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Godzilla, King of the Monsters


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It's playing on the big screen in my local cinema, but I'm not ready to go to indoor movies yet where there's likely to be a large audience. (New Mutants and Synchronic were much safer bets in that respect earlier in the pandemic.) I'll probably watch it at home on HBO Max this weekend, then maybe see the big screen version if it's still showing after 4/22.

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50 minutes ago, Matt the Bruins said:

I'll probably watch it at home on HBO Max this weekend,

I tried a trial of HBOmax when WW84 came out.  I have never seen or heard of a premium service before that had absolutely nothing to offer until that trial.  They have less watchable content than the local JoeTV. 

 

I understand why they put so much effort and resources into getting theatrical releases.  Without them they would be out of business.

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1 hour ago, Starlord said:

I dunno, I have HBO max and they have a ton of great content IMO.

 

I watched all their superhero cartoons the first week I had it.

 

Then I went through their entire library of movies and series trying to find something else to watch that I hadn't already seen repeatedly...with no luck.

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I have HBO Max and I simply don't have enough time to watch all the content on there. Partly that's because I have a lot of other things I occupy my time with away from my television, but also because I split my time across several streaming services.

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4 hours ago, zslane said:

I have HBO Max and I simply don't have enough time to watch all the content on there. Partly that's because I have a lot of other things I occupy my time with away from my television, but also because I split my time across several streaming services.

 

Yeah, this is me as well.  I was also able to get rid of basic cable because most regular TV is mostly crap compared to streaming series now IMO.

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Movie Review: Godzilla vs Kong (2021). The big question on everyone's mind is....does the fight live up to the hype? My short answer is yes...the fight scenes are spectacular and well choreographed for the most part. That said, there's more to a movie than just kaiju fights and this one falls short in terms of story, score, and human characters. " Well....so what? Nobody cares about those things in a kaiju film. " Strongly disagree. The best kaiju films always have more going for them than just the monsters. To its credit, the film does eliminate a lot of the annoying one liners that plagued the 2019 film, but the characters and their arcs are still written in such a shallow way that the majority of them could have been completely cut and you wouldn't have even noticed they were gone. The music is fairly generic and is a huge step down from the classic Godzilla scores or even the 2019 film. The script is simplistic. It's serviceable and does the job of bringing the two together, but it left behind all the potential that the 2019 film gave us for essentially Fast and the Furious with monsters. They did actually give us some legit destruction though. These beasts tear stuff up! I'll give this a B- on the strength of the kaiju action alone. We got the great kaiju fights we wanted to see, but we definitely paid for it in other ways. As a huge Godzilla fan, I'm aware that the classic Toho magic will never be recaptured. This is a fun romp, but I honestly think Kong fans will enjoy it more than Godzilla fans will (and no...that isn't a spoiler).

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I enjoyed Godzilla vs Kong, but I didn't love it. I think, for me, I am too aware of all the (easily implemented) ways this movie could have been so much better. Yes, the fights were great, but I really wish they had stuck with Gareth Edwards' conception of these Titans as colossal animals. The increased anthropomorphism made a lot of the fight choreography look like something out of the WWE than something consistent with the 2014 movie. With every movie it seems to me that they take another step closer to these creatures behaving like people, a throwback to when they were portrayed by men in rubber suits. For instance, apex predators don't have "honor". They kill any and all who challenge their position at the top. But the Legendary Godzilla is slowly becoming the scaley samurai of the Toho films, and it undermines any of the realism Gareth Edwards worked so hard to inject into this Monster-verse seven years ago.

 

In addition, I think the movie would have been much better without the Goonies trio. There are far better ways to show us what the bad guys are up to. And on a broader level the movie did not benefit from shoe-horning the Russells into this plot. They were not necessary for any kind of continuity with any of the previous movies. I kinda feel they were there just to put Millie Bobby Brown and Kyle Chandler on the movie poster.

 

Spoiler

I also felt that Mecha-godzilla's power source made no sense. It was "reconstructed" from a scan of a core sample from the Hollow Earth? WTF? Besides that, I didn't really like its overall design. It looked like a bad Transformers design that never made it past pre-production. And why did Josh Valentine insist with such authority that it was called Mecha-godzilla rather than Robot Godzilla? On the one hand I think we all realize that this was purely fan service (which I hate), but one could perhaps argue that Josh was a nerd who was into manga and anime and was drawing the classic distinction between robot and mecha, the latter having a pilot. Well, sorry Joshy boy, the moment Ren Serizawa was fried and no longer in control, it was no longer a "mecha" by this standard. I think the movie would have been better served by either giving it a name conceived by Walter Simmons, or by not giving it a name at all.

