How many times is Godzilla going to be rebooted? 2014 edition

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjKO10hKtYw

More than anything else, I want to see how they mess up "giant lizard destroys city."

Why would they need to airdrop in soldiers to fight a giant lizard? You'd think it'd be preoccupied enough with destroying the city and eating trains and stuff that it wouldn't notice five or six lil' dudes sneaking up.

Anyway, I'm excited, because I love Godzilla. I loved "Monsters," too, which shows the director knows how to write for and direct, you know, actual people.

Could be alright.

Although until not five minutes ago I was convinced that Gareth Edwards was the guy who directed The Raid. Turns out that's Gareth Evans. I haven't seen Monsters.

"Monsters" is really good, imo. Totally not what you'd expect from a movie called "Monsters" that does have monsters in it.

My flatmate's claiming it's shit right this minute. I'll watch it and make my own mind up.

Is your flatmate 15? 'Cause yeah, I can imagine a kid picking out a movie called "Monsters" and hating it.

Haha, he's 34 but his taste in movies is similar to that of a 15 year old.

that film was really good iirc.

Godzilla after Cloverfield after 9-11

Interesting aesthetics in that trailer – godzilla moving about in smoke and darkness, actually hiding in it despite his size – some of the wreckage looked realistically done, I saw a plane being chucked around a runway and a train?

Bryan Cranston?

I suppose the challenge for a special effects disaster/monster film now is that everyone knows you can make millions of tanks/spaceships/missiles fly around the screen, we're all numb to any CGI spectacle that relies too much on scale and ignores details

dang this actualy looks good

i loved monsters.
open of my fave movies in the genre.

Attaching smoke and flares to your special ops guys before parachuting them into the city seems like a the ideal way to turn them into airborne Godzillasnacks to me.

Another entry in the dark, roiling, cgi clouds school of film-making.

Lotta imaginary airborne particulate matter in Hollywood these days.

Trailer does not get me excited. It looks like your standard Bruckheimer/Bay/Emmerich summer atrocity.

agree

Only the fact that the Monsters guy is doing it has me curious. At least Big G looks more like his classic self in this.

In some ways it was genius for Toho to eventually turn Godzilla into a semi good guy. That way he got to destroy cities while also destroying other giant monsters, yet survive to star in sequels. The roteness of modern takes on "giant monster destroys city" is not the destruction, per se, but waiting for the inevitable "aha, that's how we kill it!" moment. Which is hard to care about, considering it's preceded by watching said monster destroy things in awesome fashion. Might as well have a character declare "aha, that's how we kill it, and make the movie stop moving!"

What about that "she is just protecting her eggs" moment?

Trailer does not get me excited. It looks like your standard Bruckheimer/Bay/Emmerich summer atrocity.

― zanarkand bozo (abanana), Wednesday, December 11, 2013 7:01 AM (9 hours ago) Bookmark

disagree, not enough money shots of buildings being leveled or people narrowly outrunning the earth crumbling beneath them like they're on a universal studios ride; michael bay's HALO jumping military guys would be buff scowling badasses, instead the emphasis is on their fear and terror

I have to say, I started this thread with a certain level of dismissiveness, but now I'm kinda looking forward to it.

I'm on board

Godzilla always ruled because he was a role model for fat, pear-shaped schlubs everywhere. You can change the world while still being sluggish and having horrible breath.

Or maybe being so big you knock shit down just by turning around? I don't think Godzilla can see his feet, either.

And don't even get me started on this pudge monster:
http://www.wiredmomma.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/godzilla.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/slq3w3Sl.jpg

Does this Godzilla seem even more giant than previous Godzillas? And also, would a creature that size even be able to exist in an environment with Earth's gravity?

Monsters is a great, great movie. So I'm looking forward to this on that alone.

And also, would a creature that size even be able to exist in an environment with Earth's gravity?

Probably not. As I vaguely recall from my biology and physics, if you double the size of something, its muscle strength squares, but its volume/mass cubes, so the muscles are no longer strong enough to support the body (this is why insects/spiders don't come in sizes bigger than they currently do--if they got much bigger their exoskeleton weighs more than their limbs can support). Given the vaguely humanoid sjhape of Godzilla, he'd be fucked.

But yeah, Monsters was wonderful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpc53FvcZ4c

hahaha

that trailer looks amazing up top. never saw the 1998 one. i'm guessing it wasn't much good?

You guess correct. It's not even bad in a fun way.

the way the 98 one bombed was wonderful

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIu85WQTPRc

If you would have told me back in, say 2001, that we'd have another Godzilla reboot starring Malcolm's dad and the Olsen's twins kid sister...

this looks great.

Looks surprisingly good.

Like the use of Ligeti. Hoping this turns out to be a Rise of the Apes-style classy update.

Interest building....

Does Godzilla make airplanes fall out of the sky or something?

why does the statue of liberty look so fake

did you see the desert mountains in the background

i know it was going for a way different vibe, but i hope this can provide the monster-destroying-city action that Pacific Rim was woefully short on.

commercial's great, that's for sure. better to only hint at the monster (like with the rising ocean), or show it for a second or two.

30 years later, and the techniques used in jaws still hold true.

looks great. don't know why but remakes of franchise movies like this bother me so much less than remakes of stand alone films (point break ,oldboy etc)

I like they they've kept him tied (it seems) to the post-WW2 nuclear age.

yeah, is that vegas?

idk, i'm in. why not? monsters was really good, good cast here.

not sure the other "viral" marketing video they've released -- the godzilla "roar" -- is as effective.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6z0T3VwHzk8

meh. the "roar" video wouldn't, of course, get the rare "5 out of 5 schmoes" that the official trailer did.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHyThBpoR1o

So, is there much talk of what this will be about ? Trailer implies Godzilla vs something ... some flying thing? Some tentacle thing? Both?

Weird how poor some of the effects look in the trailer (such as the wave carrying ships towards the camera) but I guess this is something they'll be rendering till just before release. Can't say I'm excited, but this did make me curious about a movie I until now assumed I wouldn't watch. The opening shots were good (corked traffic & crashed plane; tumbling buildings & origami birds)

Actually, went back now and it does seems to be some avian creature. There's a shot at 1:30 of guys aiming their guns up at a large, descending silhouette, then a shot of something — presumably the same thing — slipping into the ocean between a couple of crashing airplanes.

i liked the wave!

30 years later, and the techniques used in jaws still hold true.

― Daniel, Esq 2, Tuesday, February 25, 2014 6:31 PM (33 minutes ago) Bookmark

haha well i'd argue it doesnt hold true at all for daikaiju films... but this is just advertising and it looks like a good approach for what they're doing

i laughed (in a good way) at the line that was like 'the nuclear tests from 1954... they weren't tests, they were trying to kill it!!!'

Is that Ligetti music the same as the one in 2001.. i'm sure it is? Also a quick flash of Geiger/Alien vibes at 1 point.

yes

This looks really cool

Usually my rule of thumb is the cooler the trailer looks, the more disappointing the final film will be. But as long as they keep a lot of the surprises under wraps, and as long as what we see looks, visually, like something the guy who did "Monsters" did - which this does - I'm happy. Mentioned it upthread and will mention it again, but what made "Monsters" special (imo) is how well-written and acted the people stuff was, especially for a movie called "Monsters." Looking forward to seeing the guy pull it off again on a much larger scale.

Really hope those miniature Mothra twins make a cameo

This actually looks kinda okay! Reasonably sold on it as a 'terrifying beast smashes things' movie, and I think I saw Maggie Gyllenhaal in there so I'm in.

It'd be great if it had a strong 'idea' hook too - I mean it's obvious but the original Gojira from the Fifties was actually a, like, good movie (some slow talky scenes aside) with all kinds of resonances in post-Occupation Japan - the trauma of bomb devastation re-enacted, the useless government, the shaky faith in technical progress, an attempt to rehabilitate doomsday weapons by binding them with old-school honor/guilt, etc.... Obviously it'd be easy to do this as 9/11 stuff but frankly that's been done to death in the genre of building-destruction porn and anyway it's been a while, they should find some new anxieties to really tap into. Global warming/wild weather stuff, maybe. I guess that's why I really like the 'mostly smoke' aspect of this, seems less about wrenching every last drop of suppressed sublimation out of the WTC attacks. Could be quickly proven wrong obv. But it would be cool if this touched some nerves.

There was a lot of metaphor and whatnot swimming around "Monsters," too, but I don't want to spoil that movie for anyone who hasn't seen it yet.

did you see the desert mountains in the background
― AIDS (Hungry4Ass)

It would be awesome of Godzilla is not as big as the posters make it seem, and that it's just him destroying Vegas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uuIVn5cq5U

It seems really strange to recycle that Ligetti piece ... its association with 2001 is so strong

maybe the assumption is that no one seeing a Godzilla movie in 2014 is old enough to have seen 2001?

I'm pretty sure they just picked it because it sounds cool. Trailers use music from other movies all the time. Original scores are rarely done until fairly close to release.

key target audience of godzilla in 2014 was BORN in 2001
**mind blown**

I'd rather they reuse Ligetti than the damn airhorn noise from "Inception." Again.

iirc the Ligeti and other classical pieces in 2001 were originally temporary music, Kubrick kept them in after he decided he hated Alex North's score

too bad Kubrick never directed a Godzilla reboot

still kinda O_O at how fucking HUGE this godzilla is

it's like nine times huger than any other one I've seen. exciting!

The casting of this film is so incongruous for a hollywood blockbuster that I love it. I mean Juliette Binoche, Sally Hawkins, and Martha Marcy May Olsen are like an art house goddess triumvirate. "Monsters" was an ace scifi that cost famously all of $500,000. This is Edward's only other gig and was reportedly made for $160 million. how the hell does that happen? Especially after the dreck that was the 1998 film.

still kinda O_O at how fucking HUGE this godzilla is

it's like nine times huger than any other one I've seen. exciting!

I love love love that you went with "nine times huger" instead of ten. Seriously awesome.

i don't recall the last time everyone on ilx got psyched for a blockbuster type movie that wasn't a Batman. must be years anyway.

or, you know, gravity/pacific rim

xxpost EZ: <3

ok I watched ''Monsters" tonight finally to see what all the hoopla was about

if godzilla looks anything like that, hooray.

but if he playfakes me into watching another hour plus of glassy-eyed indie fuxxors holding hands & staring at landscapes I *will* be fucking pissed

the actual monsters were bitchin tho

The real special effects in Monsters are...human emotions

lol

the monsters are....us

lol seriously by the halfway mark I was silently praying that that would not be part of it

Hooray, I've ordered _Monsters_ from the library. After viewing the trailer on youtube, it was pretty amusing to read the comments. A perky mix of dopes who adore the movie and bros who are real mad about the movie being boring relationship crap that shouldn't be called MONSTERS c'mon wtf suxx.

yeah rented Monsters last night cuz of this thread (haven't watched it yet)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WDXpZvbpl8

Hope they included this on the soundtrack, best Godzilla raps!

"Monsters" rules, if you don't like it you don't like people, you monsters.

ppl suck, monsters rule

Hope the new subtitles are as on point as this:

https://24.media.tumblr.com/eed86711a981c9b7c6fe8c04aa78c319/tumblr_n25d3vzJl01r1x4nlo1_400.gif

hahaha that one cow is hauling ass

Man, I haven't been this excited for a movie based on the trailer since I was 13 and I saw an ad for "Predator" during the commercials in SNL:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IC3Mi9vOb_8#t=154

Short version:

http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--pE4I3AlC--/666800864549206056.gif

I have this vague suspicion/hope that Cranston will be TOO good in this movie, accurately capturing the fury and horror a scientist would feel in this apocalyptic scenario, the way Battle:Los Angeles got across how utterly miserable it would be to endure an alien invasion.

"why would my character smile and light a cigar? yes, godzilla has fallen, but the scenario that caused his return remains...his wife is still dead...sure, there would be some relief but...no...there would still be agony, trauma..."

heh.

Anyway, Cranston and Juliette Binoche! Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Elizabeth Olsen! Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins! David Strathairn! From a director equally adept with people and effects! If anything this whole movie is too good for "Godzilla."

nothing is too good for Godzilla

To step on.

wld really love to see someone edit a trailer together for the 1998 godzilla that resembles this ad campaign

hoo boy SIZE MATTERS

eeeeeeee so excited

The only way they could shape a trailer for that 1998 movie into something that looked the least bit thrilling or scary would be to not show any scenes or any of the cast and just have the sound of Godzilla walking and buildings falling over a black screen. Then at the end it just says "Godzilla" in big white letters. And it does not mention the director.

