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

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

ok sorry didnt mean to be a dick

Isn't he doing a Star Wars movie now?

This Godzilla would have been a perfect vehicle for his talents had Godzilla not spent 3/4 of the movie swimming across the ocean. It's called Godzilla. No need for a slow, dramatic reveal. We know the drill. It's Godzilla. Make him fight monsters.

one shot of him swimming then cut to one of those dotted maps like in Bugs Bunny or Indiana Jones

now you have 30 more minutes of monstertime

problem solved! next

I really liked San Francisco as Boschian hellscape -- the sequence where the paratroopers drop into it over Ligeti wailing with their red flares trailing like streams of blood is pretty great. And i guess they agree since they put that on all the posters.

Also thought this got the massive heft and weight of giant monster fighting better than Pacific Rim; kaiju in the latter were a bit too fast and agile, which kind of subtly undermined the sense of scale, that these are like skyscrapers come to life

I already forget, why did that one monster fly from Japan to San Fran? To get to the other monster? Wasn't it near Vegas? You'd think Los Angeles would have been a more centrally located destruction zone.

Lol no bldgs to destroy in LA. What are they gonna do, take a schvitz in the port?

Godzilla 2: Schvitz in the Port

They could have at least had a mutant monster emerge from the tar pits.

There are a few bldgs to destroy in LA, but yeah, it wouldn't take long. Not that San Fran is some huge towering metropolis.

Well, we have bridges

They should have had them fight in the redwoods, which surely would have illustrated the shock of mass destruction in a more personal way than all that empty steel and glass. People would be wincing at them destroying trees as old as they are.

i thought this was pretty good.

too bad about the main bro being such a nothing.

The airdrop scene is so amazing, wanted the entire film to be like that. When the monster is supposed to be some sort of primordial God, then the pictures has better be sublime, and they just weren't. The scene going into the quarantined zone especially needed to be much more striking, this is nature winning over civilization, this is the thematic point of the film, SHOW IT. But nah, some bugs, and then father and son arguing.

Still, liked it for what it was. Just not as much as I'd hoped I would.

^^ OTM

saw the original gojira at a local theater last night. kind of a revelation. certainly the darkest and most genuinely affecting monster movie i've ever seen.

right?!

loved the scene on the subway where someone says something like 'i survived nagasaki just to go through this?'

kind of expected it to be a fun curio but it's a legitimately great film, crazy to think it was eclipsed here by the raymond burr-ized version for so many years.

gojira/godzilla's death is also really really sad, which is all the more effective somehow because they didn't do what every other monster movie does and try to make him the 'hero.' the whole underwater sequence is gorgeous and devastating.

the love triangle seems kinda rmde early on but it totally pays off at the end

KING of the MONSTERS...

...SAVIOR of the CITY?!?!?!?!?!

(saw this tonight with GB and dug it quite a bit. There may have been fist-pumping at the "We call him..." line.)

i kinda wished the movie was entirely about godzilla and his friends and no human characters

― socki (s1ocki), Thursday, May 22, 2014 2:57 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This was also how I felt about the new Apes movie. Maybe the solution is to have a Godzilla vs Planet of the Apes, with no people at all.

(Took the kids to see this at the discount theater today, is why the thread revive. We were all bored by the people-talking parts, but enjoyed the battles. Totally agree that it's more a natural disaster movie than a monster movie.)

Saw this a month ago with my son and he's been obsessed with all things Godzilla since then. He's watched every bit of Godzilla video he could find on Netflix and YouTube and has lectured me at length about what a travesty the 1998 film was despite never having seen it so far.

your son otm