 

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I get what you're saying in terms of anthropomorphising the Titans, but these creatures have never been depicted as no more than animals. They're intelligent, they fight tactically. Ever since Godzilla pried open the MUTO's jaws and poured fire down its throat, it's been clear he has imagination. Kong displayed creative thinking repeatedly on Skull Island.

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To my mind, 2014 Godzilla's "tactics" are no more sophisticated than what other apex predators use, which is to use their natural weapons optimally. When you have human-like arms and hands, you will naturally use them as we do; that doesn't take Godzilla out of the realm of animals, even if--over the course of millions of years--he has learned the fundamental value of anticipating an opponent's actions. Kong, on the other hand, is essentially a huge primate, so we expect primate-level intelligence from him. The philosophical jury it still out on whether or not that constitutes sentience, so I hesitate to equate their "intelligence" with ours. But even if they are regarded as "highly intelligent" compared to most conventional terrestrial fauna, they still aren't human, and shouldn't have human behaviors. For me, the increased anthropomorphism really undermines the idea of the Titans as awesome creatures that we barely comprehend.

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51 minutes ago, Lord Liaden said:

I get what you're saying in terms of anthropomorphising the Titans, but these creatures have never been depicted as no more than animals. They're intelligent, they fight tactically. Ever since Godzilla pried open the MUTO's jaws and poured fire down its throat, it's been clear he has imagination. Kong displayed creative thinking repeatedly on Skull Island.

I went at the point that first he avoided sinking any of the ships or damaging the bridge when entering San Francisco and also when he shared the look with Brody.

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I always got the impression that 2014 Godzilla wasn't necessarily going out of his way to avoid damaging anything (or anyone), but for our own (psychological) benefit we are meant to be led into the comforting fantasy that he is. Experts like Serizawa like to interpret Godzilla's role on Earth as one of "preserver of the natural balance", but I think it is a mistake to read too much into that in terms of the so-called preserver's relationship with humans.

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3 hours ago, slikmar said:

I went at the point that first he avoided sinking any of the ships or damaging the bridge when entering San Francisco and also when he shared the look with Brody.

 

For the most part, humans are like ants to these creatures. But when Godz noticed the ships in SF Bay he might have interpreted them as large animals, which he avoided because he didn't need to hurt them. Whales, for example, have been seen to be careful in their movements around smaller creatures, including human divers.

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Godzilla went from being an unfathomable, destructive force in 1954 to a paragon of rubber-suit farce by the end of the Showa era. Any sense of "higher awareness" or intelligence he may have displayed was, in my view, purely a by-product of the declining level of realism and increased anthropomorphism heaped upon the character throughout the 1960s and 1970s. During the Heisei and Millennium eras there were occasions when Godzilla returned to his "force of nature" form, but it was never very consistent. I really thought that the 2014 Legendary Godzilla would set a new tone for the character that would be more like his original incarnation, but perhaps a bit more nuanced. I'm disappointed that Legendary Godzilla seems to be more or less following the same trajectory he did during the Showa era.

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Legendary Godzilla is very much a force of nature and has shown no signs of anthropomorphism. He has never picked up an object with his claws or really even used them outside of combat in any way that an animal wouldn't. In close quarters with Kong, he constantly attempted to bite and  clawed up his chest in their third fight but he shows his intelligence by attempting to drown Kong in the first fight. He only avoids structures and ships when he's not in combat mode but you don't see lions digging in fire ant mounds or birds invading bee's nests either.

 

So far, he only emerges from the ocean to respond to other Alpha Titans that he considers a threat(the MUTOs, Ghidorah, Kong, and Apex's creation which has a Ghidorah base). Whenever Monarch interacts with Godzilla and he flashes a dominance or intimidation display, Monarch personnel have wisely been submissive and non-threatening. My impression from the films is that he is intelligent and indifferent to humanity. We're not threats or food, so as long as we aren't nuisances, he mostly ignores us and the other Titans follow his lead just like they followed Ghidorah's in KOTM. In fact, it seems that all the Titan fights are battles for dominance, just that some would rather die than be submissive(the MUTO's were different, they couldn't be allowed to breed). Ghidorah was fine with Rhodan once the pecking order was established.

