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

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

your son ILX

really really hate this trend of b-movie seriousification. especially when it's visually so bland and grey.

The Bryan Cranston half of this is a tremendous boat anchor to the anonymously good monster fighting to come. I suppose I liked it but I'm not in any hurry to see a follow-up - unlike Pacific Rim and those wacky early 2000 movies like Godzilla Final Wars, Tokyo SOS, etc.

Oh man, just the other day I was like "hey, I just remembered there's going to be a new Godzilla reboot, when's it coming out?" and it seems the answer is "Five months ago."

Godzilla/Kaiju Halloween party happening at my house this weekend. My son is going to be Ultraman, I'll be Dr. Serizawa, and my wife and her sister will be Mothra fairies.

wow!

This... was pretty good! Surprised they actually put this much effort into it, especially in terms of world building and backstory. Great twists to make Mothra (erm M.U.T.O.) the villain and make Godzilla the hero. Thought the movie looked and sounded amazing overall.
Cranston casting did lift the movie way higher than it would've been otherwise.
Watanabe was hilariously one note, cast only to deliver one great line - "LET THEM FIGHT."

This... was not pretty good! Loads of unnecessary characters to not care about, scenery chewing acting, generally dumb plot. Well filmed tho'.

really really hate this trend of b-movie seriousification. especially when it's visually so bland and grey.
― nauru, Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Watched this last night. Think I would have enjoyed it a lot but holy shit it was too dark. Like, all I'm looking at is a black screen with occasional splotches of light and shadow flashing across it. A good percentage of the movie I just couldn't tell what was going on at all. Could have been so much more.

thought this was really fuckin good tbh

good score

Just officially named citizen of Japan!

http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--fr26ltYI--/c_fit,fl_progressive,q_80,w_636/1280221843361659750.jpg

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/interest/2015-04-09/godzilla-gets-a-new-job-as-tokyo-tourism-ambassador/.86949

Still: tourism ambassador? Don't know about that.

Liked the first, this new one is boring and drab af

Vera Farigma deserves a purple heart for having to say her lines w a straight face.

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 just saw the new one!! my first godzilla ever, too, very auspicious beginning

i had no problems at all with the human story, maybe because i am in love with vera farmiga from way back, but it seemed very economical and functional. reading the above i wonder if maybe they decided to give this one a scientist father with a dead son betrayed by his scientist wife who is betrayed by her daughter in order to try and land squarely on the associations of dangerous-mother mythography, not just for its own sake but to make a clear break with the story of the last one. so if there is family stuff here it is muted because the family is itself all invested in the kinds of weird naturalist preoccupations that are more mythopoetically potent than i-must-save-my-childson junk.

there was very little talking at length here, mainly just quick jabs and lots of good face-emoting. probably no less of a natural disaster style movie than the first, going by what i've read, but it seems pretty sweet that by the end the humans are revering the apex predator just like the other titans are. cool also to be smacked in the face by the symbolism that godzilla is a replacement ie MORE PRIMAL jesus christ figure

stoked to see supercharged godzilla fucking blasting the shit out of gidorah, i think i actually wanna go back right away and see this thing again

ZZZZZZZZZZZTTTT

watched the previous one too. the new one is waay more fun, and the natural disaster framing is dialied back a lot more than i guessed above. apparently they decided to be self-conscious about the difference because the direction is not as naturalistic as the previous one. there are several quick camera zooms, mainly associated with the monsters, that i recognize from somewhere in pop culture as being a thing from the old films.

Very little talking at length? All the talking at length is why I eventually peaced out on the movie.

After enjoying a few drably hewed monster battles, we had to be subjected to yet another iteration of League of Shadows "we must destroy this world and rebuild it to save it" M.O.

The film is glum and always shots in greys in the rain. There's no fun to be had. I tuned out the bad writing and looked forward to the monster fights and the first few were awesome but then back to 20 minutes of military chatter.

I'm really surprised no movies have taken the lead of Deep Blue Sea and killed major characters mid rousing speech.

saw it again!

i do think the first one is a lot talkier, not that it is all that verbose.

the main speeches in the new one are vera farmiga's to the monarch team, and serizawa's briefer 'long fortune cookie' speech to kyle chandler.

i think it makes sense to view the dialogue and plot in light of the way the direction relates the humans to the monsters. in the first movie it seems like there was quite a bit of viewing through glass, behind windows, through frames, etc., in keeping with the way the monsters were kept pretty far off. (obviously that's one of many technical tactics for getting verisimilitude at the same time that costs can be managed. i'd really like to see some numbers on how minimizing the amount of front-and-center monster screentime in such an expensive production helps them maximize various budget areas against the box office sales!) and with the engineer-scientist cranston dead early on and serizawa and colleague in more of dispassionate-observer scientist roles, the human agency in the first one is centered on soldiers and emergency relief types (one of the more striking acts in the latter half is the school bus driver fuckin going for it when he sees fit), where the all-too-vulnerable human space is within a world human beings have constructed for themselves and their purposes.

