Lord Liaden

That is tragic. But I have to say, "glacier" and "India" are words that don't normally connect in my mind. Silly cliche, of course, since India's northern border is the Himalayas.

Yep, this new movie was in the planning stage at least since Skull Island, probably earlier. In the interest of fairness, I should point out that King Kong vs Godzilla was the third movie in the franchise, from 1962; while Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla was the fourteenth and came out in 1974. By that point we're looking at a whole different continuity. But it is true that the writers for those movies would sometimes give Godz whatever plot ability they wanted for a particular movie. The character's origin and history were also rebooted several times, even from one film to the next.

The idea is hardly unprecedented, there having been an earlier Kong vs Godzilla movie where they were close to the same size. I should note that in said movie, Kong needed an additional gimmick to beat Godzilla too. They gave Kong the power to absorb electricity to vitalize himself, and to release it by touch. If the origin of the axe is what people are guessing, it makes more sense than that in context. I do like that this movie seems to be weaving the mythology of this "monsterverse" further into the story. It feels like it's part of something bigger.

We're the monkeys with typewriters. Just by random chance we're bound to turn out something good.

Lots of people don't understand their own kink. But I would guess Gov. DeSantis meant something like, "at bayonet point," an image of armed compulsion.

No, this is how you get... der Leiter! You just need to change the mustache...

Champions International: Lugendu is in the website store. Purchased and downloaded, will read and review soon.

This reactor won't be doing anything it doesn't normally do, they're just going to take unusual measurements. In a comics universe or RPG game setting, they wouldn't be measuring time violations, they'd be trying to deliberately create them. And yes, "hilarity" would ensue.

The comment section seems to have dubbed that move, "the atomic b!tch-slap." To me it looked less like a slap, and more like Godz raked his claws across Kong's face.

The official Japanese trailer, with a little different footage.

If that's the hand of God, it would explain a lot.

Thank you, Kaiju Krusader. I particularly remember 2001's Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack, which has as its instigating premise, the corpse of the Godzilla killed in 1954 being revived and regenerated by the collective souls of those unjustly killed by the Japanese military during WW II, possessing Godzilla to drive him to destroy Japan in revenge. That's not only thought-provoking, but a bold move for a commercial film made for Japanese consumption. But that was still, at base, used mainly as an excuse for awesome giant monster action.

Yes, it is wrong to powergame. But you can overpower anyone who doesn't like it.

Well that's your problem. You never realized that those weren't humans. 👽

I know scholars who would literally give their right arms to spend a year in the Library of Alexandria before it was ravaged. I shudder to think what they'd give to get into this place.

Thank you, slikmar. If I misunderstood the Doctor's meaning I humbly apologize. 😔

Trace Adkins died?!

Is the parking for major college football stadiums really that limited? I'm no afficionado of the sport, but those stadiums look huge, and they're often pretty full. Parking logistics have to have been taken into account.

Drysdale isn't a teammate, he's a parasite. He'd be all about getting as much of Howell's money as he could for his bank, and holding onto it for dear life.

It also doesn't mean that any media outlet is required to give everyone a platform for their speech. The First Amendment only applies to government repression of speech. Fox News is a business that has to sell itself to survive. Their management has every right to cancel any program they believe threatens their business. This is proving to be the only way to get contemporary media and public figures to consider the consequences of their actions. Hit them in their wallets.

No. The American movies are not devoid of more serious themes. In the first Legendary Godzilla film, we are explicitly told that the arrogance of man is in thinking nature is under our control, and not the other way around. We're repeatedly shown that these giants operate on a scale where we don't even matter. Our vaunted technology is not only stripped away from us, but gets out of our control and nearly causes even greater tragedy. We see the effect of tragic loss on a family, estrangement and obsession. There are constant reminders of the legacy of our nuclear age, whether it's death caused by a reactor accident, the abandoned ruin of the city of Janjira, a rogue nuclear bomb, or a main character whose father died in the Hiroshima explosion. The titular character is described not just as an animal or a monster, but as the embodied balance of nature. The second Godzilla film plays on that balance of nature concept, and how Man has disrupted it, as the precipitant for the picture's main conflict. We have another example of a family broken by tragedy, and how it drives one character into isolation while motivating another to make a disastrous choice with the best of intentions. We get the revelation that these Titans have been woven throughout our history and mythology, back to prehistoric times -- that they were in fact our first gods, and devils. And we have the major character from the first film who lost his father in Hiroshima, sacrificing his own life in a nuclear explosion to help Godzilla, and thereby save the world. In Kong: Skull Island we have a nod to American politics and society in the early Seventies, and how they tie into the expedition to the island. The theme of Man vs Nature is repeatedly emphasized, from reckless deployment of bombs that provokes Nature to retaliate; to the Monarch representative driven by fear that the ancient species ruling Earth would take it back if we don't destroy them first; to the colonel determined to show Kong that "Man is king." That character is portrayed as an old soldier facing lack of purpose without war, but with the death of his men on the island becomes an Ahab determined to kill Kong. Yet on the opposite side we have the example of a human culture on the island that has learned to adapt to the creatures they share it with, and formed a bond of respect and reverence for one species that's actually benevolent. I would never claim that any of these themes and characterizations are the core of these movies. The movies are first and foremost spectacles and thrill rides for entertainment; these elements are seasoning. But the same can be said for most of the Japanese Godzilla films.

After he fulfilled his life's dream, that's exactly what he became.

Honestly, I've seen bigger plot holes in other critically-acclaimed movies. But the mechanics of these exercises in cosmic power were never the crux of this story. The crux was the human drama, how our protagonists, and the rest of our kind, reacted to these monumental events. At bottom those events were created to stimulate and enhance the internal conflicts.

I'm posting these links to the Internet Archive one more time. Shin Gojira aka Godzilla Resurgence, in Japanese with English subtitles. Godzilla 1954, in Japanese with English subtitles.

As I've said before, Thanos is "The Mad Titan." Not "The Misguided Titan" or "The Debatable Titan." He's lived for so long with the tragedy of his planet and the conviction that he could have saved it had they listened to him, he's incapable of seeing the flaws in his plan. Many real-world people suffer such delusions.