealt with the question of 'how do we kill that thing?'
Now, the question with this series becomes "How do we turn all this raw data into information?" and/or "What is the correct context?" its everywhere, its the music that needs to be replayed under different contexts, its the bones, analyzed again and again. It goes even across space and time. And the overall score is really good, the intro is catchy, and I specially liked how the Alapu Upala song starts subtly shifting, getting direr and direr, announcing that time is almost up. And this series isn't the usual toho fare, indeed if you expect godzilla to show up at the start or middle, you'll be disappointed. Here, he acts as the herald of apocalypse basically, and he is BIG. It felt quite fitting as an apotheotic menace.
On the other side of the coin, the main characters are at best 'there' (Gintoki- I mean Yun) and at worst irritatingly idiotic (Mei), the writers tried to play them as 'quirky' but landed on 'suicidally moronic' or 'completely detached from reality', and the stich of them talking through messages got old in the second episode. I know that this is meant for the exposition dumps, but those are supposed to be done between action scenes, not during them. Each protag has their own team, and two teams mean two different foci, a luxury that very, VERY few writers can pull off without making too scattered. If the main characters were more interesting, perhaps it could have been pulled off, and making things even worse, they rely far too much on the A.Is.
Action is so-so, there are good scenes, and blander ones. The series could give itself the luxury of being more violent and killing more people, the only named character dies from stupidity and even then its completely Gory Discretion Shot, not even the sounds of them being murdered are heard.
In the end, I really enjoyed the series, and I hope that the second season will at least correct course and improve the leads. I really miss media in general exposing deeper scientific theories and ideas.