WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS

What makes films like "Godzilla" so interesting to millions of people worldwide, enough to make it a billion-dollar franchise? And what do the 3 (not counting Godzilla vs. Kong which is looking to be pretty goddamn terrible) American adaptations of the series lack that causes fans to revile them so much? The answer is simple; people come for the spectacle, not the human element. The original 1954 is regarded as a masterpiece for its haunting interpretation of the harm nuclear warfare has caused to the planet, with the titular kaiju an extension of the people of Japans' fears coming off the tail end of World War II. Most people don't remember Doctor Serizawa or his attempts to create a device capable of subduing Godzilla, or his conflict of ideas with his fiancé. Not because they aren't interesting, but because Godzilla is just narratively and physically bigger. But their subplots are woven in between the kaiju's rampage, in a way that makes them compelling enough to drive most of the film when Godzilla's not on screen.

Now, there's 32 or so Godzilla films as of 2021, and a good deal of them tend to make the mistake of not having interesting human characters, and forcing them into the spotlight when people would rather watch men in rubber suits duke it out on a miniature city. The exception, Shin Godzilla, is actually noteworthy for basing most of the film around human bureaucracy and manages to make it work, but Hideaki Anno is a master. Many of the other films in the series weren't lucky enough to have someone like him at the helm, and suffered for it. Just look at the 1969 entry Godzilla's Revenge; a schizophrenic nightmare of a movie focusing on some annoying kid running around with a tiny rubbery version of Godzilla doing absolutely fuck all for 2 hours. Everyone hates this movie. Even diehard Godzilla fans wish it never existed. And almost everyone hates the narratively and visually uninspired Legendary Pictures takes on Godzilla. Nobody goes to see a Godzilla movie to watch 2 minutes of actual kaiju action while 99% of the film focuses on whatever stupid shit the human characters are doing. Nobody goes to see a Godzilla movie to watch the girl from Stranger Things overact and run around with some fucking macguffin every 5 minutes. How does this tie into my review of HAKAIJUU? Because it makes the same exact mistakes as the worst Godzilla films, but somehow manages to be even more insufferable and stupid.

Hakaijuu immediately starts off in the worst possible way: introducing two generic rival shonen protagonists. Within the first chapter I felt like I was reading a ripoff of a better series, like Slam Dunk or Kuroko no Basket. But the hope of seeing two shonen cliches beating down monsters was keeping me from dropping it before I even finished the first 5 pages. When the kaiju attack, the author makes the fatal mistake of splitting up the two in favor for saddling the main guy with some boring schoolgirl without a shred of personality. She's sorta badass at times but mostly a cardboard cutout with Saeko from Highschool of the Dead crudely scribbled over it. We don't see the rival guy again for around 50 chapters, and by then he's already basically a different character. Also, guess what the main protagonist's goal is; finding his whiny, useless girlfriend who looks like a 12 year old and has no personality like every other female character in the manga. Because the author isn't satisfied ripping off more than one series, he decides to start stealing from Gantz. And not even the good parts of Gantz, he's taking all the shitty parts that made everyone drop it during the final arc. How do you steal something that's already terrible and manage to make it even worse? Now we have to deal with everyone elses' drama and whining, because of course there's more characters. There's too many characters, in fact.

Hakaijuu makes the exact same mistakes as every other terrible apocalyptic manga; shoving in dozens of irritating dead weight in the hopes at least one of them will be sympathetic to the readers. Unfortunately, none of them are. Unless you like every other dialogue coming out of character's mouths being "NOOOO!" or "KYAAAAH!". If you find that shit as exhausting as I do you will feel the urge to drop this mess every time you turn the page. Because incoherent screaming and whining is 99% of the dialogue in this shitshow. Wanted to see the government fighting the kaiju with weirdly implemented futuristic technology? Here's one page out of the hundreds of people acting like unlikeable screeching idiots who can't shut their fucking mouths for one chapter and do something other than be a complete burden. Also, 99% of these character die pointless, infuriating deaths due to their own stupidity and the fact that they can't stop standing in place, looking at the kaiju and screaming like deer in headlights. Even the protagonists do this sometimes, but the author hates us and always makes them survive. The only character who didn't make me regret reading this was the crazy, inexplicably buff teacher who gets way too attached to the main girl. And guess what, he turns into a fucking cyborg. Remember what I said about ripping off Gantz? Yeah.

Turns out there's an entire government faction turning people into robots and Power Rangers to fight the kaiju. They turned Tokyo into a giant laboratory, somehow, without the millions of people noticing. This is when the manga ascends from garbage-bin levels into true absurdity, some kind of Dadaist statement in manga form. Honest to God mecha fights happen in this. Halfway through it doesn't even resemble what it was trying to be at the start. You have to wonder what exactly the author was thinking.

After this inexplicable turn of events, the hulking mass of a man, using the power of NANOMACHINES SON, suddenly becomes the best character. The other two are so boring they totally lose all agency and get dragged along everywhere for a while. But of course, once they make it to the next part of the story we have to deal with the incessant melodramatics of Boring Protagonist #1 and his dumbass girlfriend, who stops having any narrative potential after a single chapter and becomes a boring damsel in distress who can hardly even function without crying an entire river every 5 seconds. So basically the girl from Gantz. Speaking of girls, i can't even remember what happens to the original girl from the start, I think she just gets sidelined. This manga sucks.

By the last few chapters Hakaijuu has all but devolved into complete tedium and nonsense in a loss of all narrative cohesion. The ending is hollow sequel-bait that hopefully never comes into fruition, and when it was finally over I physically sighed with relief, as my trial was finally over. The burden of trudging through this manga was no longer mine.

Hakaijuu is all the worst parts of large-scale disaster series crumpled up into one miserable heap. It just gets worse and worse every chapter. The only thing that isn't constantly degrading in quality is the art; it's not half bad, sometimes even great. The monsters are nightmarish, finely illustrated, and the just about only thing in this manga more frightening than the atrocious character writing. The grotesque bio-mechanical designs of the mechs were somewhat cool, even if nothing about them made sense. But while it was fun at first to see how much the craziness could escalate, it eventually stopped being fun and felt more like the author was just throwing as much as they could at the wall as possible. There's way too much stuff going on, so you just end up rooting for the kaiju to end everything prematurely and give your head a rest.