Okay, what is the pterodactyl thing?!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1pX97_0rxU

How I'm reading it now, which is totally flipping the movie upside down for me, is that Godzilla was subdued and in captivity and they let him go to fight this pterodactyl thing and now everything is going to hell.

Rodan!

cautiously optimistic about this, based on Monsters.

My knowledge of Godzilla adversaries is minimal, so I knew the name Rodan but didn't know that's what it was. WOO!

like my vid-store buddy noted, I take it as a good sign that there's other monsters in the mix, instead of just some generic city smashin and subway hidin

(one of the old SunOS system manuals had examples that used all the various monster names.)

how do they spend like a trillion dollars making godzilla look real and then the statue of liberty looks like a FF7 cutscene

it's a fucking statue you can just make a decent-looking miniature for like $8

They polish these movies all the way up until the week of release. I'd be shocked if that didn't look much better in the theater.

they polish the shit that ends up in trailers first

my point stands anyway, why the fuck make a statue out of CGI

That's supposed to be the Las Vegas replica of the Statue of Liberty

hrm it costs a lot less to do shit using cg than to make a real model and do the same.

i literally just made a realer looking model using two paperclips and flintstones vitamin

Just saw it!

http://www.sketchplease.com/tag/krypton

Pretty good!

Er, that was supposed to be Godzilla giving a thumbs up

Anyway, this was fun! Surprisingly true to the spirit of the old movies.

Lotsa cool shots. Gareth Edwards really knows how to sell the scale of everything.

Humans, like in all Godzilla movies, are there to be witnesses and explain stuff. Anyone complaining about this is kind of a schmuck, IMO.

awesome

Also want to note that the trailers made this seem like it was going to be a lot more dour and self-serious than it is. It's pure b-movie, as a Godzilla picture should be.

on second-viewing, the trailers look kinda cheesy maybe?

It hits the right combo of awe and cheese, IMO

The best part: Godzilla looks and acts like Godzilla.

?

he memorized all his lines and stopped wearing the perm

Jhericurlzilla was the worst.

I have to say it's Mr. Day-Lewis's most stunning role yet

(godzilla) stopped wearing the perm

― sitting on a claud all day gotta make your butt numb (forksclovetofu), Thursday, May 15, 2014

too bad. 'zilla's hair was a key part of the character.

http://www.aux.tv/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Godskrilla.jpg

Also want to note that the trailers made this seem like it was going to be a lot more dour and self-serious than it is. It's pure b-movie, as a Godzilla picture should be.

― Quinoa Phoenix (latebloomer), Thursday, May 15, 2014 10:55 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

isn't the perceived self-seriousness the reason every nerd is blowing their wad over this loooool

It takes itself seriously just enough.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bnx9n29IEAAo8lf.jpg

tbf broderick was the least of that thing's problems but I hope that answers zachlyon's question

what does godzilla's roar sound like in this new version?

a choir of angels

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgTWPckhYM8

300 foot Roger Waters

In which our hero Adrian Belew does the sound FX for the new movie:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8NpBWPL93s#t=622

I am going to see this tomorrow

you guys I am so psyched

15-minute countdown at Metreon IMAX starts now :)

:D

okay so when i was like eight there was this theater on the other side of town that would show godzilla movies on the weekends, and my dad would never take me. but he was a big fan of king kong from back in the day and finally one week they were showing godzilla versus king kong and he cracked and took me. man i was beside myself. I'd only ever seen godzilla in black and white on our little TV with commercials and now it was on. the big screen, popcorn, the whole deal.

and not to hide the birdie or anything but if you've seen it you already know, godzilla versus king kong suucked. even at eight years old, in love with godzilla, i knew it sucked. and i felt kind of bad for having dragged my dad across town to see a bad movie that defiled the memory of his beloved king kong.

anyway this new godzilla sucks in some of the exact same ways (sort of no plot, any scene not involving kaiju is mostly annoying, big fight at the end's a disappointment) that those old GODZILLA VERSUS movies sucked BUT: it's also it's epic in all the right ways, and lovingly restores the sense of scale and grandeur, and while some folks have complained about losing nuclear-cautionary Gojira I really dig this new lovecrafty-unknowable Elder Gojira. and hell even the suck comes off as homage... like if they'd just gone ahead and called this GODZILLA VERSUS MOTU you'd know exactly what you were in for. if i was eight years old i wouldn't have felt bad about dragging my dad to this one AT ALL.

PS it wasn't until like five years later btw that I finally connected the dots and figured out my dad was always reluctant to take me to those godzilla movies because when that theater across town wasn't showing weekend matinees for the kids it was a porno theater. true story the end.

so basically if you know anyone who is eight years old take them to see this immediately is how i break it down to an extent.

*applause*

fyi i am mentally 8 years sold so I am taking me to see it :D

old, even

bonus trailer!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3OuGMcTVeA

VG i think you'll be quite pleased

(and yes i totally had one of those and it was pretty much my #1 toy until atari arrived)

I gotta quit getting sucked by the hype machine into these blockbuster things.

Mr Veg is kinda mad at me for dragging him to see this lol

I think rogermexico's review was the perfect mental preparation. It really did suck plotwise, the characters were cyphers & mostly took up valuable monster time

But the monster stuff was mostly awesome & my inner 8 yo was p into that

But this Monsters director guy is such an emo, like omg dude settle down with all yr 'heartbreaking moments'

he made a bitchin godzilla monster though

luv that there are still people on ilx who call people emos

i get emos and screamos confused?

i love that there are ppl who are too cool to use the word emo

lol i'm very uncool, i'm really good at being uncool ok!!!, i just never see people use it like that anymore

:)

there's a bunch of godzillas on amazon prime, so rn i am rewatching og gojira :D

Is he actually bigger in this one than in the others?

The secret theme of this movie was the dangers of digital obsolescence

First they scared you by having the 15 year old data be on ZIP DISKS

You were like "Oh shit! How are they gonna read that zip disk!"

Then fifteen minutes later MOTU was firing EMP waves!

Bam! No more digital data at all! You gotta use a fucking handcarved swiss chronometer to detonate your bomb!

BTW if you wanna save $10 I found a condensed version of the movie online thank me later

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQ3oOe3mdoQ

LOL! They def made a point of letting us see the Big Blue Zip Drive onscreen for a moment.

i was in love with this directors first film, which was basically before sunset with affectionate cgi monsters and a great riff on american/latin american relations/immigration in the background.
this though, was a failure.

the monsters were great, some of the best ive seen recently, genuinely scary and a bit alien-like, but not overtly derivative, and unlike the monsters in something like super 8, they felt tangible, and physical. but the rest of this film was totally underwhelming. the subtext, if you can call it that, was so ambivalent i couldnt tell what it was trying to say about nuclear technology (probably nothing at all, but felt it had to, because of the source movie). and i couldnt tell whether godzilla was good or bad until the very end, nor did i know what the other monsters were doing there.

sally hawkins looked like she was half doing a pisstake of blockbuster acting/half acting in a mike leigh film, juliette binoche was fine but pointless, brian cranston was meant to be a crank but didnt really get enough time to make me care. which basically left the son, who was just typically bland and someone i didnt give a shit about. the film was trying to be a bit of a spielberg-ish blockbuster, with the whole family theme and attempt at sentimentality, but it couldnt even do that right, as it never made you care about the family to begin with, before they got broken apart. all the spielberg touches also made me think that jj abrams might have done a better job, but that its a shame that for anyone trying to do a good blockbuster with a narrative and characters, they have to try and imitate 2nd hand spielberg - do modern directors have nothing of their own to add? basically, this was just a tragic waste - godzilla deserves better.

i think gareth edwards has got a lot of talent, but maybe blockbusters arent for him. hes not allowed to do unusual things with monsters in a movie as big as this, so maybe he needs to be allowed to make more low budget movies where monsters are nice to each other like they were in his debut.

basically, this was pacific rim all over again.

"any scene not involving kaiju is mostly annoying"

this is otm, which basically means the film can be cut down to about 30 minutes tops

i was pretty bored by this. i did like that godzilla moved and looked like a really expensive version of a guy in a rubber suit.

couldn't tell whether godzilla was good or bad until the very end, nor did i know what the other monsters were doing there.

It was pretty unambiguous by the end that Godzilla was the good guy. The muto monsters were trying to mate and build a nest. Not that hard to follow, man.

i suppose, i was just bored and getting bored of waiting for godzilla to crush all the buildings, so didnt really care

jj had his shot at a monster movie and he goofed the ending, sorry man, no redos

Godzilla: The City Ravaging Monster with a Heart of Gold

I found this to be much more of a grim affair than Pacific Rim

xpost - or nuclear technology: possibly big and scary and dangerous but it could fight other scary and dangerous powers off for us so hey, its not all bad

this was better than pacific rim as it didnt have idris elba trying to be mr. shouty in it

Pacific Rim felt like it at least understood the 8-year old thing that rogermexico talked about above. It understood the whole 'more kaiju fighting less boring grownups', which I appreciated a lot. Obv that send it into the realm of 'big dumb movie' and I get that other ppl might view it that way
But del Toro was smart enough, at least to me, to just color the characters with primary colors, let's not go crazy with shades of grey and emotional resonance etc etc, just use them as a device to get to more fighting, and I was TOTALLY down with that

Godzilla only succeeds because of the monsters. Waaaaay too much boring grownups.

was very very curious about this (loved pacific rim) but it's starting to sound like the kind of thing where i can catch time it to catch the last half hour while i'm at the theater to see some other garbage

idk that i'd go that far

it's totally worth it to see a really gorgeously rendered Godzilla on screen. imo. I mean, if you've waited your whole life to see something like that, i mean.

This was seriously po-faced and humourless and dreary and insultingly stupid. It was a lot like a mega-budget remake of Monsters in many respects.

but then again, DavidM is pretty much otm.

I'm so torn! I dunno if I've ever hate/loved a movie so much

if vg doesn't like this that pretty much sinks my interest honestly

Has anyone here seen the original 1954 Gojira? That's about as grim and po-faced as monster flicks get. It's downright mournful.

I came in expecting grim but I got a movie where Godzilla is not only not the villain, but is actually kind of a chaotic neutral chill bro.

A movie that gives me sights such as G-dawg swimming peacefully while being flanked by aircraft carriers deserves the fucking oscar for best picture IMHO

We're talking the 8-year old Oscars mind you, but still

was hoping for a darker movie, like a Godzilla as absolute violence or freudian death instinct in which the big G is sorta secretly (or not so secretly) the hero because of the purity of his rage at us. something like the original film, I guess I'm saying, rather than the later films. don't think the idea of Godzilla as eco warrior hell bent on equilibrium is terribly interesting (and sorts pacifies the nature that is supposedly beyond our control, as the movie rightly posits). maybe even keep this idea but Godzilla's rage should be less...directed, I guess.

A movie that gives me sights such as G-dawg swimming peacefully while being flanked by aircraft carriers deserves the fucking oscar for best picture IMHO

did love this

I guess I wanted a "and fuck you San Francisco!" moment

Honestly the most absurd, suspension of disbelief killing thing in the entire movie was the fact that a soldier and a nurse could afford to live in San Francisco

Godzilla plus aircraft carriers was so fucking great

Wish the San Francisco stuff had been more Fincher with it's San Francisco details. Most of the inner city stuff except for the waterfront just looked like LA with fog

1954 Gojira is dope. And the thing with the 54 movie is it's like Gojira attacking Japan is almost like the lowest event on the totem pole of things that bum you out, like the aftermath with all the families and children and shit, and then the whole love triangle, the WAY that Godzilla is destroyed is brutal as hell.

The aftermath/consequences of Godzilla 54 is what really pushes it over the top for me. It's a fully realized reality from start to finish, complete with human suffering. I know I'm making myself sound like Goth Ebert (5 skulls, saddest movie EVER) but it gets to me so much. 54 Godzilla is grim no doubt but that's grim with heart and grit and meaning. Godzilla's just grim because the color palette is a) brown b) grey and aside from Cranston none of the characters have any kind of facial expression beyond 'sad staring eyes'.

