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

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.