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

the cute deaf girl might lead him a little in plot relevance and screen time, though

biggest wtf plot thing for me was the business with ghidorah's skull having psychic powers? why not have it be his brain? was very confused by all that until i realized they were just positing that the skull also works like a brain (i guess?)

by far the best "i wanted to hear the rest of his speech" death scene in movie history is this one, everything else is just copying the master
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BS8I9H07wKw

Elon Musk dude must have died when I was in the bathroom during that same minute that Mechagodzilla went rogue.

Question: if Musk could have made a giant robot, why did he decide on the form of a robot Godzilla? Lack of creativity, imo.

Meanwhile, how are they going to fill and plug the giant Kong-sized (plot) hole that runs from the center of the earth to Hong Kong?

thoughts thoughts thoughts
• forks otm, no question that is the GOAT of unfinished speeches
• much like recent star wars, the first thing I thought on seeing the cybernetics office park with its own nuclear reactor was "okay where are they getting the money? let's talk cash flows..."
• this had the unexpected effect of inoculating me from disbelief by the time we got to the Florida to HK tunnel bc sure lol why not nothing matters
• feel like no one here is giving sufficient weight to the sheer edgar rice burroughs-ass majesty of the GODDAMN THRONE

the throne (and the throneroom) in particular is one of the places where i felt like the design was tastefully lazy. they basically went for brown fortress of solitude.

Who built those stairs?

serf kong

watching this at the request of kids, I have no interest at all in action movies / sequences, but have do say that the dialogue is fucking appalling here. maybe all of these films are like this though, idk

Man, tough crowd. What did you even expect a giant monkey or fire-breathing lizard to say, anyway?

something about supply-side economics

someone was spouting stuff about mind control via fluoride in the water, don't think it was one of the monsters

GODZILLA IS HURTING PEOPLE AND WE DON'T KNOW WHY

Monkeys have tails, apes don't. Kong is an ape fwiw.

Okay, I'll shut up now.

If Kong can be a one-off ape the size of a skyscraper then he can also be a one-off giant monkey without a tail. That's just science.

king of the monsters is genuinely one of the most stupidly plotted efforts I've ever seen

Hold up, in addition to that incredible looking Japanese "Godzilla Minus One" movie, there is an Apple TV Godzilla mini-series *also* coming out in November?

Seeing "Minus One" today, psyched.

Pretty much ruled. Basically a post war melodrama with a particularly angry Godzilla. Yes, you hear the original theme. Yes, Godzilla stills hates trains. But there's something particularly tragic about the beaten down population of Japan still reeling from WWII and forced to contend with a giant lizard on top of it all. As soon as a character mentions how quickly Ginza is rebuilding, you want to tell the poor person: don't bother.

Loved this

caught this going in totally cold and found it to be a pretty mixed bag. found the dramatic parts to be pretty corny and time-consuming, esp anything that had to do with the empty lead character and his “war.” sakura ando was _way_ underused! and the actor playing the lead really wasn’t up to the task of finding something interesting in there either. and went back to the well of updating beats from the OG film a few too many times too.

i did enjoy the smashin and bashin and how godzilla was actually scary again. but i dunno, shin godzilla is a masterpiece imo and this was pretty safe and dour in comparison. a little surprised by the hype.

I thought the corniness was part of its charm, though I agree, there's a little too much boring drama, balanced out by some of the best Godzilla destruction in recent memory.

yea i can see that. i think if we had a director with more of a sense of humor and some more fun performances, i could have gotten more on board in a campy way. i haven't actually watched any of yamazaki’s live action and cg cartoon anime adaptations but he seems like a pretty bland director judging by this and a back catalog bursting with junk.

Saw this last night, thought it was great.

I assume I'm not the only one that thought of "Jaws" throughout the movie, right?

Oh yeah, I spotted that bit immediately

yeah, def. thought it captured the same kinda claustrophobia at sea as jaws pretty well.