There's so many ways it could have been great. And for how awesome Godzilla looked and how well he was animated etc, it *deserved* to be a way better movie than it was.

the thing that bugged me a lot afterwards was the more I thought about it, the more the MUTOs were just a device to delay the Godzilla reveal. But once they're revealed and oh it's a male and a female and babies and...nothing.

idk.

I liked it a lot more when I walked out of the theater on Saturday than I do now that I've had to stew on it for a few days.

ok i'm done

sorry

it could have easily be retooled into a much lower budget movie where you only see the kaiju battles on tvs in the background.

Needed more Raymond Burr lurking in the background ready to explain what was going on

Godzilla 54

I get so confused when these two words are next to each other b/c it makes me think people are talking about the 1998 Razzie awards.

haha

Godzilla 54 Where Are You?

I never seen the original Godzilla but I thought this was fun

I appreciated the 'human' elements to this more than Pacific Rim, probably because they didn't try to be humorous (and then having the humor fall flat)

The best scene in the movie imo was the MUTO feasting on the carcass of the Russian nuke sub

everyone needs to see original godzilla if they haven't already

or rewatch if you have

The worst part of this movie was having both the Muta AND Godzilla make eye contact with Bord

I appreciate latebloomer's point that this movie was just about kaiju fighting each other & humans were just spectators

But that totally broke the illusion

fucking HATED that

this ain't Free Willy

the eye contact i mean

this ain't Free Willy

― set the controls for the heart of the sun (VegemiteGrrl), Wednesday, May 21, 2014 11:43 AM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark

But we're not talking about XXX movie parodies

lol

was hoping for a darker movie, like a Godzilla as absolute violence or freudian death instinct in which the big G is sorta secretly (or not so secretly) the hero because of the purity of his rage at us. something like the original film, I guess I'm saying, rather than the later films. don't think the idea of Godzilla as eco warrior hell bent on equilibrium is terribly interesting (and sorts pacifies the nature that is supposedly beyond our control, as the movie rightly posits). maybe even keep this idea but Godzilla's rage should be less...directed, I guess.

― ryan, Wednesday, May 21, 2014 7:47 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark

Yeah I felt that this movie was lacking in active malevolence towards humans; in this sense it felt like a natural disaster movie

Even when the MOTU was messing shit up, its violence was oddly passive - helicopters flying into appendages unfortunately moved at the last minute, EMP waves that cause planes to fall out of the sky, people dying from tidal waves & not the monsters causing them. I think this movie was probably conceived directly after the 2011 Japanese tsunami, both the nuclear terror and the coastal destruction

latebloomer's point that this movie is just about kaiju fighting each other & humans being along for the ride goes some way towards explaining this away

But even in a natural disaster movie there's a fear of some kind of runaway domino effect causing the destruction of the Earth or something - I guess I couldn't get too worked up about either a nuke detonating in a (mostly) evacuated SF, or a bunch of baby MOTUs roaming the Earth looking for nukes and power plants (that'd be kind of cool, actually)

I just loved the whole "weary old fighter" vibe from Godzilla. I loved the eye contact. It wasn't anything more than a brief moment of interspecies solidarity. "I feel ya bro." *falls asleep*

I wonder how many civilians the big G accidentally crushed on his way back to his home

I noticed a bunch of civilians on that pier & they were looking at him going in to the ocean

But they stayed on that pier and didn't die

He killed a bunch of people coming ashore on Hawaii

dayo otm re absence of fear

it was a very passive disaster movie. the kaiju were popping nukes like uppers, total post-nuclear world iconography

if you're going to mention jj abrams then Cloverfield was a good Godzilla movie - monster from somewhere destroying everything.

have been watching the originals (the Classic Media versions are good with both the original japanese subtitled and the butchered american dubbed versions with insightful commentary on them. also dead cheap, about £4 from amazon, including postage). after about 4 he's jumping up and down clicking his heals when he wins. but Honda usually has something in there to make them worth watching.

(also, takeshi shimura was in both the original godzilla (and a couple of the sequels) AND seven samurai in the same year. he did 9 films that year)

would like to see the 80s reboot as they look a bit darker, more like the '54 version.

(the one 2000s reboot i saw had a kid in the van and someone walking along swinging a plank like something out of a charlie chaplin film. i didn't go any further.)

my god, this was atrosh

dude has some interesting ideas about how to make big movie monsters and shoot them, i kinda wished the movie was entirely about godzilla and his friends and no human characters

the build-up to first seeing any of the monsters was excruciating... all that dumb pointless backstory... really made me lol how juliette binoche and bryan cranston were just like "get me the fuck out of this movie NOW" *dies*

and whats-his-name... the lead dude... what a black hole...

love how they keep giving him kids to protect too haha

i mean there were points where i was like, are they going for a stilted 70s disaster movie thing here? but i dont think it was intentional

Yeah, Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays the lead. Such a weirdly disinterested hero. It's like nothing affects him; the death of his father, rampaging behemoths, nothing. I'm pretty sure he gets loads of people killed, too.

All 3 generations of Godzilla suit wearers walking down the street together

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BoNdSBaIUAAGiwE.jpg

<3 <3 <3 awesome

and yeah they could have replaced the lead actor with a spoon and it would have been better

I really liked him in that Anna Karenina movie with Keira Knightly, but maybe that role was better suited for him.

I have such sympathy for Mr Veg.

How long do you think Ken Watanabe has known his US career would involve Gojira at some point?

lol

it's weird to me that they played the non-Godzilla stuff so blandly (unless there's some meta level to it I'm missing). you've got Godzilla in your movie, there's really no way you can build the "human" story around him in a way that's gonna dampen ticket sales. why not take some small risks at least?

how dare you sir. they studied Jaws very carefully what more do you want?

Yeah Fort was really bland, by design it seemed

I finally got around to seeing this, with my daughter. Several thoughts, perhaps addressed above by others, by I'd been avoiding the thread til I saw it:

The good:

1) Love that they made Godzilla an unabashed good guy. My daughter's reaction, pretty much, was "Aw, he's a nice guy after all!"
2) Some of the shots were oddly beautiful
3) Some of the things that made me like "Monsters" were ported over directly to this. A quarantine zone, the notion of the monsters just going about their business while the people freak out, even the notion, iirc, of the monsters mating ritual being the thing that freaks people out.
4) The Godzilla design was great, a strong update of the model.
5) Nice nods to the franchise, from the Mothra in a tank to the requisite antipathy for trains and bridges.

The bad:

1) Not enough Godzilla. Dude is so lazy in this, just taking his time getting to the bad guys, swimming away. That was half the movie. More than half.
2) A great, great cast, all but wasted by making them stick to repetitive, seconds-eating reaction shots. Cranston might by chewing the screen off, but while he's there at least he livens things up. Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins, let alone Binoche, for major, respected actors, have next to nothing to do but stare. The cast of "Pacific Rim" was more colorful (in every sense).
3) Soooo many shots of some mass slowly approaching and filling the screen. Smoke, dust, light, water. I know this is par, but again, felt super repetitive. I saw it in 2D, but maybe 3D would have made this stuff worth while?
4) The fact that despite the huge budget, and all the potential, and, come on, the more or less foolproof formula of giant monsters destroy city, this movie echoed bits of previous movies that let people down, for the same reasons. Like the egg stuff, from the last shit Godzilla reboot. Or (literally) backgrounding so much of the action in favor of people and their not compelling story, like "Pacific Rim." If anything, they spent too much time on the writing and felt the need to have their A+ actors just talk, even though said talk advanced the story not one bit and in fact slowed everything down to a portentous crawl.

Monsters" worked (imo) as an under the radar cult film driven by some DIY invention and an original story, but the things that made "Monsters" interesting - slow pace, foregrounding the people and backgrounding the monsters, given the monsters a strange sort of primordial innocence - have no place in a $180 million dollar Godzilla movie.

yeah i wonder what a non-mega budget studio version of godzilla directed by him might have been like. obviously no one would ever greenlight that, but id like to see him make more monster movies, just not through hollywood studios.

um idk if you're serious but he did make one? It's called "Monsters" - it's how he got the Godzilla gig.

um i know and ive seen that already, im just wondering if hes better suited to somewhere between indie and tentpole

ok sorry didnt mean to be a dick

Isn't he doing a Star Wars movie now?

This Godzilla would have been a perfect vehicle for his talents had Godzilla not spent 3/4 of the movie swimming across the ocean. It's called Godzilla. No need for a slow, dramatic reveal. We know the drill. It's Godzilla. Make him fight monsters.

one shot of him swimming then cut to one of those dotted maps like in Bugs Bunny or Indiana Jones

now you have 30 more minutes of monstertime

problem solved! next

I really liked San Francisco as Boschian hellscape -- the sequence where the paratroopers drop into it over Ligeti wailing with their red flares trailing like streams of blood is pretty great. And i guess they agree since they put that on all the posters.

Also thought this got the massive heft and weight of giant monster fighting better than Pacific Rim; kaiju in the latter were a bit too fast and agile, which kind of subtly undermined the sense of scale, that these are like skyscrapers come to life

I already forget, why did that one monster fly from Japan to San Fran? To get to the other monster? Wasn't it near Vegas? You'd think Los Angeles would have been a more centrally located destruction zone.

Lol no bldgs to destroy in LA. What are they gonna do, take a schvitz in the port?

Godzilla 2: Schvitz in the Port

They could have at least had a mutant monster emerge from the tar pits.

There are a few bldgs to destroy in LA, but yeah, it wouldn't take long. Not that San Fran is some huge towering metropolis.

Well, we have bridges

They should have had them fight in the redwoods, which surely would have illustrated the shock of mass destruction in a more personal way than all that empty steel and glass. People would be wincing at them destroying trees as old as they are.

i thought this was pretty good.

too bad about the main bro being such a nothing.

The airdrop scene is so amazing, wanted the entire film to be like that. When the monster is supposed to be some sort of primordial God, then the pictures has better be sublime, and they just weren't. The scene going into the quarantined zone especially needed to be much more striking, this is nature winning over civilization, this is the thematic point of the film, SHOW IT. But nah, some bugs, and then father and son arguing.

Still, liked it for what it was. Just not as much as I'd hoped I would.

^^ OTM

saw the original gojira at a local theater last night. kind of a revelation. certainly the darkest and most genuinely affecting monster movie i've ever seen.

right?!

loved the scene on the subway where someone says something like 'i survived nagasaki just to go through this?'

kind of expected it to be a fun curio but it's a legitimately great film, crazy to think it was eclipsed here by the raymond burr-ized version for so many years.

gojira/godzilla's death is also really really sad, which is all the more effective somehow because they didn't do what every other monster movie does and try to make him the 'hero.' the whole underwater sequence is gorgeous and devastating.

the love triangle seems kinda rmde early on but it totally pays off at the end

KING of the MONSTERS...

...SAVIOR of the CITY?!?!?!?!?!

(saw this tonight with GB and dug it quite a bit. There may have been fist-pumping at the "We call him..." line.)

i kinda wished the movie was entirely about godzilla and his friends and no human characters

― socki (s1ocki), Thursday, May 22, 2014 2:57 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This was also how I felt about the new Apes movie. Maybe the solution is to have a Godzilla vs Planet of the Apes, with no people at all.

(Took the kids to see this at the discount theater today, is why the thread revive. We were all bored by the people-talking parts, but enjoyed the battles. Totally agree that it's more a natural disaster movie than a monster movie.)

Saw this a month ago with my son and he's been obsessed with all things Godzilla since then. He's watched every bit of Godzilla video he could find on Netflix and YouTube and has lectured me at length about what a travesty the 1998 film was despite never having seen it so far.

your son otm

your son ILX

really really hate this trend of b-movie seriousification. especially when it's visually so bland and grey.

The Bryan Cranston half of this is a tremendous boat anchor to the anonymously good monster fighting to come. I suppose I liked it but I'm not in any hurry to see a follow-up - unlike Pacific Rim and those wacky early 2000 movies like Godzilla Final Wars, Tokyo SOS, etc.

Oh man, just the other day I was like "hey, I just remembered there's going to be a new Godzilla reboot, when's it coming out?" and it seems the answer is "Five months ago."

