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

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.

All 3 generations of Godzilla suit wearers walking down the street together

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BoNdSBaIUAAGiwE.jpg

<3 <3 <3 awesome

and yeah they could have replaced the lead actor with a spoon and it would have been better

I really liked him in that Anna Karenina movie with Keira Knightly, but maybe that role was better suited for him.

I have such sympathy for Mr Veg.

How long do you think Ken Watanabe has known his US career would involve Gojira at some point?

lol

it's weird to me that they played the non-Godzilla stuff so blandly (unless there's some meta level to it I'm missing). you've got Godzilla in your movie, there's really no way you can build the "human" story around him in a way that's gonna dampen ticket sales. why not take some small risks at least?

how dare you sir. they studied Jaws very carefully what more do you want?

Yeah Fort was really bland, by design it seemed

I finally got around to seeing this, with my daughter. Several thoughts, perhaps addressed above by others, by I'd been avoiding the thread til I saw it:

The good:

1) Love that they made Godzilla an unabashed good guy. My daughter's reaction, pretty much, was "Aw, he's a nice guy after all!"
2) Some of the shots were oddly beautiful
3) Some of the things that made me like "Monsters" were ported over directly to this. A quarantine zone, the notion of the monsters just going about their business while the people freak out, even the notion, iirc, of the monsters mating ritual being the thing that freaks people out.
4) The Godzilla design was great, a strong update of the model.
5) Nice nods to the franchise, from the Mothra in a tank to the requisite antipathy for trains and bridges.

The bad:

1) Not enough Godzilla. Dude is so lazy in this, just taking his time getting to the bad guys, swimming away. That was half the movie. More than half.
2) A great, great cast, all but wasted by making them stick to repetitive, seconds-eating reaction shots. Cranston might by chewing the screen off, but while he's there at least he livens things up. Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins, let alone Binoche, for major, respected actors, have next to nothing to do but stare. The cast of "Pacific Rim" was more colorful (in every sense).
3) Soooo many shots of some mass slowly approaching and filling the screen. Smoke, dust, light, water. I know this is par, but again, felt super repetitive. I saw it in 2D, but maybe 3D would have made this stuff worth while?
4) The fact that despite the huge budget, and all the potential, and, come on, the more or less foolproof formula of giant monsters destroy city, this movie echoed bits of previous movies that let people down, for the same reasons. Like the egg stuff, from the last shit Godzilla reboot. Or (literally) backgrounding so much of the action in favor of people and their not compelling story, like "Pacific Rim." If anything, they spent too much time on the writing and felt the need to have their A+ actors just talk, even though said talk advanced the story not one bit and in fact slowed everything down to a portentous crawl.

Monsters" worked (imo) as an under the radar cult film driven by some DIY invention and an original story, but the things that made "Monsters" interesting - slow pace, foregrounding the people and backgrounding the monsters, given the monsters a strange sort of primordial innocence - have no place in a $180 million dollar Godzilla movie.

yeah i wonder what a non-mega budget studio version of godzilla directed by him might have been like. obviously no one would ever greenlight that, but id like to see him make more monster movies, just not through hollywood studios.

um idk if you're serious but he did make one? It's called "Monsters" - it's how he got the Godzilla gig.

um i know and ive seen that already, im just wondering if hes better suited to somewhere between indie and tentpole