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

:)

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