WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Season 1 of Godzilla Singular Point, now streaming on Netflix.
When it comes to Godzilla, as much as science plays an important part in the franchise, ultimately, fans just want to see kaiju brawl. A lack thereof was a major reason that the 2014 Godzilla movie from Gareth Edwards disappointed some viewers, and why the other two movies, especially Godzilla vs. Kong, were more palatable in that regard.
Now, we're not saying dumb Godzilla down, as there can be a proper mix of science and action, as per the Netflix animated trilogy. However, the Godzilla Singular Point anime gets the balance totally wrong by leaning way too much into quantum physics, alienating a lot of viewers in the process.
The thing that makes Godzilla click is that whether it's aliens, like King Ghidorah, or evil robot clones, like Mechagodzilla, the science is always digestible. It showed in King of the Monsters where the Legendary MonsterVerse brought back the Oxygen Destroyer, for example, and almost killed the lizard undersea during a simple fight that both old fans and new ones could grasp.
But Singular Point goes way overboard on the mechanics of wormholes and inter-dimensional properties, leaving fans trying to piece together the science of things way too much. As the season goes on, it only becomes even more tedious as we sway from Ashihara's Super Dimension Calculator to the trans-temporal Archetype (existing in different states in different dimensions). Not to mention the other convoluted aspects, such as the mysterious folklore song, how the radio waves affect kaiju like Rodan, how many forms these beasts take to evolve, the evolution of Jet Jaguar's robotic body, the A.I. Yun makes to power up Jet Jaguar and Mei's phone, what Shiva Consortium is doing with its cubes and the hole Salunga crawls up from... The list is endless.
Throw in the complex tale of the Orthogonal Diagonizer and the military, Mei, Yun and Professor Li all running their theories and building sci-fi weapons, and you're left with a wall of mystery, stringing together so many fragments that you don't even realize the show hasn't even used Godzilla in full form until midway through the season. In essence, Godzilla Singular Point feels like Interstellar when it should be akin to Pacific Rim.
The highlight of this is when the show's mysterious Red Dust is rendered inert at the end, and Jet Jaguar updates to a Jaeger-like form via a code sent through the wormhole. Unfortunately, it's such a messy process to get there, it has you scrambling to remember the series notes of old rather than just enjoy the experience at hand.
Jumbling all this into one season detracts a lot from the kaiju, too, made even worse by only seeing the king of them all, Godzilla, unleashing its atomic breath a couple of times and never really tussling with many monsters. We get that Singular Point is trying to be intelligent and not derivative, but simpler doesn't have to mean rudimentary or by the numbers; it just means a less complex plot informing form and function to deliver what's happening, which in its simplest terms can be boiled down to interdimensional kaiju attacking Earth and the means by which they come over and survive being weaponized.
It's not that hard, but with overly thorough explanations ruining the moment at most turns, and heavy-handed quantum physics failing to suspend our disbelief, the first season of Godzilla Singular Point feels like a university course we didn't sign up for.