Call me a sucker but any action film with an anti-war message usually wins me over

All I can say is, keep this movie in mind while you watch this pile of poo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lV1OOlGwExM

G-1 was def anti-war but… maybe with a little bit of that old rambo 2 “can we win this time?” nationalism seasoning? (I’m honestly not so sure about this myself but I _did_ get scared that the movie was gonna lean into that more at some point, at least)

I worried about that too but the line from Doc about "not going to war is something to be proud of" kind of assuaged those worries

saw a trailer for Godzilla x Kong - The New Empire, and it looks terrible artistically, I assume almost all of the effects have to be extremely unfinished. it looked like a Playstation One game on my buddy's 80 inch TV.

The plane reveal had me excited because I recognized the type. I knew that plane, I’d built a model of the German version of it.

yeah that was a mega cool moment.

also though I saw it in 4DX which meant I was like riding an amusement park ride while watching the movie which helps

On board with _Godzilla Minus One_ completely, hell of a watch. (I don’t know whether having seen _The Human Condition_ a few months back helped but it sure as hell didn’t hurt.)

Good interview, this

https://www.theverge.com/23984534/godzilla-minus-one-interview-takashi-yamazaki

"Godzilla, was it hard to film in that cold water?"

They had a giant basking lamp set up for him between takes.

I saw this last night and it's the most rewarded I've felt for watching a movie in theaters since Titanic. Yes, it was incredibly cheesy and nonsensical at times, but that didn't take away from all that was good about it. The giant lizard and the destruction that he wreaks are obviously all you need to sell a ticket here - so impressive! The human drama was appropriately intense at some times (particularly when Shikishima returns home after the war and finds Sumiko moping about the rubble) and cheesy at others, but I admit that my tears rose out of their ducts at more than one point. Other things that I was impressed with include:

The costumes were absolutely on point. Everyone looked so good in this movie.
Machine-gunning mines out at sea.
Reporters on the rooftop steadfastly reporting on the destruction.
Trio of scientists in white coats monitoring things from their little bunker on the deck of the destroyer.

I've only seen a handful of the original 1950s/60s Godzilla movies, Godzilla 1985 (when I was a kid), the Gareth Edwards one, and the first of the animated movies that came out on Netflix. Godzilla Minus One definitely whomps most of those. It's definitely inspired me to go back and check out some of the classics and the newer Japanese ones that I've missed.

if you go to archive.org and search for godzilla there are a bunch of rips there of the showa and heisei films.

HBO MAX has a bunch of Showa era but missing a ton of them. I've used that to start getting into the series.

think Ghidorah and Destroy All Monsters are two of my favs besides the original from 1954

I saw it last night too, with my 13yo son who is a massive Godzilla/Kaiju fan, and we both were knocked out.

I recently subscribed to the Criterion Channel, and there are a number on there as well.

As mentioned on another thread I'd heard some less than enthusiastic stuff from Japanese and Japan-based sources on this film and yeah, it's "anti war" in the same way the boomer Vietnam movies are anti war - WWII was terrible for what it did to the Japanese people. How did things get there, were perhaps some other peoples also negatively affected? It is a mystery. The big stirring speech about how Japan has not respected human life enough still focusing exclusively on Japanese soldiers - lol imagine if a German film did that. And of course all that stuff's valid, but it's pretty telling what goes unsaid. Nary a US soldier to be seen either, might mess with the ethno-nationalist redemption arc if it's acknowledged the country was under occupation.

That being said, obv I don't go to Godzilla for the politics, and even with those taking up a p large space in the film, the actual monster action is great. The Akira Ifukube theme will never not get me hyped. The method of dispatching big G was wonderfully silly. Minami Hamabe a much more magnetic presence than Kamiki though, could've stood to get more screentime.

One of the film's big reveals is spoiled early on if you read German. I swear they lingered on that text too!

I thought one of the themes of the film was whether you are anti-war or pro-war, we can all get together to be anti-Godzilla.

Though not unrelated, I found the hand-waving dismissal of international intervention/interference/cooperation pretty hilarious. Yes, there is a 300-foot tall radiation-breathing dinosaur laying waste to Japan, but tensions between the US and Russia are pretty high, so America's gotta stay out of this fight. You're on your own. But good luck, Japan, we're rooting for you! Let us know how it turns out.

A good time. Could've used Godzilla's heat ray to vaporize about 20 minutes.

Final Wars from 2004 absolutely ruled

well shit i just thought godzilla symbolized ptsd

Yes, Final Wars is the fucking best.