So Kaiju in this universe are the WEAPONS from Disc 2 of FFVII then? Cool.
1 Like
Just got back from my local drive in to see this. Perfect way to see a Godzilla film, save for how dark the scenes were. Headlights kept coming in to make it hard to see, but I felt like THAT was the atmosphere to see this film.
But FUCK…
I swear to God, cut white man and his horrible family out of this, and you have a fucking BRILLIANT film. I could not give two FUCKS about the Madison family and their plight. Why Mark was the main character in this, I will never know. He is EXHAUSTIVELY boring. Madison is probably the best of the three, because Millie Bobby is a fantastic actress, but she’s just the anchor to these two INCREDIBLY bland characters.
They should have have Dr. Ishiro fill in as the main character as the carry over from the first. He’s WAY more interesting, and I feel like most of Mark’s lines could have easily transitioned to his character. Mark is what… Some fucking nature asshole? Ishiro has WAAAY more experience with the Titans than any of the characters. But NOPE. I guess he has to… Die… Did any of the characters from Skull Island carry over?
In terms of the fights, this felt incredibly Eldritch. So many shots were sooo apocalyptic. I mean, with Godzilla, even in Shin, you could really place the monsters in the spaces they occupied, in this they felt like elements of nature. Godzilla melting buildings, Godira controlling hurricanes, Rodan erupting from a volcano… They were all so GIANT. Which made Mark’s dumb ass line about, “We’re in this fight too!” Really dumb to me. How are people not LOSING THEIR MINDS at the horror of this?
Really loved the film, but GOD I hope Mark is gone for the next one.
2 Likes
Actually yes, Joe Morton, who is present when Mothra hatches, is supposed to be Houston Brooks, Corey Hawkins character, from Kong
I really hope Marlowe comes back and it’s just Reilly in old age makeup. You can’t replace John C Reilly.
2 Likes
Saw this on opening day, because of course I did. Avengers is one thing but a big budget movie starring Godzilla, Ghidorah, Mothra AND Rodan? The only other thing I get this excited for is Jurassic Park movies. I just love big monsters.
Really loved the Gareth Edwards Godzilla but I think what Jordan Vogt-Roberts did with Kong: Skull Island was great too, just the right amount of awe and big monster silliness - lots of human characters with just the right amount of buildup getting killed off so unceremoniously. So I was pumped for this movie. I think in the scenes where it shows the monsters it is great, but I don’t think it has the craft that Gareth Edwards had, but it certainly feels biblical in the revelations sense. The introduction of Ghidorah and Rodan was great in particular.
Where it let itself down was all the human characters - there are so many big names in the movie. I know Godzilla movies do have to burden themselves with plot and human characters. I think you could have lost some of the comedic relief and maybe focused on Ken Watanabe and his relationship with Godzilla. I think I’m fed up of seeing Kyle Chandler as estranged father. The turn from Vera Farmiga was dumb and would have been better if you just had Charles Dance being eco-terrorist Tywin Lannister, as such he was criminally underused. Millie Bobbie Brown says shit like three times in this movie. And of course somebody from the science team has to wonder whether big G and Mothra fuck…
I’m looking forward to Godzilla Vs Kong. I’m not sure where you take this franchise next. Probably space…
1 Like
Dance is such a pro, it really showed how much of a veteran of this kind of material he is. He made a little go a very long way.
I enjoyed the monster fighting on the whole, but there was a strangeness to the movie opening with “this time we’re not gonna make you wait!” before settling back into a similar sort of visual rhythm to 2014. “Unable to see” does feel like an exaggeration given how much is shown by the end, but I can see where it comes from.
Can I say I am enjoying all the cute Godzilla x Mothra art on Twitter right now?
4 Likes
I think a lot of the problem with the Legendary movies is that they don’t have an actor playing Godzilla and the production therefore doesn’t need to treat him like a character. The old Japanese suit movies had a professional actor in that costume who took his job seriously even when he was dancing or whatever, and that leads to the production respecting Godzilla as a star that the audience will care about. Instead these Legendary movies just have the monsters as special effects that some poor overworked CG studio a thousand miles away puts together in post, and of course the movie focuses on boring humans instead.
CG kaiju can be really cool, that Rodan chase was awesome and no man in a suit could have done that. But without a physical connection from director to Godzilla, the movie ends up unfocused and bland and forced to shove a really obnoxious white nerd guy making bad jokes to add cheer to a really stuffy movie.
Anyway, watch Final Wars instead is my point here.
3 Likes
…but this one didn’t.
Like, the one big complaint surrounding this movie is that there isn’t enough human characters or focus. They literally did a reverse of what they tried with the 2014 movie.