Godzilla/Kaiju Halloween party happening at my house this weekend. My son is going to be Ultraman, I'll be Dr. Serizawa, and my wife and her sister will be Mothra fairies.

wow!

This... was pretty good! Surprised they actually put this much effort into it, especially in terms of world building and backstory. Great twists to make Mothra (erm M.U.T.O.) the villain and make Godzilla the hero. Thought the movie looked and sounded amazing overall.
Cranston casting did lift the movie way higher than it would've been otherwise.
Watanabe was hilariously one note, cast only to deliver one great line - "LET THEM FIGHT."

This... was not pretty good! Loads of unnecessary characters to not care about, scenery chewing acting, generally dumb plot. Well filmed tho'.

really really hate this trend of b-movie seriousification. especially when it's visually so bland and grey.
― nauru, Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Watched this last night. Think I would have enjoyed it a lot but holy shit it was too dark. Like, all I'm looking at is a black screen with occasional splotches of light and shadow flashing across it. A good percentage of the movie I just couldn't tell what was going on at all. Could have been so much more.

thought this was really fuckin good tbh

good score

Just officially named citizen of Japan!

http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--fr26ltYI--/c_fit,fl_progressive,q_80,w_636/1280221843361659750.jpg

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/interest/2015-04-09/godzilla-gets-a-new-job-as-tokyo-tourism-ambassador/.86949

Still: tourism ambassador? Don't know about that.

Liked the first, this new one is boring and drab af

Vera Farigma deserves a purple heart for having to say her lines w a straight face.

sally hawkins looked like she was half doing a pisstake of blockbuster acting/half acting in a mike leigh film, juliette binoche was fine but pointless, brian cranston was meant to be a crank but didnt really get enough time to make me care. which basically left the son, who was just typically bland and someone i didnt give a shit about. the film was trying to be a bit of a spielberg-ish blockbuster, with the whole family theme and attempt at sentimentality, but it couldnt even do that right, as it never made you care about the family to begin with, before they got broken apart. all the spielberg touches also made me think that jj abrams might have done a better job, but that its a shame that for anyone trying to do a good blockbuster with a narrative and characters, they have to try and imitate 2nd hand spielberg - do modern directors have nothing of their own to add? basically, this was just a tragic waste - godzilla deserves better.

i just saw the new one!! my first godzilla ever, too, very auspicious beginning

i had no problems at all with the human story, maybe because i am in love with vera farmiga from way back, but it seemed very economical and functional. reading the above i wonder if maybe they decided to give this one a scientist father with a dead son betrayed by his scientist wife who is betrayed by her daughter in order to try and land squarely on the associations of dangerous-mother mythography, not just for its own sake but to make a clear break with the story of the last one. so if there is family stuff here it is muted because the family is itself all invested in the kinds of weird naturalist preoccupations that are more mythopoetically potent than i-must-save-my-childson junk.

there was very little talking at length here, mainly just quick jabs and lots of good face-emoting. probably no less of a natural disaster style movie than the first, going by what i've read, but it seems pretty sweet that by the end the humans are revering the apex predator just like the other titans are. cool also to be smacked in the face by the symbolism that godzilla is a replacement ie MORE PRIMAL jesus christ figure

stoked to see supercharged godzilla fucking blasting the shit out of gidorah, i think i actually wanna go back right away and see this thing again

ZZZZZZZZZZZTTTT

watched the previous one too. the new one is waay more fun, and the natural disaster framing is dialied back a lot more than i guessed above. apparently they decided to be self-conscious about the difference because the direction is not as naturalistic as the previous one. there are several quick camera zooms, mainly associated with the monsters, that i recognize from somewhere in pop culture as being a thing from the old films.

Very little talking at length? All the talking at length is why I eventually peaced out on the movie.

After enjoying a few drably hewed monster battles, we had to be subjected to yet another iteration of League of Shadows "we must destroy this world and rebuild it to save it" M.O.

The film is glum and always shots in greys in the rain. There's no fun to be had. I tuned out the bad writing and looked forward to the monster fights and the first few were awesome but then back to 20 minutes of military chatter.

I'm really surprised no movies have taken the lead of Deep Blue Sea and killed major characters mid rousing speech.

saw it again!

i do think the first one is a lot talkier, not that it is all that verbose.

the main speeches in the new one are vera farmiga's to the monarch team, and serizawa's briefer 'long fortune cookie' speech to kyle chandler.

i think it makes sense to view the dialogue and plot in light of the way the direction relates the humans to the monsters. in the first movie it seems like there was quite a bit of viewing through glass, behind windows, through frames, etc., in keeping with the way the monsters were kept pretty far off. (obviously that's one of many technical tactics for getting verisimilitude at the same time that costs can be managed. i'd really like to see some numbers on how minimizing the amount of front-and-center monster screentime in such an expensive production helps them maximize various budget areas against the box office sales!) and with the engineer-scientist cranston dead early on and serizawa and colleague in more of dispassionate-observer scientist roles, the human agency in the first one is centered on soldiers and emergency relief types (one of the more striking acts in the latter half is the school bus driver fuckin going for it when he sees fit), where the all-too-vulnerable human space is within a world human beings have constructed for themselves and their purposes.

this one starts right off with a lot of stuff that basically amounts to passing through those panes of visibility / protectiveness, if not their being broken (DO NOT TAP ON GLASS etc), which serves the definition of the roles of the scientists (the main centers of agency now). vera farmiga (who starts out living amid the rainforest in a house with a giant picture window onto the mothra site) starts out quite resolutely dashing thru the airlock thingy for what seems like reasons of confidence in her theory for her gadget, although given her cooperation with the ecoterrorists you can see that retrospectively as part of her general agenda of releasing the monsters (for what the family backstory depicts as murky un-worked-thru reasons). kyle chandler, who starts out 'in the safest place he could be' (implication: vera farmiga realizes she is endangering people but thinks he is out of harm's way), is practically among the wolves in the field, but watching and photographing through a telephoto lens, i.e. he is someone who is pragmatic (more than once later he is the person who 'can't just sit here' and do nothing; consider his trick solution, the just-in-time use of the hatch door to expel and engulf/embrace what's outside the protective hull of human agency, to the pickup of the helicopter or whatever later on) but recognizes the sense or prudence or wisdom in staying behind the glass. their daughter starts out between them, unsure about how to balance her relationship: her dad's ashamed of having become a drunk before her, and he's doing self-penance among the wolves, but his daughter is having doubts about whether or not to sell out her mom for what she knows she has been planning. when mothra is first released and later when they go to release gidorah, the daughter reaches out to touch them. her dad would never do that but her mom's work on the echolocation gizmo connects her with the monsters via the sense of sound that gets used throughout the movie to underscore spatial relations between things (all those radar/sonar/etc. circles on the screens) and to put a point on the audio half of the 'spectacle' by making as many of the sounds as possible manifest in the form of visible waves of contact between bodes, and the daughter seems to share in that association throughout (when she's holed up in the second half before taking off with the gizmo, it's in the radio room, for example).

an interesting thing about the family is that their bit of backstory shown at the beginning ties them in different ways to the experience of godzilla and other titans, specifically to seeing them. i think the mom has that tinge of reverential awe at godzilla early on that you see from the daughter near the end (played with kind of a that-big-galoot grin that reflects the audience awareness of the fictive goofiness of the 'character', but also i think a kind of relish in destructiveness that also reflects an audience pleasure), and from the others once godzilla has reclaimed the apex predator spot. this would help explain her motivation, the open embrace of nature's inhumanity that is on display in her big speech (not without exposure of the denial underlying it, her not having accepted the way her son was lost). the father is shown differently, in a kind of abject frozen resignation that he repeats later with gidorah, and that the mother repeats later once she thinks she has chosen to sacrifice herself to him (for the sake of her daughter and the others, she probably thinks, but it seems pretty evident that she's trying to punish herself for her earlier actions).

the visual domain is the one we associate with the director so if i were developing a comprehensive read on this i would try to use that to understand a weirdness of vera farmiga's big speech. as with most modern action-adventure type pictures this thing is absolutely inundated with screens on the screen, windows for the characters onto the action and down-to-the-second plot info available whenever it needs to be extracted from the whole contraption. the design on it all is really, really complex, in a way that makes me hope, at least, that the director's visual sense would contain an important part of his larger intent. farmiga's speech comes mainly via a video communication that's thrown up on a multi-screen monitor for the monarch folx, with the result that it has big ol vertical and horizontal scores thru the image that i would say emphasize its visual character and discourage the audience from automatically cancelling it out and just seeing the monarch folx and her 'talking to' each other, as so much would make them do. so they're set to notice one of the weirder things in the direction, which is that vera farmiga's little speech is inter-cut with like newsreel footage, as if she has prepared a visual aid or a communique produced for broadcast or something. in context that does NOT seem supported by the plot or character or whatever, so i think it makes more sense to take it as a directorial intervention, 'breaking through the glass' of the film with the use of an incongruous visual technique.

to what end?? uh

i'm not sure but the danger in 'breaking through the glass' is that you are no longer protected by distance, by mere observation. in the story-world, on the other side of the camera glass, this is depicted with the camera in terms of godzilla's privilege of gazing directly into the camera, not in a point-of-view type shot (though he gets those too) but so as to break through the fourth wall and look upon the audience, and for them to look upon him and feel whatever feelings of awe and terror and admiration he can stir up in them (that's the meaning of his sneering grin, that he knows he has this power over us too, even though we cannot be stomped by him). so what the audience is in danger of is a kind of terrified, fixed gaze at the biggest possible dangers that imperil them. near the end of the film there is a bit of jubilation at having helped 'the big guy', at having been helped by him, but i think zhang ziyi's bit on it gets at the film's true position, which is not just according to what she says—'for now'—but her saying so out of that same attitude of awestruck reverence at the apex predator. which is to say, its purposes are not ours, our belief that we are 'cooperating' is prone to delusion, we will let our terror be explained by any nominally self-empowering story about our situation and what we've done that helps us downplay our powerlessness. (presumably it is her ecstatic reaction to mothra that enables her to recognize this.)

the characters the movie selects out as wisest are dr serizawa and (in the pragmatic man-of-action mode i guess) kyle chandler (only AFTER he confronts godzilla face-to-face and realizes that his son's being killed or not killed by godzilla was beyond a matter of discretion, just like his not being killed by godzilla seems to have nothing to do with a kind of humane gratitude or respect at having been helped by the non-alpha humans), who is taught about acceptance and faith by serizawa. who also reaches out to touch godzilla, but only in a context where he fully accepts that this coincides with his death. and who is shown to become momentarily godzilla-like—foot stomping up the stairs—as he is about to do so, let's say, accepting his role in the natural order of things. serizawa also gets to have one of the legit BIG FEEL moments of the movie, a weird one though for conventional storylines—passing on his personal notes to another scientist. one true observer recognizing another.

the server literally told me my post was too long

I only saw the trailer and haven't read the thread but America will never be able to make a good Godzilla movie

not while they remain un-nuked anyway

watching this now - some incredibly boring moments of people talking with awkward voiceovers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godzilla_vs._King_Ghidorah

lmao

Gerald Glaubitz of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association appeared alongside director Kazuki Ōmori on Entertainment Tonight and condemned the film as being in "very poor taste" and detrimental to American-Japanese relations, allegations that Ōmori denied, stating that the American extras in the film had been "happy about being crushed and squished by Godzilla."

god this was fucking dire

too many people blathering terrible exposition-heavy dialogue & too much goddamn rain & not enough tension/cool monster stuff

it played like a way shittier version of Armageddon but with monsters

also they talked about Mothra for the entire movie & you only get to see 10 minutes ~maybe~

seriously fuck this movie even more than the last one

there should be an international law barring Americans from being involved in the production of Godzilla movies, the results always suck shit

VG otm. My daughter loved it and I went based on her recommendation, came out thinking "ugh, such shiiiiiiiit." Kaiju is just not for me, Japanese or American.

i love Japanese kaiju but these iterations have been moronic & even worse, hella boring

shakey otm

supercharged godzilla fucking blasting the shit out of gidorah

ZZZZZZZZZZZTTTT

THere's more to follow judging by the after credits scene.
BuT yeah did seem a little cliched to say the least.

i’m ok with cliches in this genre

i’m not ok with filmmakers thinking that i give two craps about badly written characters who feel ~things~ and do things for ~reasons~ but who serve no story function except to bridge monster scenes
if that’s what they are just make them even broader and even dumber, don’t act like we are ever going to care about them.

i saw something like oh dark phoenix and godzilla tanked is this the end of the summer blockbuster?
Yeah, it is, if you show complete disdain for your audience by just dumping a bucket of boring shit in their laps when they’re paying $$ to come see yr fkn movie. ugh.

