Thanks, I’m glad there’s an explanation for that.
Them’s fighting words if you think I’m not.
Ah, mea culpa!
Unless we can fight in giant rubber lizard suits & edit in cheesy flash gordon type effects. Then they’re fighting words.
I thought the script was obviously half baked. The wife leaves her phone far away AND on vibrate? That’s lazy writing. The kid on the train AND his own kid both randomly find the parent/s that they are separated from…in the middle of refugee areas with swarms of people? Come on. No one, human that is, has anything to do in this movie. The women are nonentities, but even the military leader and the scientist are kind of just hanging around looking at readouts and each other in way that made me feel like these actors were waiting for the director to yell “action!” and he never did. Whoever wrote this didn’t even try.
These characters are generic and not obnoxious like in Cloverfield, so there’s that. Plus the Godzilla action is far better than the giant robot vs monster action of Pacific Rim, so there’s that too. All in all, okay for fans like me and a decent first step towards an eventual good Godzilla movie, but kind of disappointing.
but even the military leader and the scientist are kind of just hanging around
even Kickass-Ford couldn’t
this
defuse the bomb (nice clockwork by the way). Finally a timed bomb went off
I liked that ending… For me, there were far more things I liked, than things I didn’t like. So this makes it a thumbs up…
Saw this on Saturday with the kids and my oldest girls boyfriend. All the teens loved the movie. I really enjoyed it but think they missed some opportunities. My one main wish was that it would have been awesome to see Watanabe and Cranston interact. I would have loved to see their interaction over how to deal with the monsters, so just replace the son’s “get back to my family” arc with that. Keep the son and his military activity in, just nix the wife and kid, the characters were paper thin anyway.
Loved the monsters and the fights. I may have been slightly embarrassed by letting out a distinct “Wooo!” through the theater when…
omgomgomg
Godzilla’s back spines started glowing, knew instantly what was coming and got a bit giddy.
The problem with that approach is:
SPOILERZ!
Edwards clearly wanted to establish Godzilla as the “good” monster, who maintains the natural order of things by killing off the “bad” MUTOs. But that doesn’t work if it’s just Godzilla rampaging thru human cities like he does in the original “Gojira.” Unless maybe he only goes after eeeeevil cities like Pyongyang and Newark.
The other advantage of more than Godzilla being in the movie is that they have prepped the audience to accept that in this world(of the movie) multiple monsters are to be expected. This way no one is going to feel cheated, or roll their eyes in disbelief, in future sequels if more and more monsters are brought into the fray. The whole point is you don’t want it to be all about Godzilla, because then you’d be limited in what you can do.
Actually that reminds me. Did anyone else see…
on the carrier
On one of the screens where they showed markers of the three monsters converging on San Francisco that one of them was labeled Gojira, did anyone else see if they had named the other two?
Wurd!
nobody liked the Halo jump??
I loved the halo jump. I just didn’t have anything to say about it.
I also thought all the jets crashing was eerie & really well done.
I liked the movie pretty well until the halfway point, at which point it felt kind of aimless. I spent much of the second half trying to figure out how I would do the movie differently, and wrote it up here.
To summarize the link, the difference in scale between Godzilla and the human characters makes it impossible to dovetail their plots. So you have two separate movies running in parallel, and not only that, but the human part of the movie is further divvied up between a number of characters that never really get to interact. As a result, the humans were completely bland exposition-dispensers / monster-fleers (except Cranston, who got to make decisions involving people in addition to dispensing exposition). I thought they should have gotten rid of Brody’s family and focused on the military – lemme see Seal Team 6 work in San Francisco during a monster attack.
Yes. It’s on Netflix Instant now and it deserves viewing. It has an understanding of character, stakes, and scale far beyond what this silly movie conveys.
-xtien
“But you can’t fight nature.”
If we’re bouncing ideas around on improving this movie here’s mine: They had the human element RIGHT THERE and dropped the ball. Gonna have to spoiler cause plot The son had his family destroyed, his dad driven crazy, his mom AND dad killed, his son never really knowing his grandfather all because of the deliberate actions of the military and scientists…the same military and scientists who desperately need his help to decrypt his father’s data in order to save the world! He has to help the people he hates most in the world or everyone, including his wife and kid, dies! But the military and scientists did it to the prevent mass panic and worldwide chaos that would erupt if giant monsters were thought to be roaming the Earth, so they did the right thing by doing the evil thing! The hero needed to be like Snake Plissken, pissed off and not the least bit impressed by the authorities he’s helping. At the end, when the authorities are still going to use their superweapon on Godzilla, after Godzilla destroys the MUTOs, the hero uses his insider status and pulls the plug letting Godzilla escape somehow.
Mm, that is a good idea.
Yep, plus 1 on gameoverman’s idea. Will you fix my next book, dude?
Alternately, it’s a sluggish and contrived movie to such a degree that I’m surprised anyone who saw Monsters expected Godzilla to be anything other than what it is. To me the only difference is that in Godzilla you actually get to see the monsters once in a while. Edwards clearly loves the subject matter, but Godzilla once again shows he’s much better at monsters than people. If he does pursue a Destroy All Monsters style sequel as he has hinted in interviews, that will play to his strengths.
I don’t mean to EMP your point, Matt, but as it happens I didn’t watch Monsters until after I saw Godzilla in the theater. As disheartened as I was, I wanted to give Gareth Edwards another shot (and also prep for the podcast, natch).
As for sluggish and contrived, I just cannot get on board for your characterization at all. If you have time go ahead and flesh that out, but I don’t see it. I thought it was full of the urgency of the everyday fear. That menace that is so always-there that you can only turn it off in the moments when you allow yourself not to be wary of it. But still it informs so much of how you live your life. You know. Like taking off your shoes at the airport.
Furthermore, I cannot disagree more with your point about him being better with monsters than people. I think the problem with Godzilla is that he’s going for a different aesthetic, one that is as unsustainable for a modern summer blockbuster as is the one in Monsters…but is different. Actually I would say that Monsters shows the exact opposite of your point. That he is better with people than monsters, and that he is clever enough to know how to raise the stakes with the former with his use of the latter. I just don’t think he could do that with Godzilla given the obvious constraints of making a summer tentpole movie.
-xtien
“You mean like a doctor?”
Ha! I thought the same thing! Where is the eating of his prey? Unless he was really a giant radiation vampire who sucked them dry. I did like that they made him vulnerable.