Usually I will eat up giant monster movie slop, no matter how bad. You’re talking to someone who adores even the badly dubbed English version of Godzilla vs The Smog Monster (Hedora).
I wasn’t too impressed with 2014s American Godzilla, but it got a pass from me for at least trying to understand the anti-nuclear message. Hated the pro-US military stuff tho.
But holy shit, Godzilla KoTM was hot garbage. Which is surprising because it had all the ingredients to be great, it had Ghidorah, Rodan and Mothra, all with fantastic redesigns. However the story was just bad, not the fun kind of bad, bad to the point that was hard to sit through.
Never before have I seen the idea of Godzilla so missunderstood.
Godzilla as a concept is famous for being an allegory of nuclear weapons and a warning that using destructive technology can have unforseen repercussions. When Godzilla is the bad guy, he’s a stand in for nature’s wrath at man for daring to use something as perverse as nukes. When he’s the good guy, it’s usually to protect the Earth from anything from aliens to pollution.
In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, they make ecoterrorists the bad guys and a nuke saves the day. I’m not even joking. They nuke Godzilla to revive him so he can protect them from King Ghidorah. Oh, and the only Japanese character sacrifices himself to the nuke to make it happen. It’s not saying anything important like an allegory Godzilla movie, nor is it goofy and fun enough to be a cheesy slop monster fight movie.
Thank god for Shin Godzilla and Godzilla Minus One.
So yeah, I’ve never watched Godzilla vs Kong or the newest one. Are they any good? They look pretty bad, but I want to know if I’m missing out on good slop.
I don’t expect much about plots in monster movies so as long as it’s not too bad. King of the Monsters is shit when it comes to fight scenes, 3-5s of monter fight, then a human scene cuts in. It’s super annoying for rewatchs.
Godzilla vs Kong is more of a Kong movie ( even more in the sequel). Fight scene is ok, less human interruptions.
The new sequel though, they dumped down the plot too much. There are more fight scenes but way less qualities. Yeah, when audiences feedback about more monster scenes, clearly they want to lower qualities for more quantities.
Godzilla X Kong was just dumb cyborgmonkeypunching fun: “he hurt his arm, luckily we made a punch-gooder-arm and it’s right here, like a hundred metres away”.
And well, I enjoyed the impersonal force of nature that Godzilla was when responding to threats - straight line to target, not even noticing the cities in the way.
I didn’t watch KotM, but I did watch Godzilla vs. Kong and it was okay, I guess.
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Mechagodzilla is in it, at least.
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do they call it Kiryu?No
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I only ask because that’s what they name Mechazilla in the 2000s Toho movies and that’s my favorite incarnation of Mechagodzilla lol oh god I’m a nerd
they’re not good movies, they’re impressive as a visual spectacle but the human stories just feel tacked on to add emotional depth that isn’t really there. they’re theme park rides. they don’t take themselves too seriously but they’re not camp enough either, it’s very much MCU vibes tbh. there’s some silly sci-fi elements so if you care about movies breaking the fundamental laws of physics and handwaving it away with BS jargon then these are not the movies for you. personally I don’t really care and think hollow earth is dope as hell
King of the Monsters is actually the only Monsterverse movie I’ve skipped, sounds like I made the right choice there
You’re not really missing much tbh
Like, aggressively mid, the lot of them
Also, I get that Toho has made some pretty terrible Godzilla movies too, but I like those because they’re terrible in a charming way, not in a vapid Hollywood kind of way.
Even the bad Godzilla movies are fun to watch. Godzilla eras usually very serious and become silly with each movie (Which is the reverse to what hapenned to Gamera Heisei). Hollywood just feel lifeless.
i watched the first 3 ones and the funny part is that I cannot recall a single thing about them. i don’t have good memory but I usually remember the biggest plot points or the impacting scenes and for these ones there is nothing other than data. it feels so weird because it means that they didn’t had a single impacting thing that the brain could keep.
i wanted to watch the new one but it’s hard to commit on something i know it’s going directly into oblivion
Have to agree, I also can’t remember anything about the first two apart from that Eleven is in one of them. I have no desire to rewatch to remember either, but I’d rewatch Shin Godzilla and Minus One in a heartbeat (even though I also have my issues with the way Minus One’s allegories are handled).
I bailed after the first Legendary Godzilla purely because the American troop deepthroating in that movie was so nauseating
They kill off Bryan Cranston early on so you’re left with his charisma vacuum troop son as the protagonist. He’s also a HUSBAND and YOUNG FATHER and he feels like he’s straight out of a propaganda poster
American Godzilla movies are always pro-US. Iirc when that awful 1990’s US Godzilla movie was released, the Japanese producers were pissed off that they focus on the US army and that the army kills Zilla.
Shusuke Kaneko, who directed the successful 90s trilogy of Gamera films, stated:
“It is interesting that the US version of Godzilla runs about trying to escape missiles. Americans seem unable to accept a creature that cannot be put down by their arms.”
At least in the 1998 movie the military spends most of the movie getting stomped on by Godzilla and the non-troop main characters have to work around them by teaming up with Jean Reno and his guys (who I think were French special forces troops
)You can definitely tell the Legendary Godzilla was made after 9/11
Same here, it was a shite movie with nothing new to offer conceptually and an abundance of US military bootlicking.
Godzilla to me is the fucking G-force using their goofy impossible technology like MASERs and gotengos to do battle with the eldritch kaiju, pure fucking big screen magic escapism. Pacific Rim was a better Godzilla movie than KoTM. Its just another safe neoliberal mishmash of previously tried and tested ideas because anything cool and over the top takes imagination and might scare away the common denominator.
The best Gozzila is the Matthew Broderick one.
lol, I love shitty spectacle movies, but Godzilla X Kong sucked so bad for me. I like, got bored. and I adore Rebecca Hall and Brian Tyree a lot. I think he’s extremely talented and could carry anything, but this movie is such a turd I remember being on the couch, watching for free and being like actually angry at how uninteresting it was even on an incredible display / audio set up. I am laughing about it now, but at the time it finished I was so pissed I deleted it haha.
