New American Godzilla Movie

Movie needed a lot more Godzilla, or they should have renamed it Mothra Ripoff.

It didn’t suck, but it didn’t blow me away. It should have just been about Godzilla. We don’t need any other monsters in the first outing.

Over all really liked it, Godzilla and the monsters were amazing, not enough Bryan Cranston at all and the kid from Kick Ass was just ok. But that said still had a fantastic time with the move.

I enjoyed it but have some criticisms. I’ll agree with those who say “needed more Godzilla” and “he should have been the focus of the film.” I also think it started too slowly and that Godzilla, who’s advertised as an “alpha predator” multiple times, needed to eat the other monsters. Taking potentially fatal damage and not even getting a meal out of it? What kind of predator does that? Great battle scenes, though, once they finally kicked into high gear. The climactic kill was particularly awesome.

When did Zylon become such a troll? I haven’t seen a positive reply out of him for ages.

About 10,770 posts ago?

The movie has the perfect amount of Godzilla. If they hadn’t been witholding him throughout the movie, the final fight wouldn’t have had anywhere near the impact it had, it would’ve been a deflating repetition.

I really liked it. The human stuff isn’t the most stirring stuff, but I like the way the movie locks us into those subjective viewpoints – at least until the final catharctic brawl – so the monster stuff becomes properly huge and awe inspiring.

The plot was super-dumb, but the whole thing was beautifully filmed. So not perfect, but definitely great; I really enjoyed watching it and I’m glad I saw it in the theater.

Really liked it.

yaddayadda

[spoiler]Would have liked to see more Godzilla, but as Sören said: It probably would have made the last third less satisfying had we seen lots of fighting before that.

After people said that the human part was terrible, I had lower expectations. Aaron Tayler-Johnson’s character is super-bland, Elizabeth Olson and Ken Watanabe don’t have a lot to work with, and, geez, I felt sorry for Sally Hawkins. I really like her, and she really had nothing to do here. Killing off Brian Cranston’s character was a bit surprising since the trailers made me think he’d have a bigger part in the movie. And while it’s nice to be surprised, I guess, it was also was a mistake when it comes to the whole narrative as they removed the character/actor who seemed invested most and also actually had a bit of backstory.

But here’s the thing: They were bland, but I didn’t get annoyed. The people in 1998’s Godzilla or most of the people in Cloverfield really got on my nerves. Let’s not about children or those fairy things in Japanese Godzilla movies. And while I enjoyed Pacific Rim, it had tons of groanworthy dialogues and delivery, and the main character didn’t seem any less bland than Ford. Sure, some of it was meant to be intentionally campy, I guess, but it got my eyes rolling nevertheless. Only Idris Elba got to ham it up enough to come off as entertaining.

I knew that there’d be another monster in the movie, but I didn’t think Hollywood had it in it to really go for the Godzilla-our-guardian thing since it wouldn’t fit well to the usually more ‘grounded/gritty’ approach to have the giant lizard just leave at the end and vanish peacefully. Unlike Desslock, I didn’t mind that to be the case because most of the recent monster movies seemed to focus on the monster being the bad entity - at best we’re supposed to think that it’s not evil per se and just wants to survive, but simply doesn’t fit in (Godzilla 1998, Super 8).

The build-up was long, but really pays off. The first time you see the full beast in Hawaii and have it roar - made us basically go “Hell yeah!” And, later, when the fins are starting to light up and you knew what was about to happen I was grinning from ear to ear. And the movie delivered some impressive and haunting pictures. It was also interesting to see that the trailers contained some parts that were not in the movie, probably to hide MUTOs. For instance, in the parachute sequence in the trailer you get a very brief glimpse at Godzilla whereas in the movie we get to see Godzilla and one of the MUTOs fight.

P.S.: While the characters weren’t annoying… good lord, the army was really incompetent in this, no? Unable to track the MUTOs in an age of satellites and high-altitude drones and surveillance aircraft? How the hell did they not know that the female MUTO was near the train? Also, the part with the nuclear waste deport was utterly ridiculous. Sure, let’s check one room after another to see if there’s anything missing while apparently NO ONE notices the giant thing making its way to Las Vegas outside.[/spoiler]

I also checked out some pieces of Godzilla 1998 on Youtube to freshen up my memory. I think I only watched it once way back when it came out. The CGI looks really bad now.

There will be spoilers throughout in this post.

all of it

[spoiler] My inner 8-year-old is so, so happy with this movie. And that part of me is so pleased that it doesn’t even care that Elizabeth Olsen was criminally underused.

I love the way they kept Godzilla in his traditional shape, not at all a dinosaur, clearly a man in a rubber suit, and just went with it. It works. This is classic Godzilla at his finest, and those of you who think this movie is being “too reverent” to the Japanese films are off your rockers. (Granted, I grew up with them, so I have an obvious bias.)

I don’t think it’s a contradiction at all to think of him as both a force of nature & as a savior of humanity, since the first role is descriptive & the second is incidental, as always. Even keeping parallels to the bomb doesn’t seem out of place (and makes for quite a poignant little moment) because that’s about how these things are senselessly beyond our control.

Getting back to plot over themes, sure this thing is a bit slow to get started, but that’s because it knows how to tease. Good god, does it know how to tease.

It gives us enough of a taste of Godzilla at the very beginning that we’re not worried about how long it will be till the big reveal (though I was confused until later about why no one else remembered Godzilla), and it wisely plays the two best actors in the opening sequence to keep us engaged before the real film begins. That first death resonated far more than it had any right to in a movie like this. (And if it had come anywhere else in the movie, I’d have felt like it didn’t know what tone it wanted to maintain; but early on, it’s okay for the human element to be more important, because we haven’t shifted focus away from them yet.)

