zslane

I think it is worth pointing out that in that particular case, the plaintiff was trying to argue that the "things the characters do in the game" (via game mechanics) are part of the copyrightable "expression" (of the characters), which the court dismissed in its judgment. This was ultimately a copyright infringement case, which the plaintiff lost (as they should have), and not a patent challenge for the game mechanics. The game mechanics only figured into the case tangentially, and ultimately, irrelevantly.

I can get on board with that edict. Applying it to other franchises would mean that, for instance, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ought to drop their obsession with pizza. Which I am perfectly fine with.

The most infamous case of that kind of narrow-minded litigation I can recall is when Kevin Siembieda sued Wizards of the Coast for providing Palladium conversion information in their Primal Order books.

In a nutshell:

I think it has been pretty well documented that the suicide of Zach's daughter had little-to-nothing to do with his departure from the project. That was merely the cover story given to the public.

I grew up during the 1970s loving Godzilla. But for me the Legendary Godzilla is the design my adult self sees as the "way he should have looked all along", conceding of course that it benefits greatly from exceptional CGI production. But Edwards' movie was the first time in 60 years that, to my eyes, Godzilla and the monsters he fought looked 100% real. I also really enjoyed the entire aesthetic of the 2014 movie along with its patient storytelling, and the decision to be sparing with showing the monsters. We had decades of Godzilla movies that were non-stop monster slugfests. For me, that had become old hat and I wanted something different. By the end of the Showa era, I had outgrown Godzilla and the silly rubber suited action and low-budget stop-motion animation that came to define the look of the franchise. I had grown up and, without realizing it, wanted Godzilla filmmaking to grow up too. In my view it didn't do that until 2014. I kinda feel that for those who want to bathe in the cinematic tradition of previous eras, there are still Godzilla movies coming out of Japan that scratch that itch. I was hoping that the Legendary version would continue to be distinctive, modern, and American in the sense that it wouldn't feel quite so beholden to nostalgia for Japanese-derived tropes, traditions, and conventions. But I am obviously in the minority here. One of the few who feels Gareth Edwards' film was the standard that should have set the tone and direction for the franchise going forward. In some ways it did, but I just feel that too much of the realism and nuanced storytelling was discarded in favor of "big dumb monster action" because, ostensibly, that's what audiences were demanding. Well, not this audience member.

I remember the bad old days when RPG publishers would pretend to own invented game terms through trademark even though none of them were actually registered, and would never receive trademark protection in any case. It was the era of rulebooks filled with Uppercase Terminology and a veritable paragraph at the bottom of the edition notice devoted to convincing the reader that all the terms were trademarks. All in an attempt to prevent anyone else from writing and publishing their own supplements for the game system.

Robin was part of a literary tradition of young boys taking on wild, dangerous adventures, such as Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island. I think he works best in that context. But when you take Batman and make his stories dark, grim, and ultra-violent, then kid sidekicks no longer make any sense. You either remove the tween sidekicks from the stories, or you end up looking like an idiot for suggesting that it makes any kind of sense for Batman to bring kids into his lethal world of vigilantism. Pointing out that Batman is a poor mentor of young boys on the basis of stories--and the grimdark setting they inhabit--that aren't appropriate for young sidekicks to begin with is essentially a straw man argument.

WB put that movie on the path to failure from the very start. Firing Snyder and bringing on Whedon out of desperation only made matters worse. But rather than pulling up his big boy pants and just getting through the crappy situation with as much grace as possible, Fisher went the route of passive aggressive resentment, and has turned this into the cross he has chosen to bear for what will probably be the rest of his rather brief career in Hollywood. Was WB responsible for cultivating and fostering a completely miserable on-set environment? Absolutely. Was Fisher being way too precious about his role? Without question. Could it all have been handled better/differently? With all the particular players involved, probably not.

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.

I agree that the people at the top of WB aren't fit for leadership (in the movie business), but not for the reasons Ray Fisher is going on about.

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.

Yes. You might run into a number of trademark infringements, however, depending on how/if the characters and the place names have been registered.

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.

When it comes to game rules, copyrights only exist for a specific written text of rules. So if you completely re-write the rules to any game you are not in copyright violation. Copyrights do not protect ideas or game mechanics. When it comes to game mechanics, the only IP framework that can potentially cover them is a patent, and patents for game systems are extraordinarily rare. I seriously doubt that any of the material you are using was previously patented by anyone. I am confident that you are safe from any legal challenge, at least in terms of how the judgment would go. If you think anyone is litigious enough to take it to court (even though they would lose), you would still have to consider the cost of legally defending your work.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It is always interesting to me how vastly differently people experience the same movie. James Whitbrook of io9 says this about the fights: "...the hits come so few and far between to justify slogging through the rest of it." So which is it? Are there plenty of kaiju fights? Or are they rare, few and far between? I guess it comes down to one's expectations. If you're only expecting one (big) battle, then maybe it feels like this movie delivers plenty of fights, but if you were expecting wall-to-wall kaiju action then maybe it felt too sparse. This is (one of many reasons) why I don't pay much attention to reviews (of anything, not just movies). There's no way to calibrate other people's assessments/opinions with my own to arrive at any useful conclusions about whether I will like it or not. In fact, as misleading as trailers typically are, I can usually tell if I'm going to like a movie much more from a trailer than anyone's review.

I don't know how you got that impression. I don't for a moment think Jackson's changes were arbitrary. I already explained what I feel his reasons were, and yes you are right, I disagree with those reasons rather strongly. I also disagree rather strongly that it couldn't have been done any other way, as if Jackson had a choir of angels directing his hand when writing the script, and that what we got was adapted cinematic perfection. I still enjoy the movies, particularly the extended editions, as I've pointed out repeatedly. That does not, however, make me blind to (what I feel are) numerous unnecessary blunders on Jackson's part. In most respects his achievement is nothing short of astounding, and I give him tremendous props for pulling it off as he did. However, where he changed/compromised/updated the original story under the auspices of "adaptation" I feel he sometimes went too far astray and did not do the original story justice.

I don't see the big problem with that. And I'm pretty confident that audiences wouldn't have had a problem with it either. It's these unnecessary deviations from the canon that just bug me. Farmer Maggot gets so little screen time it is a wonder Jackson left him in the film at all, or that his actions weren't handed off to some other character, like Grima Wormtongue, in some misguided attempt at foreshadowing (and bringing him full circle at the end in case he chose to do the Scouring). Yet Jackson decided that it was important to retain a relatively unimportant and forgettable character like Farmer Maggot anyway. So Farmer Maggot stays, but Glorfindel gets the cut from the cinematic history of Middle Earth as re-written by Peter Jackson.

Preach it, brother. I get that Jackson didn't want to introduce a character who would suddenly appear, do something heroic, and then just disappear from the story, but I still don't like swapping out Glorfindel for Arwen, or transferring the power of her father (who had Vilya at his disposal for such things) to her. As an aside, Tolkien organized the complete work into six "books", adding further confusion. Moreover, he submitted the material to Unwin over several years, not all at once, so the publisher couldn't have released it as a single volume in any case.

Indeed. In the books, Arwen was less involved in the War of the Ring than, say, Galadriel, but she was given more to do in the movies, which is irksome. In fact, if the goal was to have another strong female character in the movies, in addition to Eowyn, I would have just eliminated Arwen completely and instead showed the defense of Lothlorien and Galadriel at her most fierce.

The love between Aragorn and Arwen is well documented in the source material, so clarifying it (for audiences) is not really a case of diverting from the canon, but rather just devoting a bit more attention to it (in the main narrative). That's not much of an adaptation sin, in my view.