this one starts right off with a lot of stuff that basically amounts to passing through those panes of visibility / protectiveness, if not their being broken (DO NOT TAP ON GLASS etc), which serves the definition of the roles of the scientists (the main centers of agency now). vera farmiga (who starts out living amid the rainforest in a house with a giant picture window onto the mothra site) starts out quite resolutely dashing thru the airlock thingy for what seems like reasons of confidence in her theory for her gadget, although given her cooperation with the ecoterrorists you can see that retrospectively as part of her general agenda of releasing the monsters (for what the family backstory depicts as murky un-worked-thru reasons). kyle chandler, who starts out 'in the safest place he could be' (implication: vera farmiga realizes she is endangering people but thinks he is out of harm's way), is practically among the wolves in the field, but watching and photographing through a telephoto lens, i.e. he is someone who is pragmatic (more than once later he is the person who 'can't just sit here' and do nothing; consider his trick solution, the just-in-time use of the hatch door to expel and engulf/embrace what's outside the protective hull of human agency, to the pickup of the helicopter or whatever later on) but recognizes the sense or prudence or wisdom in staying behind the glass. their daughter starts out between them, unsure about how to balance her relationship: her dad's ashamed of having become a drunk before her, and he's doing self-penance among the wolves, but his daughter is having doubts about whether or not to sell out her mom for what she knows she has been planning. when mothra is first released and later when they go to release gidorah, the daughter reaches out to touch them. her dad would never do that but her mom's work on the echolocation gizmo connects her with the monsters via the sense of sound that gets used throughout the movie to underscore spatial relations between things (all those radar/sonar/etc. circles on the screens) and to put a point on the audio half of the 'spectacle' by making as many of the sounds as possible manifest in the form of visible waves of contact between bodes, and the daughter seems to share in that association throughout (when she's holed up in the second half before taking off with the gizmo, it's in the radio room, for example).

an interesting thing about the family is that their bit of backstory shown at the beginning ties them in different ways to the experience of godzilla and other titans, specifically to seeing them. i think the mom has that tinge of reverential awe at godzilla early on that you see from the daughter near the end (played with kind of a that-big-galoot grin that reflects the audience awareness of the fictive goofiness of the 'character', but also i think a kind of relish in destructiveness that also reflects an audience pleasure), and from the others once godzilla has reclaimed the apex predator spot. this would help explain her motivation, the open embrace of nature's inhumanity that is on display in her big speech (not without exposure of the denial underlying it, her not having accepted the way her son was lost). the father is shown differently, in a kind of abject frozen resignation that he repeats later with gidorah, and that the mother repeats later once she thinks she has chosen to sacrifice herself to him (for the sake of her daughter and the others, she probably thinks, but it seems pretty evident that she's trying to punish herself for her earlier actions).

the visual domain is the one we associate with the director so if i were developing a comprehensive read on this i would try to use that to understand a weirdness of vera farmiga's big speech. as with most modern action-adventure type pictures this thing is absolutely inundated with screens on the screen, windows for the characters onto the action and down-to-the-second plot info available whenever it needs to be extracted from the whole contraption. the design on it all is really, really complex, in a way that makes me hope, at least, that the director's visual sense would contain an important part of his larger intent. farmiga's speech comes mainly via a video communication that's thrown up on a multi-screen monitor for the monarch folx, with the result that it has big ol vertical and horizontal scores thru the image that i would say emphasize its visual character and discourage the audience from automatically cancelling it out and just seeing the monarch folx and her 'talking to' each other, as so much would make them do. so they're set to notice one of the weirder things in the direction, which is that vera farmiga's little speech is inter-cut with like newsreel footage, as if she has prepared a visual aid or a communique produced for broadcast or something. in context that does NOT seem supported by the plot or character or whatever, so i think it makes more sense to take it as a directorial intervention, 'breaking through the glass' of the film with the use of an incongruous visual technique.

to what end?? uh

i'm not sure but the danger in 'breaking through the glass' is that you are no longer protected by distance, by mere observation. in the story-world, on the other side of the camera glass, this is depicted with the camera in terms of godzilla's privilege of gazing directly into the camera, not in a point-of-view type shot (though he gets those too) but so as to break through the fourth wall and look upon the audience, and for them to look upon him and feel whatever feelings of awe and terror and admiration he can stir up in them (that's the meaning of his sneering grin, that he knows he has this power over us too, even though we cannot be stomped by him). so what the audience is in danger of is a kind of terrified, fixed gaze at the biggest possible dangers that imperil them. near the end of the film there is a bit of jubilation at having helped 'the big guy', at having been helped by him, but i think zhang ziyi's bit on it gets at the film's true position, which is not just according to what she says—'for now'—but her saying so out of that same attitude of awestruck reverence at the apex predator. which is to say, its purposes are not ours, our belief that we are 'cooperating' is prone to delusion, we will let our terror be explained by any nominally self-empowering story about our situation and what we've done that helps us downplay our powerlessness. (presumably it is her ecstatic reaction to mothra that enables her to recognize this.)

the characters the movie selects out as wisest are dr serizawa and (in the pragmatic man-of-action mode i guess) kyle chandler (only AFTER he confronts godzilla face-to-face and realizes that his son's being killed or not killed by godzilla was beyond a matter of discretion, just like his not being killed by godzilla seems to have nothing to do with a kind of humane gratitude or respect at having been helped by the non-alpha humans), who is taught about acceptance and faith by serizawa. who also reaches out to touch godzilla, but only in a context where he fully accepts that this coincides with his death. and who is shown to become momentarily godzilla-like—foot stomping up the stairs—as he is about to do so, let's say, accepting his role in the natural order of things. serizawa also gets to have one of the legit BIG FEEL moments of the movie, a weird one though for conventional storylines—passing on his personal notes to another scientist. one true observer recognizing another.

the server literally told me my post was too long

I only saw the trailer and haven't read the thread but America will never be able to make a good Godzilla movie