I like watching Al Pacino assuredly investigate, but the attempts at depicting roiling guilt don't work. It feels both messy and incredibly simplistic. I did not like any of the visual tics either.

Gundam longsleeve boy, and Woodstock-from-Peanuts sweatshirt girl. They had me the second Debussy started playing over the opening credits. I felt very attuned to the down to earth dissatisfaction, struggles, and joys. There's these nice moments of Tomomi and Takao being mismatched in their wants and needs, but still finding something in each other. Tomomi has very mild shifts in expression that still communicate a lot about what she's feeling. That mildness makes the stair pushing scene almost more shocking for her than for us. I've come to like these small pink films about characters feeling their way through everyday circumstances more and more.

Very careful to condemn imperial Japan and the wartime military, while remaining a conservative fantasy. It's very appealing and alluringly sentimental and romanticized. I liked Koichi's struggles, his nightmares, and Noriko and Akiko are effective as an idealized vision of family. The Godzilla scenes are quite good, but I seriously question tying Godzilla's defeat to Koichi's fulfillment of duty.

"Your blood is the purifying water." The four council member deaths early on are great. The poisoning kill in particular, with the enormous volume of blood bursting out of the car door. This has strange almost patient pacing, moving in fits and starts, as Riki waits for his plan to unfold in between spikes of violence. There's some decent apprehension about Riki becoming the exact same as the generation that's being eradicated. I'm feeling charitable towards the non-ending. The violence and death continuing, unending.