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

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

not while they remain un-nuked anyway

watching this now - some incredibly boring moments of people talking with awkward voiceovers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godzilla_vs._King_Ghidorah

lmao

Gerald Glaubitz of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association appeared alongside director Kazuki Ōmori on Entertainment Tonight and condemned the film as being in "very poor taste" and detrimental to American-Japanese relations, allegations that Ōmori denied, stating that the American extras in the film had been "happy about being crushed and squished by Godzilla."

god this was fucking dire

too many people blathering terrible exposition-heavy dialogue & too much goddamn rain & not enough tension/cool monster stuff

it played like a way shittier version of Armageddon but with monsters

also they talked about Mothra for the entire movie & you only get to see 10 minutes ~maybe~

seriously fuck this movie even more than the last one

there should be an international law barring Americans from being involved in the production of Godzilla movies, the results always suck shit

VG otm. My daughter loved it and I went based on her recommendation, came out thinking "ugh, such shiiiiiiiit." Kaiju is just not for me, Japanese or American.

i love Japanese kaiju but these iterations have been moronic & even worse, hella boring

shakey otm

supercharged godzilla fucking blasting the shit out of gidorah

ZZZZZZZZZZZTTTT

THere's more to follow judging by the after credits scene.
BuT yeah did seem a little cliched to say the least.

i’m ok with cliches in this genre

i’m not ok with filmmakers thinking that i give two craps about badly written characters who feel ~things~ and do things for ~reasons~ but who serve no story function except to bridge monster scenes
if that’s what they are just make them even broader and even dumber, don’t act like we are ever going to care about them.

i saw something like oh dark phoenix and godzilla tanked is this the end of the summer blockbuster?
Yeah, it is, if you show complete disdain for your audience by just dumping a bucket of boring shit in their laps when they’re paying $$ to come see yr fkn movie. ugh.

ZZZZZZZZZTTTTT

i keep meaning go back to read j.s superlong posts

vg what did you think of skull island

Im not vg but Skull Island was way better than this ish imho

I saw this a second time to see if my opinion changed. Sadly it didn't and the friend of mine who begged me to see it with him got bored and fell asleep :/

Skull Island was pure stupidity but def on the enjoyable end of the spectrum for me. The vietnam-war-movie parody element went a long way with me, also John C Reilly.
Tom Hiddleston was not a great choice of leading man though.

Also Kong wrestling the Trogdor Pterodactyl was pretty dope.

hmm ok was hoping youd hated it so i could gleefully disregard yr pan of this but no such luck it appears

yr welcome

might still go tbrrwu

I'd figure you would never run out of movie ideas for someone in a big lizard suit.

I would totally see a movie where everything was state of the art CG *except* Godzilla, who was a man in suit.