Not at all. There’s much more monster in this movie but it they’re still largely charmless and lack personality and the movie needs to constantly link us back to the humans every single time. Godzilla can’t just fight Ghidora, the dad has to be in peril in a plane somewhere. If critics are unhappy with the monster focus it isn’t that the monsters are too frequent, they’re not fun enough, neither are the humans. Not a lot works, sadly.
Like the mom dies in this, and the movie focused on her even though all this was her fault and she sucked and AVALANCHE can do better than her. Yet Mothra gets mostly ignored.
Also I struggling so hard to make this spoilers, I have no idea what the spoiler tag is here on this forum. I’ve been here long enough that I should know it, but it isn’t the HTML tag. Every damn website on the internet makes up their own HTML for it, so I can never remember…
I honestly felt like there was too much story, which was counter to what I had heard about the film.
See my Mark complaints above.
1 Like
I super disagree with this! The amount of personality was one of the things I I was most impressed by, there was so many little touches and details. King Ghidorah was absolutely the star of this movie, with the way the different heads interacted with each other and the way it slithered and crawled and glared with utter disdain for everything around it. Or rodan, who for the first time was actually an awe-inspiring terror, yet still had that “oh its this fucking asshole bird” energy? Theres one part where he bites the head off a plane like an eagle with a fish that was especially great. I wish Mothra had more screen time but the way she was presented as sort of an angelic being was awesome. And Godzilla was sort of this huge lumbering bear who really hams up every atomic breath blast and. Its definitely a different vibe to the Toho movies, they’re more these majestic eldritch animals than the stiffer, goofier, lumbering creatures of those, but they are no less packed with personality. Its just less theatrical and broad than in the Toho films. Both flavors are great!
Also spoiler tags can be applied by clicking on the gear icon at the top of the posting window thing, just select what you want hidden, click that gear, choose blur spoilers, and it auto formats it for ya.
3 Likes
Great Monster Movie test (with apologies to the Bechdel Test)
- It has at least two monster characters.
- They have names.
- They fight over something other than a human.
(This movie is on my review proof list, I’m going to see it as soon as soon as I can manage)
2 Likes
spoiler put your text here /spoiler, but put brackets around [ spoiler ] and [ /spoiler ]
If Rodan continues to be a presence in these movies, I hope they keep him as the Starscream of the MonsterVerse
2 Likes
Good point.
I don’t know whether Godzilla was brought to life by a motion capture actor but I know Toby Kebbell did the motion capture for Kong in Skull Island and I think the difference is there because Kong does come across more as a character. Kebbell worked with Andy Serkis on the Planet of the Ape movies, and I think Serkis is prove that you can anchor CGI characters with realistic nuanced actor performance. I think the studio probably wanted to treat Godzilla more as a force of nature.
1 Like
Andy Serkis is, in fact, listed as the motion capture performer for Godzilla on imdb.
He was more of a consultant than an actual performer though.
I believe I disagree with this. I think the initial appeal of old Kaiju movies to begin with is human insignificance. I think there is a lot of appeal in the idea of these being natural disaster movies as much as monster movies. The heights of the genre, the scenes people recall the most are the parts where everything is sort of laid bare before the monster. It’s that scene in the first Godzilla with the mother holding her children and the radio broadcast going off the air and the utter hopelessness in everything. I think, at the core, that’s what people actually want.
Yeah over time and 50934 movies we’ve enjoyed tiny scale cities being pummeled and monsters fighting each other for no particularly good reason and The Rock communicating with a giant mutated gorilla, because that’s fun. I think that superficially appeals to a larger audience in a Saturday afternoon ‘I’m doing some laundry and vacuuming what’s on TNT now?’ sort of way. But I think (and this is more Godzilla than King Kong) when people go into this monster movie a large part of the appeal is the sadness of it all.
I think the people keep showing up in hopes of another Shin Godzilla. I think it’s not dissimilar for a lot of subgenre movies. There’s a generic broad appeal aspect that gets people to watch one or two scenes and never go back. But I think the people who hold the genres up are often searching for a bit of existentialism.
It might be what you or I want, but I think people got used to the Godzilla of Showa era of films. Godzilla movies became wrestling films essentially. I always liked the return to the style of the original film with the Heisei era that followed because they were a little darker, a little more of a return to what made that first movie so impactful. Shin reminded me of these films as well.
But there was a very very long stretch of time where Godzilla was essentially a Saturday morning cartoon character, a wrestling icon, or a super hero, and I think audiences got too used to that, and expect mostly that as a result.