ZZZZZZZZZTTTTT

i keep meaning go back to read j.s superlong posts

vg what did you think of skull island

Im not vg but Skull Island was way better than this ish imho

I saw this a second time to see if my opinion changed. Sadly it didn't and the friend of mine who begged me to see it with him got bored and fell asleep :/

Skull Island was pure stupidity but def on the enjoyable end of the spectrum for me. The vietnam-war-movie parody element went a long way with me, also John C Reilly.
Tom Hiddleston was not a great choice of leading man though.

Also Kong wrestling the Trogdor Pterodactyl was pretty dope.

hmm ok was hoping youd hated it so i could gleefully disregard yr pan of this but no such luck it appears

yr welcome

might still go tbrrwu

I'd figure you would never run out of movie ideas for someone in a big lizard suit.

I would totally see a movie where everything was state of the art CG *except* Godzilla, who was a man in suit.

xxpost i get it - hell i went today know that there was a good chance it was going to be bad

gotta see to believe

yeah....and despite the criticisms above ringing v true based on trailer....i mean monsters on a big screen with the bass HHHHHOOOOMMMMM noise yknow?

nmmnmnrhrrhrmnrmnr mnmrnrmnrnmnrrrhrrr rrmnmnrrRRRRRRRRHHGHGHRRR WWOWOWOWOWHWHRHRMRMRMRMRMMRMRMRRM

ZZZZZZZZTTZTTTTTTTTT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

basically yes i fuckin love it

ents are kaiju dont @ me

electro monsters are not enough when TWO THIRDS of the movie is Concerned nonsensical humans

ents are totally kaiju

i kaiju knot

the concerned nonsensical humans are like. true to the source material

This is like sub-Friday Night Lights drama

the humans aren't there for you to care about

they are there for the mythopoesis

WOWOWOMROMWOMWOMWOMORWMOMWWWWRWRWRRW

many xpost concerned nonsensical humans take on new layers of nonsense in *this* movie lemme tell ya

plus it’s not the fact of them that bugs me, it’s that we spend way too much time with them & everything about them is eyerollingly dumb/boring/both

sounds more like a documentary amirite hey

The humans were presented as if you were supposed to care deeply about them and their motivations, except they were completely unsympathetic and their motivations made zero sense.

otm

then again tho i mean thank god they all took turns standing around explaining themselves to each other or we would have never known their deeply stupid reasons

I spent a good chunk of the movie trying to connect the family with the first movie only to learn they weren't in it. Yet they were presented as if we'd be totally familiar with them from the beginning.

that's myths for ya

I did like the monsters though. King Ghidorah was cool.

King Ghidorah was pretty neat
I liked how beefy they made Godzilla too

Wait they weren’t in the first movie? Christ, this movie seems even dumber now, was the dead son that they won’t shut up about in it at least?

I don't think so, but that's what I'm saying! The treat the kid as a tragedy we're supposed to be familiar with. False memories, maaan.

Was anyone from this besides Ken Watanabe in the first one?

they were not in it; everything about them is at the beginning of this one, which writes them marginally into the events in san francisco from the last one. doctor serizawa his colleague and the david straithairn admiral are holdovers. plus the big guy obviously.

absolute unit

Man, Shin Godzilla was soooooo weird. Also pretty boring, like watching a filmed radio play at times. But cool destruction, guess.

I described Shin Godzilla as "nonstop panic" so I guess we disagree on that. It's an office drama as much as anything but I was into it.

I thought there was not enough panic! Everyone was really cool and collected and practical and reasonable, almost to comic effect.

"If we were to devise a coagulate, maybe we can hinder Godzilla's cooling abilities."
"Yes, that is a very good idea. What time is it?"
"It's 5:42."
"Hmm, at this hour the traffic could be pretty terrible. Can we get a helicopter?"
"Maybe. Here, fill out these three forms and we'll send it over to accounting to see if we have enough funds left."
"Oh no."
"What is it?"
"The printer is out of ink."
"Damn. Can you check the filing cabinet?"
"Hmm, let me see. No, it's locked. Do you have the key?"
"I think there's a copy of the key with the secretary."
"Great. In the meantime, are you staying hydrated?"
"Yes, but the water bubbler will need to be replaced soon."
"Hmm, good point. Perhaps we can have someone make a run to Costco for a case of bottled water?"
"That's a very good idea, but Godzilla has destroyed the main road."
"Damn again. How about the Americans? Can they deliver some water?"
"We can ask, but the treaty does not outline water distribution, only recycling protocol that addresses the empty bottles."
"This is a terrible development."

And every line of that exchange would be delivered by a different character in a suit and take place in a different anonymous bunker or board room. And then Godzilla would do something cool.

Shin Godzilla is great but it is fundamentally about meetings iirc

Kinda funny, considering these films as reflections of the anxieties of the societies that produce them, how detonating nuclear warheads is like super cazh in these latest American ones

xp yes exactly, it’s a satire

I guess as a satire it's pretty amusing? Except googly-eyed Godzilla is pretty menacing in this one, which undercuts the satire.

Wait why?

It’s satirising the Japanese bureaucratic response to natural disasters, how is that undercut by the disaster being scary

did he mean papercut

I suppose I just found the satire kind of dumb, because like I said, everything they wanted to do made perfect practical sense. If they are already worrying about floods and nuclear reactors and things of that nature in the movie, what difference does it make to throw in a giant supernatural monster? I mean, it works just as well as a satire of Godzilla films!

Maybe we just live in a post satire world.

I saw it less as a satire and more as a compelling office drama. You can only get away with going that deep on the minutea of office decision-making when the fate of Tokyo is on the line. Probably a big part of the appeal of (certain) war movies as well.

> how detonating nuclear warheads is like super cazh in these latest American ones

If you are stupid enough to watch the straight to TV films on the horror channel you'll see they fix everything with nuclear weapons. Asteroids, tornados, alien invasions, you name it.

Shin Godzilla was a bit weird, yes, but I'd still take it over the last two Hollywood Godzillas (not seen the new one)

rewatching the recent Hollywood Godzilla venture and, yes, it does a lot less with a huge budget than many low budget Godzilla movies

they really leaned too hard into the family drama aspects and boring white guy gets too much screen time

the plot about humans deciding to revive the "titans" in order to correct a planet out of balance, only to realize they've unleashed something that's not of earth, has some legs

tbh the best -- and maybe only good character -- is Ken Watanabe who gets all the reaction shots telling the real plot. he gets that something much bigger is going on, and his sacrifice in the movie is a good depiction of pure religious devotion to something he fears but respects

otm. couldn't believe all my kaiju friends were going gonzo for this, because the Vera Farmiga storyline was fuckin' terrible.

by the time the big battle happened I was bored af

WOWOWOMROMWOMWOMWOMORWMOMWWWWRWRWRRW

― j., Tuesday, June 18, 2019 7:16 PM (seven months ago)

too much time spent showing us that humans are completely irrelevant and incapable of having any effect at all -- just report that the monsters killed all the people offscreen and give us some monster fights with better lighting

Never commented on this thread I guess, but I did love the 2014 one.

yeah this recent one was bad but there was a moment where someone is watching tv and to scenes of giant monsters going apeshit all over the globe a newscaster says in totally flat-affect newscaster voice "this is the worst disaster in human history!" and I totally lost it.

it does suffer or benefit from the script curse where anything that tries to be funny falls flat but lines like that are hilarious

I mean, I suppose it gets points for the number of ridiculous lines of dialogue they can squeeze into one trailer?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=claci32Zjvc

that preview belongs to some different pre-covid world where we were supposed to take this even vaguely seriously.

"godzilla's out there and he's hurting people and we don't know why!"

so much stuttering NAAAAAAAAAOWWWWWW effect

kong’s constantly shifting size is one of the weirdest things about this “franchise,” from 1933 on. presumably a kong tall enough to battle godzilla would also be too big to stand comfortably on top of the empire state building.

Insurance companies raising rates in NY

also had to rewatch the part where kong somehow stops godzilla’s radioactive breath in midair and pushes it back at him a few times just to make sure i hadn’t imagined it

Doesn't he reflect it with something? But seriously, Godzilla has rage and *range*, how can they even consider this a fair fight? Maybe Godzilla is just really dumb, and Kong has giant ape smarts.

can't wait for all the "this movie is antireptile and kong is canceled" lolz, oh how meme-y it will be

godzilla vs. pong pic.twitter.com/Li9sz8JcBM

— Fred Delicious (@Fred_Delicious) January 24, 2021

The depressing thing about tennis is that no matter how good I get, I'll never be as good as a wall. - Godzilla

kong’s constantly shifting size is one of the weirdest things about this “franchise,” from 1933 on. presumably a kong tall enough to battle godzilla would also be too big to stand comfortably on top of the empire state building.

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.)

He doesn't even appear to have a consistent size in this one trailer. The obvious way to pitch it for me would be to have Kong be much smaller than Godzilla, but also much more cunning.

presumably a kong tall enough to battle godzilla would also be too big to stand comfortably on top of the empire state building.

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Sunday, 24 January 2021 22:02 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Post 9/11 structural standards imo

can't imagine any value from watching this trailer that wouldn't be bettered by watching Shin Godzilla or the '33 Kong again

that preview belongs to some different pre-covid world where we were supposed to take this even vaguely seriously

yeah "THIS YEAR, ONE WILL FALL" maybe not the best tagline for a 2021 trailer idk

I suggest GODZILLA VS KONG: WHO WOULD WIN IN A FIGHT?

I'm not really keen on Kong's neatly trimmed hipster beard.

Will this be the franchise entry that finally tackles the issue of the monsters' respective digestive processes?

Gizzardilla

Would be awesome if the upcoming CGI headache turned out to be another secret reboot of "Blair Witch."

Loved GODZILLA VS. KONG! Great, comprehensible action, a fittingly gonzo story, and they did an incredible job hiding their big twist (for most of the movie, both Godzilla and Kong are very, very small)

— ben mekler (@benmekler) March 21, 2021

The script is rotten, but kid me would have ate this up. Daylight CGI Godzilla! Kong! They fight! More than once! And a third joins in! Kids save the day!

And as someone noted elsewhere, Kong has an axe.

watching tonight

:D

MZS review just batshit enough to get me thinking i might do the same this weekend

i am 2/3 through

this is batshit and dumb and really good
i already think i love it

guys i think

i’m pretty sure

that this rules?

Yeah, solid stuff. These two tweets are complementary and accurate:

Totally appreciated that Godzilla Vs Kong was apparently scripted by a 12-year-old boy after eating all his Halloween candy at once - this is not a diss

— Art Of Coop (@ARTofCOOP) April 1, 2021

So #GodzillavsKong was great but once again too much humans talking about some bullshit

— Kiki La Double Mask will be at the hospital bar (@kdc) April 1, 2021

In case anyone is wondering, #GodzillaVsKong's Jia is played by a Deaf actress, Kaylee Hottle and I hope this debut role leads to so many more. I loved her! pic.twitter.com/zDVKGSuMtS

— Kate Sánchez⁷ (@OhMyMithrandir) March 31, 2021

Junkie XL did an awesome job w the score too

Wingard references a lot of things in my wheelhouse in this interview & I think it explains why the movie worked so well. Dude just GETS it

https://filmschoolrejects.com/godzilla-vs-kong-adam-wingard-interview/

can’t wait to watch this ! Loved “ Skull Island”.

this is MUCH better than Skull Island, and crazier

Isn’t “too much humans talking about some bullshit” a major part of the Godzilla experience

Like the effects are expensive and you gotta hit the runtime so put some people you don’t care about in there talking about stuff that doesn’t make sense and doesn’t matter

Talking scenes in kaiju films should be funny or camp, that's what the '60s/'70s Godzilla films understood

Kong: Skull Island was that

the previous two Godzilla films have been deathly boring though

Godzilla vs Kong was kind of flat compared to Skull Island. I thought that one, even when the human characters were goofy, had decent characterization and you could point to each character and explain their motivation. GvsK just... has motivations that make no sense whatsoever

It did deliver everything promised by the title, though.

