This track segues into Daisuke Yano’s “Godzilla vs.

The album starts promisingly with a brief iteration of Ifukube’s Horror of Godzilla theme.

Overall the music sounds like it comes from an early 2000s video game. The music is rock and techno-laden, though thankfully there are a few legitimately good pieces. The result is a score that somewhat matches the over-the-top film, but is wholly unsuited to represent the gravitas of Godzilla. Japanese composers Nobuhiko Morino and Daisuke Yano stepped in to complete the music, ensuring that the composers’ material lined up stylistically. In fact after the first act of the album he largely disappears from the track credits. Emerson only had a couple weeks in his schedule to create music. Instead of getting Michiru Oshima, Takayuki Hattori, or another traditionally orchestral composer, Kitamura went in a completely different direction by hiring British progressive rock artist Keith Emerson. Needless to say, the film is divisive in Godzilla fandom.Īlso divisive is the musical score, composed by Keith Emerson. Highlights include a literal Japanese Keanu Reeves serving as a Neo expy, a scenery-chewing alien commander, and martial artist/pro wrestler Don Frye as a badass American. The film’s saving grace is that it gets so ridiculous and bad that it gets good again. The director Ryuhei Kitamura, known for his over-the-top and violent action films, expresses too much interest in the Matrix-inspired human fight scenes. Also like that earlier film the plot involves aliens using mind control to invade the earth with monsters. Like Destroy All Monsters decades earlier, the film boasts a large cast of monsters, but gives almost none of the them significant screentime. The final result, Godzilla Final Wars is at best a guilty pleasure. As it happened Godzilla’s 50 th birthday was coming up, so Toho decided to once again take a break from the franchise (their longest) with a big extravaganza. Unfortunately, despite some pretty good films, the Shinsei Godzilla series was not proving as financially successful as hoped. Composed by: Keith Emerson, Nobuhiko Morino, & Daisuke Yano

Godzilla final wars intro