And then our antagonist is revealed first, which saves the reveal of Godzilla for a proper action scene, and the impact of this monster is truly menacing. It has already been established how much devastation it can wreak, and its powers leave us, literally, powerless to defend ourselves in any way.

Finally, not so soon that it feels rushed but not overdue either, Godzilla makes his entrance. We have that appropriately tremendous buildup to the money shot, and then it cuts away. The movie knows it can’t ignore the fight here, but it also knows to tease us with it at this point; so we get the full-framed news footage, which simultaneously admits & denies us what we want to see. Not original, certainly, but pitch perfect here.

Now the plot evolves around the second villainous monster, with a scientific explanation far more coherent than any I’ve ever seen in one of these movies. (Note that “coherent” and “plausible” are two different things.) I thought the pacing of this back half of the movie was particularly good, especially the way it allows us time to establish the stakes for humanity while reinforcing how ultimately helpless we will be in the final battle.

And when we finally get to that battle, this movie knows exactly how to cut loose on what we’ve all been waiting to see. About the only thing I can think of Pacific Rim did better was keeping the flying monster’s wings a secret, but here we’ve got familial instincts from the bad monsters & Godzilla’s powers to keep things interesting.

Speaking of, that reveal was brilliant. The building glow of blue was such a great moment that I actually gasped with delight. (From this point on, I pretty much had a grin on my face. My facial muscles hurt from all the smiling. Like I said, inner 8-year-old.)

When we see it again (and the movie is smart enough not to use it more than twice), the money shot is so fucking fantastic that I actually squealed with joy in the theater.

Needless to say, I liked this movie a lot. It probably helped that we watched Terror of Mechagodzilla first (the movie so bad it ended the original run) instead of a competent monster movie, but I feel satisfied by this movie in ways Pacific Rim left me wishing it had been better.

And don’t get me wrong, my inner 8-year-old loved lots of things about Pacific Rim, to answer the question upthread, but this movie is just far more competently made. Maybe it’s the way this one doesn’t have to be tongue-in-cheek to work that I prefer? In any case, it didn’t leave me wishing for anything. Even more Elizabeth Olsen, because I know I can find that elsewhere.[/spoiler]

Great post Austin, well said.

Am I the only one that detects a plot re-write for this movie?

Whining

-The trailer showed Lady Liberty trashed. Version I saw the farthest East a monster got was Vegas.
-Cranston dies early on. Odd for being widely marketed for the film (but I understand that one).
-After evacuating San Francisco for 1.5 days, there are still people actively working in their offices appearing surprised when a monster battle begins.
-The subway evacuation bits, as well as the bridge bits, seemed really choppy.
-Godzilla dies. Gets up. Walks away while everyone apparently just stands there.
-Screen time was long in the human sense, short in the monster sense. Leading to the next observation…
-The human parts of the story were seemingly unnecessary, they do not actively participate in the battle, and the whole bomb thing was an annoyance that had no real bearing/impact on the story of the monsters. If you took out all of the human plot scenes, I think it would be the same film, but nicely shorter.

Also, the monsters seemed very selective about when their foot falls would cause Earthquakes.

I did not like this one. I liked Pac Rim.

Sequel confirmed.

— Alan

It felt formulaic the way this family had to be constantly in immediate danger. I felt like I could hear the notes- “Make the stakes more personal!”. For this to work you need to care about the characters, but they’re too bland and the tone too po-faced to allow for that.

The plot seemed incoherent at times. Spoilery questions follow…

specifics

When the train is derailed and Our Hero jumps from the train, we see the MUTO pick up the nuke and put it near it’s mouth. Suddenly it’s morning and the military are recovering the nuke intact. Huh? Why didn’t the MUTO take the nuke?

Later on, other soldiers carry the nuke to a boat while Our Hero is delayed. While they’re trying to cast off, the MUTO shows up and kills them in a way that doesn’t damage the pier or the boat(??). By the time Our Hero arrives, the MUTO is distracted by some soldiers with handguns and doesn’t care about the nuke any more.

The egg chamber… how the heck did the MUTOs set that up? The space was too small for them, and when it comes to check on the eggs it’s forced to peer through the same small opening the humans used.

There was also general plot idiocy like starting the nuke timer THEN trying to maneuver the boat into position. They knew about the EMP, that’s why they used the clockwork timer.

When the dog was running from the tidal wave, did it remind anyone else of Independence Day?

There will always be a sequel for Godzilla.

To address your first spoiler point, that’s the Statue of Liberty replica in Vegas outside the New York New York casino that you see in the trailer.

There’s a replica of the Statue of Liberty in Vegas.

I think there were two nukes on the train.

Or maybe you just misread what was said, because nobody complained about Godzilla looking too much like he has in the past – if anything, the opposite. The comment about this movie being too referential was directed at the absurd Japanese spirituality nonsense and abandoning any attempt to treat the subject matter more seriously than a fairy tale.

Good comments though, although I wouldn’t use the word “coherent” when describing any of the expository in this movie, which is too bad, but they obviously intentionally opted to mimic the gibberish spiritual “earth guardian” crap that renders so much Japanese anime and monster flicks nonsensical. It has its charm, I guess, and obviously treating the subject matter more seriously is more difficult and invites derision. But it really made Cloverfield one of a kind.

There were, the first one was eaten in the train attack

Actually, I was addressing that part, too, although I had assumed you were including the look in that complaint. My next paragraph was more about the second part.

But like I said, I’m biased towards the old movies.