Shin Godzilla, which I will never shut up about, had a lot of human time which was.awesome

The exception that proves the rule -- the whole point of Shin Godzilla isn't the monster so much as the fuck-ups.

still waiting for the gonzo Fury Road/Raid version of one of these thats just all the good stuff and none of the boring stuff

Shin Godzilla is amazing.

I'm realizing that the only Godzilla I have seen is 1998...

okay this is unexpectedly great

MZS review pretty OTM

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/godzilla-vs-kong-movie-review-2021

so many fave moments but i looooled at how Kong slams his shoulder into a skyscraper to pop it back into place like Riggs in Lethal Weapon

somehow never saw the 2014 one, any good?

you guys have me sold on shin godzilla

Shin Godzilla rules, great pandemic movie

idk maybe i dont have the patience to enjoy these movies the way they are meant to be enjoyed but i got very frustrated with how complicated the plot was and how many characters there were in order to create situations where king kong and godzilla fight each other. idgaf about the backstory of the guy who does the podcast about the monster technology company or the handsome guy piloting the hollow earth shuttlecraft or w/e, monster smash stuff plz.

the fights btw godzilla and king kong were very fun especially the underwater stuff but in the big city i kept wishing the camera would step back and stay still more so i could see them better, i was losing patience for the 'you are there' swooping videogame camera moves and closeups, but i guess thats how modern CGI action is presented now. this was still fun but i also wish i'd just fast forwarded through everything except the parts where kong and/or godzilla smash stuff.

This was cool. Still prefer the pulpy and trim(mer) “Skull Island”, though.

just watched godzilla 2014....a few amazing moments of godzilla ownage but a bit of a slog to get there. going from cranston to tylor-johnson as focus character is a huge downgrade. the dusty grey was irritating but it made the halo jumping sequence look incredible, that almost has the feeling of what a good live-action Eva should feel like. but only for about.....2 minutes.

watanabe, olsen, hawkins all woefully overqualified

meanwhile Skull Island is even better than I remembered. considering the sheer density of MCU actors in this it's a miracle vogt-roberts didn't get sucked into that orbit (or hasn't yet, anyway). it looks so good!

man, this was absolute dogshit trash. you don't need to have the tightest script or the most memorable performances in a monster movie, but you should probably at least try

it had some OK moments but it was no Skull Island.

pity poor Brian Tyree Henry who was stuck with maybe the worst-timed "hero" imaginable

he tried to bring the right amount of conspiracy-crazy but the script didn’t quite cut it imo

This was like a cross between one of the bad '70s Godzilla movies and a bad '80s movie but with state of the art special effects that ... wasn't totally bad? But was totally stupid. I suppose in the end I'd much rather something like this be almost totally incoherent but come in under two hours than try to be incoherent, hit 2 1/2 hours and still be incoherent. And boring. Which this was at times, too, but again, at under 2 hours, it could have been worse. But not much stupider.

In 2021 “under two hours” is like an automatic 7/10 minimum.

the effects were...fine? kong haymakering godzilla on the aircraft carrier was p sick, otherwise this would have just been better as a video game

Def. felt 90+% CG, that's for sure. Would play a game that looked like this. Certainly the games I've been playing lately have been better written.

I only noticed the liquid/green blood effects being extremely janky, almost Xavier Renegade Angel-esque at times

I assumed they did that partly so that the grisly stuff (monsters beheaded, brains sucked out, creatures getting ripped in half, etc.) wouldn't get the movie an R.

I really think brody nailed what was missing with this flick

I gotta respect Brody panning #GodzillaVsKong despite all the "how do you do fellow kids" types on here who decided it's so dumb you get to love it. There's little worse than the professional culture drudge who decides to let us know, "I'm fun!" They always pick the wrong movie.

— Pfizer Wilhelm (@benschwartz_) April 3, 2021

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/godzilla-vs-kong-reviewed-a-monster-mush-of-two-venerable-franchises

this was pure trash and i regret sitting through it

- it presumed i knew or cared about the past films (which i'm pretty sure I watched?!?) but i do not
- the design of the monsters and tech and cities and costumes was tasteful and clean and derivative and expensive looking and utterly uninspired
- it has been awhile since i watched a big non-marvel summer blockbuster but i'm stunned at how painfully dumb every single line and action was. relentless inanity.
- the actors, as noted above, might as well have been in entirely different movies; everyone poorly served in every way
- the cynicism of godzilla/kong/mechazilla's respective body count - clearly each in the tens of thousands regardless of what fake news CNN says - juxtaposed with little crying girl clapping so that kong comes back to life was nauseating
- fight sequences fine enough to keep me around but otherwise generally moribund sequences throughout

not a fan

how in the fuck are you gonna put lance reddick in a movie and give him like four seconds of screen time

May I add that Millie Bobby Brownie is dead weight on the screen as well? Absolutely no charisma. The little girl from Kong's island stole the movie and she just blinked a lot and shed a tear.

how in the fuck are you gonna put lance reddick in a movie and give him like four seconds of screen time

I assumed they did that partly so that the grisly stuff (monsters beheaded, brains sucked out, creatures getting ripped in half, etc.) wouldn't get the movie an R.

This gives me another prompt to praise Skull Island again - the violence in that movie pushes the boundaries of PG-13 more than any recent one I can think of.

Millie Bobby Brownie is dead weight

Holy crap is this otm. I didn't see the last Godzilla, but did see the first ("first") nu-Godzilla and "Skull Island," and not only did I not know her character, she and her crew were bad and had nothing to do. Even my daughter, a big Stranger Things fan, kept saying "oh, I forgot these people were in it" every time it cut back to them and their "story." I did appreciate it on a nostalgia level, since a lot of the bad classic Godzilla films are bogged down with boring children of dubious motives scampering around these behemoth battlegrounds like mice, too.

I had literally no idea what Kyle Chandler (let alone Lance Riddick) was doing, where they were or who they were. Also, at one point toward the end I got up to use the bathroom, came back a minute later, and Mechagodzilla was destroying everything. I asked my kid, wait, what did I miss? (This is not a movie worth pausing.) And she just shrugged and said "oh, Mechagodzilla went rogue." At times it felt like Wingard had found a whole bunch of unused footage from other movies of actors delivering ridiculous lines ("if we reverse the polarity of the gravitational field then maybe we can create a nuclear-genesis event that will fuel the primal flex line! Otherwise, we will be stranded in hollow Earth until evolution concedes its wrestling match with these mortal enemy titans!"), had his team create 90 minutes of Godzilla and Kong doing their respective thing, then just inserted the people and their scenes in seemingly random spots.

godzilla/kong/mechazilla's respective body count

Seriously, in fact I thought at first they were going to lean into it even harder (no pun intended). That is, when Godzilla first appears in Hong Kong (iirc?) I could have sworn it was just going to level every skyscraper at once with one big sweep of its tail, which would have been pretty audacious and funny. Or when Kong picked up that plane to throw at Godzilla, at first I figured it was empty, then I realized Kong did not gaf that there was still a pilot in there, but then they wimped out and had the pilot eject.

I've definitely seen worse than this movie, but that did not make it good. In fact, I kept expecting kind of a reverse of "The Guest," which started out serious and then shifted into totally garish ott neon goofiness by the end. I figured Wingard was starting this one all slick and silly and neon and then was going to do something with the last third, too, but no, it stayed slick and silly and neon, only Kong also had a magic rechargeable axe.

call me square but I'm sort of uncomfortable with the "hollow earth" aspect of these movies because real-world "alternate-shape" earth conspiracy nuts are pretty much all anti-semites and half are pedophiles

All the conspiracy theory stuff, btw, and the hand sanitizer, the bleach, apparently it was baked in years ago (the movie wrapped April 2019), so a total weird coincidence.

Speaking of pedophiles and tunnels, is this the first on-screen depiction of a Musk-y hyperloop?

Anyway, where's Brad to declare "this the best movie I've ever seen!"?

The "hollow earth" aspect has been baked in since at least Skull Island. maybe kong or zilla scholars will tell me it actually goes much further back idk

Tbf, I think contemporary crazies have forgotten all about hollow earth theory, since a lot of them have regressed even further to flat earth theory and as we know, the earth cannot be both flat and hollow because that would be illogical and a total fantasy.

i mostly enjoyed this movie for what it was, if anything i think it could’ve been a bit more brazenly dumb instead of apathetically dumb

there was that part where kong takes that one wing lizard by the tail and uses it like a baseball bat to smack another winged lizard out of the air, then does a little bat flip with the first monster’s tail. more of that, please

I didn't understand why the girl, fluent in sign language, still felt the need to sign to Kong in caveman talk. "Kong go home. Kong find family." Kong probably thought she was a moron.

maybe she saw a youtube documentary about koko the gorilla

That's probably what Kong was thinking. "Wait, does this girl think I'm Koko? Um, OK, I guess I'll play along. "Kong happy." (giggles) "Kong want hug."

I'm honestly surprised they did not make him literally talk, like the Gorilla in "Congo."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxhXJGA32YI

I was really not into how humanlike Kong was in this tbh, I thought Skull Island gave him enough character without going too far in that direction

i'm still reeling from the part in the zoller seitz review where he raves about the "no muss no fuss story"... like did he just watch an effects demo reel or what

gotta admit i'm a little at sea trying to make sense of the "its dumb but GLORIOUSLY dumb, they really lean into the CRAZY" reactions bc idk the monster fighting was good but didnt seem exceptionally nuts to me, like kong isnt firing a tommy gun or breakdancing or anything. some of these raves sell it like its Kaiju Kung Fu Hustle or something, which id love to see but this wasnt that

Anyway, where's Brad to declare "this the best movie I've ever seen!"?

― Josh in Chicago, Tuesday, April 6, 2021 6:06 AM (fifty-seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

little to no interest in the current iteration of the monsterverse, tho i do wanna see kong: skull island

Brad, I think you'd like this! See Skull Island first, though.

I haven't read any reviews but I assumed they meant that the people stuff was gloriously dumb, because giant ape vs Godzilla is innately dumb (and awesome). I could see how the people stuff and plot (as such) could be read as gloriously dumb, because it was definitely more than just merely dumb, imo.

how humanlike Kong was in this

I dunno, maybe it explains why, for all the "Kong bows to no one" nonsense, Kong was constantly getting his ass kicked.

a good 75% of the human interactions (including that line) were just fodder so they’d have something to put in the trailer

*rebecca hall looks directly into the camera*

“kong bows to no one!”

Lol ok wiki:

Skarsgård called Nathan an homage to 1980s films like Indiana Jones, Romancing the Stone, Lethal Weapon, and Die Hard. Skarsgård prepped for the film by researching the Hollow Earth.

little to no interest in the current iteration of the monsterverse, tho i do wanna see kong: skull island

you will not regret watching kong: skull island imo

skarsgard had to teach himself how to play a character that wasn't an enormous creep

The Godzilla one with Cranston has some good moments, Skull Island is probably my favorite of all of these and actually fun in a way the recent Godzilla movies never are, because they’re positioned as being more about loss and human drama.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters has a handful of fun moments, mostly contained in the monster battles, and a very thin selection of interesting human moments. Ken Watanabe and Vera Farmiga get some good bits, and don’t appear in GvK for (no spoilers) plot reasons from that movie. I have no idea why they shoehorned in MBB and Kyle Chandler into this new one, because the former has motivations that could have been any stock character and Chandler’s given absolutely zero to work with and his scenes just exist to suck the air out of the room. Brian Tyree Henry’s character seems like they wanted to cast Craig Robison and have him ad lib half the lines. All the material he has to work with his kind of boilerplate

For some reason, the bit that bugged me the most was the big evil corporation having all this highly advanced technology when this seems to take place in the present or at most the near future. The other ones didn’t really do that, and. now we’ve got these electromagnetic antigravity ships?

What do they have against gravity, anyway?

why do I suddenly feel like I’m drinking coffee in a car

the (hopefully) best thing about watching GZvK is that it has motivated me to have a go at Shin Godzilla now

Shin Godzilla is great, but also a completely different type of movie than this run of new big budget Godzilla films. It's basically a drama about government bureaucracy with incidental Godzilla mayhem.