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The MUTOs were actually parasites on Godzilla's species, so his antipathy toward and desire to destroy them was very natural and in his self-interest.

 

I too noted that Legendary G has never used other than his natural weapons, with which he's well equipped. It's another element separating him from Legendary Kong, who's always used artificial weapons and quite cleverly. In the way it's been presented Kong fighting Godzilla often resembles a man fighting an animal.

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1 hour ago, Grailknight said:

no signs of anthropomorphism

 

Well, I have seen reviews in which the sentiment is strongly expressed that both Godzilla and Kong exhibited very human traits and behaviors, to the point where it was distracting. There's even a "they should have kissed" meme going around, I think. I wouldn't go that far, but there was at least one move where Godzilla executed a very convincing judo takedown (using his mouth grip instead of hand grips, but still). And then there's the whole bit where Godzilla put his foot on Kong's chest in a very human "I could kill you right now, but I have honor and will let you live, but you will always know that I defeated you" show of dominance. I'm sure I could point out others, if I watched it again and made an effort to log them.

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The foot-on-chest move has become pretty much standard for Legendary Godzilla. He used it on the female MUTO when he first shoved her down, and on Ghidorah at the end of their fight. Godz is so massive in his lower body, it makes sense for him to use that weight to his advantage. Displays of dominance without lethal follow-through are actually the rule in conflicts in the animal kingdom, although normally only within the same species.

 

Spoiler

It was pointed out to me that near the end of their fight in Hong Kong, when Kong is on his back scrambling to try to escape, Godzilla is crawling after him on all fours, like a lizard or reptile. That was actually the most animal-like behavior I've seen from this incarnation of G.

 

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59 minutes ago, Dr. MID-Nite said:

And kaiju displaying human characteristics is absolutely within genre. Unless you hated the entire Showa series

 

As mentioned, I was hoping that Gareth Edwards' approach would be taken for the full series of Legendary movies, where there was an attempt to make Godzilla more grounded and "real", something the Showa era abandoned pretty early on.

 

2 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

Displays of dominance without lethal follow-through are actually the rule in conflicts in the animal kingdom

 

Not among the big cats (to use just one example). Nevertheless, such "displays" make no sense in a life-or-death battle between two Titan species that we are told have warred with each other for millions of years. They do make sense, however, if we are to see that moment as an anthropomorphic analog to a samurai showing respect for a worthy adversary. That might make sense if you want to continue the anthropomorphic tradition established by previous Japanese incarnations of the character, but like I've said, I was hoping for something different from the Legendary franchise.

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3 hours ago, zslane said:

 

As mentioned, I was hoping that Gareth Edwards' approach would be taken for the full series of Legendary movies, where there was an attempt to make Godzilla more grounded and "real", something the Showa era abandoned pretty early on.

 

 

Not among the big cats (to use just one example). Nevertheless, such "displays" make no sense in a life-or-death battle between two Titan species that we are told have warred with each other for millions of years. They do make sense, however, if we are to see that moment as an anthropomorphic analog to a samurai showing respect for a worthy adversary. That might make sense if you want to continue the anthropomorphic tradition established by previous Japanese incarnations of the character, but like I've said, I was hoping for something different from the Legendary franchise.

 

Edwards didn't even give us what your suggesting. The trailers suggested a return to the destructive Godzilla from 1954 and we got the "hero" Godzilla of the 70's.  The 2014 was fairly dull and Edwards pulled a "bait and switch" and gave us a totally different movie from the trailers. His Godzilla was in the "hero" mode akin to the 70's mixed with some of the "shock and awe of the Heisei Godzilla. His Godzilla wasn't any more "real" (or original) than the versions presented to us during the Heisei series, but his film was generally less fun to watch. I won't even get into using Akira Takarada to get the goodwill of hardcore fans on his side and then cutting him from the movie. None of the Legendary films were great (and all were lacking in several ways), but the latter two captured the essence of what made these films fun to a greater degree than Edward's film ever did.

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