What I expected from a Godzilla from Hideaki Anno Even though Godzilla and a lot of the kaiju from the Showa era are a huge presence, the series is not essentially about them, so naming it Godzilla seems to be a bad idea, especially looking at its reception. The series is essentially a mind-bending race to stop the apocalypse where the space-time continuum is in a mess. This could've replaced all the Godzilla universe elements with something else and still worked by using some other stuff in place. But at the same time, the love for the Godzilla universe, all the monsters, and I think a special place for the robot Jet Jaguar is pretty clear. The influence of all the different types of Godzilla movies is clear but that of Shin Godzilla was even more evident at times. When I first heard Hideaki Anno making Godzilla, I was expecting something like this more than what Shin Godzilla was and the makers might have been big fans of his work. Even the end credit song visuals almost like depicting a parallel universe with more traditional iterations of all the monsters felt more like a beautiful tribute without losing the mind-bending aspect.
Now, the sci-fi aspects were a bit over the top. It is intentionally made hard to understand because even though they have used a lot of real-world concepts, like the MD5 hash function very important in the plot, the way they integrated the more fictional aspect doesn't really make sense unless you give into the absurd ideas that conspiracy theorists come up with when faces with paradoxes. The outlook of the two main characters that are established in the first couple of episodes does paint them as too weird and brainy to justify their easy acceptance of absurd sci-fi puzzles they face. But if the series would've slowed down for the viewers to catch up with the jargon they keep on using, it would've made it clear it's mostly pseudo-science bullshit, so the fast-paced way they went where you don't really need to understand it, was the right way to tell this.
The use of the weird haunting Sanskrit song and some Hindu mythology references was nice to see. But some of the pronunciation of Sanskrit felt a bit American, not even Japanese which kinda threw me and wasn't easy to understand what the actual lyrics were. The Gita quote is used here too as Godzilla is a nuclear monster.
The animation is also incredibly well done and the CGI on the monsters worked really great too.
Overall, it's a pretty great series that kept me hooked throughout even though there was a lot of mumbo jumbo talk with science talk that only makes sense if we fully aspect that everything is a singular point in this world. The AI Pelops was too cute and made this a whole lot more enjoyable around all such science talk.