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

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.