Where did Tyree, MBB and Julian sneak onto the maglev subway? Florida? I could handle the giant monsters fine, but given that Seattle took 6 years to bore out the two mile Highway 99 tunnel, my brain tangented to "when/how did they build a FL to Hong Kong subway?" If there are secret societies amongst us, they are excellent at construction projects.

one of the constant brain breakers about this film for me was the juxtaposition of an international super-science team that has the wherewithal to figure out how to basically lift the Ever Given with a big net and a fleet of jumbo helicopters in the space of a few hours but can't keep a seven year old from wandering on to the deck of an airplane carrieer
or the amoral capitalist tesla (basically just tesla) company that creates an underground maglev supertrain from Florida to Hong Kong but doesn't take the time to check the cargo in its monster egg transports
etc ad infinitum

basically everyone sees the tech for the first time when they start using it, no one has a user's manual but everyone knows where the seatbelts are

evil capitalist guy and his evil capitalist daughter are incredibly unnecessarily stupid in the approach and execution of their goals and both die for laughs in the same stupid kind of "UH OH" sequences

i dunno, i think i'll remember this film much more than mank (and it's not much worse!) but i wish i hadn't bothered

I literally have no memory of an evil capitalist guy death scene. The daughter (who we kept calling Khloe Kardashian), what a stupid pointless drama free death that was, even for a stupid pointless character.

that guy’s death scene was one of the few times I laughed, not because of the highly choreographed death, but because of another character saying “I really wanted to hear the rest of his speech!”

the role of The Other Kid played by Julian Dennison was really the most memorable character outside of the monsters

the cute deaf girl might lead him a little in plot relevance and screen time, though

biggest wtf plot thing for me was the business with ghidorah's skull having psychic powers? why not have it be his brain? was very confused by all that until i realized they were just positing that the skull also works like a brain (i guess?)

by far the best "i wanted to hear the rest of his speech" death scene in movie history is this one, everything else is just copying the master
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BS8I9H07wKw

Elon Musk dude must have died when I was in the bathroom during that same minute that Mechagodzilla went rogue.

Question: if Musk could have made a giant robot, why did he decide on the form of a robot Godzilla? Lack of creativity, imo.

Meanwhile, how are they going to fill and plug the giant Kong-sized (plot) hole that runs from the center of the earth to Hong Kong?

thoughts thoughts thoughts
• forks otm, no question that is the GOAT of unfinished speeches
• much like recent star wars, the first thing I thought on seeing the cybernetics office park with its own nuclear reactor was "okay where are they getting the money? let's talk cash flows..."
• this had the unexpected effect of inoculating me from disbelief by the time we got to the Florida to HK tunnel bc sure lol why not nothing matters
• feel like no one here is giving sufficient weight to the sheer edgar rice burroughs-ass majesty of the GODDAMN THRONE

the throne (and the throneroom) in particular is one of the places where i felt like the design was tastefully lazy. they basically went for brown fortress of solitude.

Who built those stairs?

serf kong

watching this at the request of kids, I have no interest at all in action movies / sequences, but have do say that the dialogue is fucking appalling here. maybe all of these films are like this though, idk

Man, tough crowd. What did you even expect a giant monkey or fire-breathing lizard to say, anyway?

something about supply-side economics

someone was spouting stuff about mind control via fluoride in the water, don't think it was one of the monsters

GODZILLA IS HURTING PEOPLE AND WE DON'T KNOW WHY

Monkeys have tails, apes don't. Kong is an ape fwiw.

Okay, I'll shut up now.

If Kong can be a one-off ape the size of a skyscraper then he can also be a one-off giant monkey without a tail. That's just science.

king of the monsters is genuinely one of the most stupidly plotted efforts I've ever seen

Hold up, in addition to that incredible looking Japanese "Godzilla Minus One" movie, there is an Apple TV Godzilla mini-series *also* coming out in November?

Seeing "Minus One" today, psyched.

Pretty much ruled. Basically a post war melodrama with a particularly angry Godzilla. Yes, you hear the original theme. Yes, Godzilla stills hates trains. But there's something particularly tragic about the beaten down population of Japan still reeling from WWII and forced to contend with a giant lizard on top of it all. As soon as a character mentions how quickly Ginza is rebuilding, you want to tell the poor person: don't bother.

Loved this

caught this going in totally cold and found it to be a pretty mixed bag. found the dramatic parts to be pretty corny and time-consuming, esp anything that had to do with the empty lead character and his “war.” sakura ando was _way_ underused! and the actor playing the lead really wasn’t up to the task of finding something interesting in there either. and went back to the well of updating beats from the OG film a few too many times too.

i did enjoy the smashin and bashin and how godzilla was actually scary again. but i dunno, shin godzilla is a masterpiece imo and this was pretty safe and dour in comparison. a little surprised by the hype.

I thought the corniness was part of its charm, though I agree, there's a little too much boring drama, balanced out by some of the best Godzilla destruction in recent memory.

yea i can see that. i think if we had a director with more of a sense of humor and some more fun performances, i could have gotten more on board in a campy way. i haven't actually watched any of yamazaki’s live action and cg cartoon anime adaptations but he seems like a pretty bland director judging by this and a back catalog bursting with junk.

Saw this last night, thought it was great.

I assume I'm not the only one that thought of "Jaws" throughout the movie, right?

Oh yeah, I spotted that bit immediately

yeah, def. thought it captured the same kinda claustrophobia at sea as jaws pretty well.

Call me a sucker but any action film with an anti-war message usually wins me over

All I can say is, keep this movie in mind while you watch this pile of poo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lV1OOlGwExM

G-1 was def anti-war but… maybe with a little bit of that old rambo 2 “can we win this time?” nationalism seasoning? (I’m honestly not so sure about this myself but I _did_ get scared that the movie was gonna lean into that more at some point, at least)

I worried about that too but the line from Doc about "not going to war is something to be proud of" kind of assuaged those worries

saw a trailer for Godzilla x Kong - The New Empire, and it looks terrible artistically, I assume almost all of the effects have to be extremely unfinished. it looked like a Playstation One game on my buddy's 80 inch TV.

The plane reveal had me excited because I recognized the type. I knew that plane, I’d built a model of the German version of it.

yeah that was a mega cool moment.

also though I saw it in 4DX which meant I was like riding an amusement park ride while watching the movie which helps

On board with _Godzilla Minus One_ completely, hell of a watch. (I don’t know whether having seen _The Human Condition_ a few months back helped but it sure as hell didn’t hurt.)

Good interview, this

https://www.theverge.com/23984534/godzilla-minus-one-interview-takashi-yamazaki

"Godzilla, was it hard to film in that cold water?"

They had a giant basking lamp set up for him between takes.

I saw this last night and it's the most rewarded I've felt for watching a movie in theaters since Titanic. Yes, it was incredibly cheesy and nonsensical at times, but that didn't take away from all that was good about it. The giant lizard and the destruction that he wreaks are obviously all you need to sell a ticket here - so impressive! The human drama was appropriately intense at some times (particularly when Shikishima returns home after the war and finds Sumiko moping about the rubble) and cheesy at others, but I admit that my tears rose out of their ducts at more than one point. Other things that I was impressed with include:

The costumes were absolutely on point. Everyone looked so good in this movie.
Machine-gunning mines out at sea.
Reporters on the rooftop steadfastly reporting on the destruction.
Trio of scientists in white coats monitoring things from their little bunker on the deck of the destroyer.

I've only seen a handful of the original 1950s/60s Godzilla movies, Godzilla 1985 (when I was a kid), the Gareth Edwards one, and the first of the animated movies that came out on Netflix. Godzilla Minus One definitely whomps most of those. It's definitely inspired me to go back and check out some of the classics and the newer Japanese ones that I've missed.

if you go to archive.org and search for godzilla there are a bunch of rips there of the showa and heisei films.

HBO MAX has a bunch of Showa era but missing a ton of them. I've used that to start getting into the series.

think Ghidorah and Destroy All Monsters are two of my favs besides the original from 1954

I saw it last night too, with my 13yo son who is a massive Godzilla/Kaiju fan, and we both were knocked out.

I recently subscribed to the Criterion Channel, and there are a number on there as well.

As mentioned on another thread I'd heard some less than enthusiastic stuff from Japanese and Japan-based sources on this film and yeah, it's "anti war" in the same way the boomer Vietnam movies are anti war - WWII was terrible for what it did to the Japanese people. How did things get there, were perhaps some other peoples also negatively affected? It is a mystery. The big stirring speech about how Japan has not respected human life enough still focusing exclusively on Japanese soldiers - lol imagine if a German film did that. And of course all that stuff's valid, but it's pretty telling what goes unsaid. Nary a US soldier to be seen either, might mess with the ethno-nationalist redemption arc if it's acknowledged the country was under occupation.

That being said, obv I don't go to Godzilla for the politics, and even with those taking up a p large space in the film, the actual monster action is great. The Akira Ifukube theme will never not get me hyped. The method of dispatching big G was wonderfully silly. Minami Hamabe a much more magnetic presence than Kamiki though, could've stood to get more screentime.

One of the film's big reveals is spoiled early on if you read German. I swear they lingered on that text too!

I thought one of the themes of the film was whether you are anti-war or pro-war, we can all get together to be anti-Godzilla.

Though not unrelated, I found the hand-waving dismissal of international intervention/interference/cooperation pretty hilarious. Yes, there is a 300-foot tall radiation-breathing dinosaur laying waste to Japan, but tensions between the US and Russia are pretty high, so America's gotta stay out of this fight. You're on your own. But good luck, Japan, we're rooting for you! Let us know how it turns out.

A good time. Could've used Godzilla's heat ray to vaporize about 20 minutes.

Final Wars from 2004 absolutely ruled

well shit i just thought godzilla symbolized ptsd

Yes, Final Wars is the fucking best.

Short overview of Godzilla movies.

https://www.bfi.org.uk/features/where-begin-japan-kaiju-monster-movies

Started watching Neon Genesis Evangelion laat night after I read it

FYI, Criterion's release of all the Showa-Era films are on sale in the Apple TV store for $9.99 each.

!!!!!!!!!!!

um this ruled and is a pretty great spiritual pairing w godzilla 56

no notes

a+

*godzilla minus one, I mean

a pedant writes: '54

same year as Seven Samurai, and both feature Takeshi Shimura who did 11 films that year

ugh i’m dumb

I did like what they did with the atomic breath and his physical strength in this movie.

in the Heisei era movies (that I've seen so far), he was using his atomic breath for what seemed like 90% of his attacks and his tail for the rest, but here, it being something that takes longer to recharge, but having a much more amplified, almost a-bomb type impact, was badass. used a lot more of his built-in strength, doing things like throwing actual gigantic battleships across the ocean.

also i finally watched Shin Godzilla

while very different from the modern godzilla movies it rules incredibly hard and is also, like Minus One, very spiritually connected to *54* Godzilla (i wont screw that up a second time)

maybe even more so
the fukushima parallels are so well done

when godzilla goes nuclear it is perfectly pantshittingly terrifying, as it should be

and such a great blend of fantasy & reality, excellent no notes

We are meant to understand, right, that Godzilla is just a regular local sea monster who torments some outlying islands until Bikini makes him much bigger and gives him atom breath?

Is the regeneration power a consequence of being irradiated too? I.E. are we meant to believe that if Koichi had opened fire from his plane on Odo that would have been the end of Godzilla?

I totally felt the Rambo 2 vibe here btw. I thought there was a healthy ambivalence. Sure ""not going to war is something to be proud of" but the character that's said to eventually shows up at the war and saves the day by doing so! They don't want to be in the war, but they have to be, on some level they want to have to be.

This movie reportedly about to hit $100 mil at the box office. Budget was $15 mil!

I maybe have a false memory of vague spoilers that Kid Godzilla was in this -- was it a blink-and-you-miss it kind of thing?

There's a lil Godzilla we meet first, maybe that's it? Shin Godzilla kind of had a lil Godzilla, too, iirc.

My son and I watched Shin Godzilla last week - not at all what I was expecting, but it was a real joy. I think my son scratched his head a little at this one. He must have checked how much time was left in the move four or five times. I loved it but we both prefer Godzilla Minus One.

my brother and I kept joking that the UN was going to issue sanctions against Godzilla

I'm in the Heisei era now, Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla 2.

kinda loving the more bonkers each one gets.

how in the hell can they afford to rebuild so many power plants so frequently though

This movie reportedly about to hit $100 mil at the box office. Budget was $15 mil!

