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

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.