The director denies this: says it was closer to ten.

have now finished the Heisei era.

Godzilla v Destoroyah rulllllllllllled.

SpaceGodzilla was a complete cipher of a monster but I actually preferred that one to Godzilla v Mechagodzilla II, which was just completely all over the place nonsense.

taking a break for a bit. I've watched about 15 of these in the last month

xpost Either way, that's astounding. I saw somewhere that labor laws in Japan are pretty loose, and non unionized crews and other people on set are seriously overworked and underpaid, but even then, it's hard to wrap your head around those numbers and what's on screen. The FX in a movie like "The Marvels" look pretty unimpressive, imo, or at least they're not notable, but even at their best they don't look significantly better than this one. I think the same article I saw that mentioned labor laws complained that the "Minus One" FX sometimes looked kind of shoddy, but I never noticed anything particularly bad. In fact, I just saw a review (in Slate, iirc) that went out of its way to complement the tactile realism of Godzilla (the creature), and when I think back to the recent Hollywood Godzillas and Kongs, they sure are hell don't look 10x better/more expensive.

I have to admit, part of the expectation of a "back-to-basics" Godzilla was hoping for a dude in a rubber suit, and being a little disappointed with how generically slick it was, though maybe with such lax labor laws the guy would probably drown a few times while filming. Was the last hurrah for that sort of thing in the 80s?

even the 90s movies largely had rubber suits, and I think several of the ones into the 21st century.

ahh this is helpful!

https://www.inverse.com/entertainment/22234-special-effects-in-godzilla-movies-history

I guess Godzilla 2000 is the first to have a fully CGI Godzilla

I'm with the quote here - I know it was CGI but it didn't look it:

But it's still necessarily CGI, which is what's great about this film's effects: Yamazaki and his team are using the latitude of computer animation to push their Godzilla to do things that no stuntman in a rubber suit could have possibly down, constrained as they all were by physics, but they also very carefully make sure that it always looks like a stuntman in a suit. As Godzilla thrashes its way through the Ginza district, in the film's big landbound setpiece (this Godzilla is primarily an aquatic animal), the flexibility and full-body vitality of its movements are like nothing else in this franchise, but it's never weightless. It's the very best kind of popcorn movie magic.

yeah they did a really good job with it. I'm usually put off by big computer monsters in blockbusters but he was dynamic and terrifying. lots of great open water scenes too which I loved.

ok I lied about the break. taking it after finally finishing Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah - Monsters All Out Attack.

think that puts me at 18....only half or so, but most of them watched in a month's time so give me credit.

My buddy wanted to see this again, so I saw it again. Held up! And while it was a smaller theatre, it was packed.

So I guess they are re-releasing this for a week in black & white for some reason. Has anyone ever preferred the B&W versions of movies, when they do this? "Fury Road," "The Mist," what else? Soderbergh made that B&W silent version of "Raiders of the Lost Ark," I guess that was a cool novelty, but mostly I prefer the original color versions of these gimmicks.

Really want to see this, so does my son, but we've had a hard time lining up a screening that works for us.

They also did a black and white version of Logan.

I massively prefer the b&w mist

That might be one where I slightly prefer the black and white version, but I didn't have a big problem with the color version.

Okay so I've seen the new Monsterverse one and SIIIIIIGH

My happily spoiler filled rant follows!

* First, an immediate breaking point for a lot of you: GODZILLA IS BARELY IN THIS. Maybe 15% of screentime or so? A more accurate title is _KONG (feat Godzilla): SOME BULLSHIT_
* Said ape's personal problems are the core of the movie and the first plot point involves whether his dental insurance plan covers tooth replacements. (I am only slightly kidding.) And indeed, a good chunk of his whole arc can best be called 'divorced/widowed/old dude hangs around with a young punk who he teaches the ways of goodness to as part of setting him straight given the bad crowd he's fallen into.' Imagine _Gran Torino_, but without the Torino, and only in ape noises. You will feel your mind melt into mush.
* The most 'I guess I didn't expect that' moment is when a typical-these-days sloooow motion goodie vs baddie personal clash moment is ridiculously interrupted. But it's still not that great.
* The implied body count in the film if you count all the various buildings smashed to bits across the globe is likely in the hundreds of thousands. To say that none of this has the slightest hint of resonance and overwhelming, shocking loss in comparison to something like, I dunno, let me pick something at random, _Godzilla Minus One_ maybe, is to understate. (I grant this is feature not bug with so many of the movies and this new one is long in the works and etc. etc. but...ya know?)
* KINDA speaking of which, a quick sequence in which three bridges are smashed in succession with people on them, well, they couldn't plan for that being all too resonant this week, but having a famed Muslim-majority city get violently trashed...well...ANYWAY MOVING ON.
* The Golden Earring "Twilight Zone" sync, I did like that, I haven't heard that in a while and I always liked that song, and it probably helped it was during the most visually interesting and weird part of the film. The Kiss, Foreigner and Badfinger drops, eh.
* At one point Kong and Godzilla shout at each other across the entire length of the Mediterranean and then one gets to the other five minutes later. Somehow, it is all very unimpressive and uninteresting!
* Various actors are on screen and they do act. I have nothing to say about any of them. (Except Rachel House, who always rules, but is given little to do except run around a headquarters and say things urgently, but awesome glasses, though.)
* Look, the end fight is okay enough, I guess. But that's faint praise.
* This is such a dumbass, haphazard 'franchise.' Even though it wasn't perfect or anything, I have to give a certain credit to Matt Fraction and crew for using the _Monarch_ series to try and retcon the previous four films into a vaguely consistent story instead of one that stumbles from situation to situation at best. But this new film doesn't help things any and probably just makes it all worse again.
* There is no easter egg or anything after the end credits. Just go home. Better yet, don't go.

Thank you for your service.

The advantage of a monthly Alamo pass that pays for itself pretty quickly is that I don't feel like I've shelled out for this thing.

ugh that sounds like more of the same from the 2014 Evans and 2019 Dougherty movies.

cosigning josh thank you for yr service it sounds dire

how hard is it to make a fucking monster movie ABOUT THE GODDAMN MONSTERS

Especially after Minus One got it done.

I do still hold Gareth Evans personally responsible for this infernal trend

It's never too late to blame Zack Snyder for everything being in slo-mo as well.

I'd put that more down to The Matrix (in terms of popularising it over the brim)

Wonder why del Toro wasted so much time with Pacific Rim, let alone Frankenstein and Pinocchio, when he probably could have made a really awesome (American) Godzilla.

wtf Pacific Rim was great

I thought it was fine and saw it once.

I don't recall it bringing anything to the table that would not have been brought by Godzilla.

i saw it MANY times so i think i am qualified to disagree with “it was fine” :D

Many!!! Hats off.

I recall Charlie from Sunny In Philadelphia getting swallowed by a monster? Also, robots controlled by stair masters, something like that.

Seen Pacific Rim maybe three times it's as fun as Del Toro Giant Mechs vs Kaiju could be. I like the flawed yet effective-above-its-weight Edwards-directed Godzilla also though.

Edwards has a gift for big imagery that often only shows in moments, but they last. Whoever thought up the paratroop drop silhouette moment, whether himself or someone else, had the best brainwave.

Godzilla Minus One still isn't streaming and has left theaters; and no streaming date in the forseeable future. I read somewhere the rumor is that there is some IP contract that is keeping it off because of this new shitshow movie.

Would watch the hell out of a Godzilla vs Big Man Japan franchise flick, otherwise it's a no from me I'm afraid

yeah Mr Veg was telling me it was some weird deal
with Showa & Paramount where if Showa releases the movie theatrically Paramount won’t show it on streaming for x amount of time, like a year?

idk i may have the details all wrong

Showa meaning Toho? (I mean, Toho is happy to take Warner Bros/Legendary money!)

ugh yes toho sry

I watched the new one with my 14yo Godzilla suoerfan son. My expectations were near zero, so to that end it surpassed my expectations and was perfectly entertaining, albeit with a low bar. But all of Ned’s comments above are spot on too.

Even with the threadbare connections from movie to movie, I just don’t think this franchise can sustain multi-film narrative arc. By now the majority of the film takes place in the fictional Hollow Earth realm, and the human characters are on more or less friendly terms with the titular monsters. There’s just no TERROR. And yeah like Ned said, when the action does take place in recognizable cities, the carnage is so cartoonish it’s totally devoid of any sense of what ought to be inconceivable tragedy.

Minus One on Netflix!

https://gizmodo.com/godzilla-minus-one-netflix-streaming-1851513563

And we have fancy release coming in September:

https://godzilla.com/products/godzilla-minus-one-blu-ray-deluxe-japan-collectors-edition

Annnnd here we go

https://gizmodo.com/takashi-yamazaki-godzilla-minus-one-sequel-new-movie-toho-2000519226

weeee

Pretty lame of them to denigrate the legacy of Godzilla with a sequel.

last week was 70 years since the first film

and has been downhill all the way

Minus One is back in US cinemas for anniversary reasons this week

Caught the theatrical rerelease of Minus One they're doing to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Big Guy. (They're also showing it in the Minus Color variation; while I caught both versions in the original runs but won't be able to do Minus Color in theater this time I fear.) While I happily have the fancy-as-hell box that came out which I linked a few posts back, this was the first time I'd rewatched it since the original Minus Color run, and it really does hold up so well. (This time around it struck me how remarkable the music was in the final sequences, that's pure Howard Shore LOTR level stuff.) Also the bonus stuff for this release included the VFX promo reel they submitted for Academy consideration and new interview snippets with Takashi Yamazaki and Kiyoko Shibuya about the whole experience, so catch it if you can.

Bunch of nerds were excited about the Criterion release of "Godzilla Vs Biollante." Don't know what I expected, but with the exception of the maybe 10 minutes of the plant monster Biollante (an OK design) it was pretty much garbage. Made me laugh a couple of times, at least, at the shitty '80s espionage plot and gun fights (between people), which were sub A-Team. Acting was bad, dialogue was bad, requisite girl with ESP was bad, flying saucer military weapon was bad. Godzilla writes itself, so why are so many of these movies so bad!?

Biolante is my second favorite in the series!!!

It's enjoyable when it's not dumb and boring, I guess. Or I should say, it's definitely enjoyable when it is dumb, but like so many Godzilla movies it is shockingly boring. It was almost as if I was watching an alternate cut or something. What do you like so much about it?

Most nerds I know are pissed that Criterion is releasing this, not considered one of the high points of the Heisei era, separately as opposed to doing a box.

hmm nerds i know are psyched for an upgrade but not happy about the dub not being included. and yeah, they want a box!

What do you like so much about it?

the monsters and practical fx, what else??

the shots of Godzilla emerging from the water in POV view effing rule. the scope and drama of the piece too

not one i've seen (in last 4 decades at least), but i'd prefer to be able to buy them one at a time rather than in a (pointlessly large) £150 box, especially when i already have 6 of the 13 showa-era films.

the editions i have have both the original japanese and the american cuts, with full commentary. and they were as cheap as chips at the time, like £3 from amazon

Godzilla Raids Again (ntsc)
Purchase Date 2011
£2.18 + £1.26p+p
Total: £3.44

Hmm, I love me a good man-in-suit Godzilla and models, but I didn't get much in the way of scope or drama. Just a lot of lame commandos running around shooting at each other. Especially this loser:
http://i.imgur.com/Zfuy56u.jpg

koogs, the biollante 4k is like 30 pounds so 150 for a Heisei set would actually be a bargain...

Godzilla v Destoroyah is on for free at my local fleapit the last Sunday this month, celebrating 2 years in business I think (the cinema not Godzilla). Will report back!

The scene that made me laugh is when the soldier in the building shooting the bazooka at Godzilla thinks he's done, but with perfect slow comic timing puppet Godzilla sneaks up on him while he's packing up and then:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9a4GEygDTY

destroyah friggin RULES x-post

i love most all of that era tbh

Biolante is my second favorite in the series!!!

Which is your favorite?

Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack

Meantime, the next Monsterverse film is apparently called Godzilla x Kong: Supernova:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pa3nW0EYYcQ