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Manchu wrote: Him realizing the theme of the movie in which he is a character is irrelevant. As a character, he's only supposed to help convey the theme. If the theme is "humans are powerless before nature" then his total lack of relevance to the actions of the monsters is a big check in the convey theme column.
Maybe it's just years of watching underdog movies where the underdog wins spoiling it for me. I'm not talking about exactly what he does, but rather the films portrayal of him. To me the handling of his narrative conflicts with the theme of powerlessness because it seems to want to encourage us to root for him to win and never pulls the rug out from under us even when it tries.
Not sure how to say it really It's the tone of the narrative, not the events of it that feel conflicted to me. The scenes all feel straight out of another film and jammed into this one where they feel like they don't fit in as well as they should.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2014/05/16 06:16:19
For me the conflict is that I was never convinced that Ford, the main human part of the narrative, ever realized the point himself. His story was a typical man fights nature and wins story in most ways, and this doesn't mesh with what the rest of the film seems to be saying. It was a conflict in tone and style.
Spoiler:
He doesn't win though. He doesn't do much of anything. He burns the eggs I guess, but they would have died anyway absent their food source. He doesn't even do his job as bomb diffuser, a job they're talking about long before it ever actually becomes relevant. "I don't drop bombs dad, I stop them". Except he didn't stop jack. This seemed to be a complaint in my party "He was a bomb diffusing expert that didn't diffuse any bombs!" they exclaimed annoyed. It's like no, the circumstances aren't even going to give you that. The thing you're an expert at? The thing you do, your job, one of the big parts of your identity? Even that can and will be irrelevant in the face of things bigger than you. It does this without making it a point of despair though or making it seem like human efforts lack meaning.
It... worked for me. Like I said though, I'm kind of an odd duck.
This message was edited 6 times. Last update was at 2014/05/16 06:20:04
No the more I think about it the more I think I'm just kind of spoiled from years to typical American movie magic. Ford did all the things an action hero typically does and achieved nothing and my head is confusing that with another sense and confusing itself.
EDIT: Like my head knows he fails all around by my previous experiences are invoking a different set of emotions and mixing the two up I guess.
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2014/05/16 06:20:27
The original Godzilla focuses on destructive power of the atomic age, this film also follows suit. Each of the main characters has a personal loss due to the presence of atomic/nuclear power.
Also in each of the movies the humans are powerless to defeat it. Despite all their intellect and advanced technology they cannot control the power that was unleashed by the atomic age. Godzilla is a symbol of that power and destruction brought by nuclear weapons and mans inner nature to destroy himself, it's not about trying to control nature like Jurassic park (although it's easy to draw the nature connection).
The military always fights Godzilla in a pointless battle, much like a force using swords and spear cannot defeat an army with guns, but an army with guns cannot defeat the atomic threat, it can only delay it.
It's a Pandora's box, ultimately nothing can stop the atomic age, it consumes until there's nothing left and man is powerless to stop it.
In the older films Mothra is the representation of nature unbound and protection of life, Godzilla he's a destroyer and king of monsters, the monsters being reflections of the human condition (anger and war).
This message was edited 3 times. Last update was at 2014/05/16 06:29:49
Paulson Games parts are now at:
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LordofHats wrote: The scenes all feel straight out of another film and jammed into this one where they feel like they don't fit in as well as they should.
I can agree with that. But my explanation, again, is that the film makers just weren't inspired by the kaiju. I think this is very clear in the visual design of the mutos, for example. It is also clear in Ford's ... um, it's not an arc. His "story," I guess.
Each of the main characters has a personal loss due to the presence of atomic/nuclear power.
I feel that is way overselling it.
Spoiler:
Joe and Ford lost the same person. Dr. Serizawa's loss is confined to a nearly throwaway and totally prefunctory reference to the 1954 film via Hiroshima. Indeed, even his name is a throwaway reference to the original film.
Even with a pin in that balloon, I agree that there is a critique of nuclear power here. And it comes off as not especially relevant even given Fukishima. Again, we have a basic and typical misunderstanding of kaiju. "They stand for nuclear power." Nope. Even if that was correct, I don't get how it's supposed to grab audiences in 2014.
This message was edited 3 times. Last update was at 2014/05/16 06:31:14
Really I saw the radiation bits in the film as merely homage/acknowledgement of Godzilla's origin in the 1954 film, or possibly as a way of keeping this iteration connected to the large Godzilla mythos. Really it would be a little odd to go to a Godzilla movie and hear nothing about radiation or atomic power.
But they definitely redefined that aspect in this movie. Godzilla was not a beast born of the atomic bomb in this film, but rather a primordial power. An ancient force far older than us and that fits in with the themes on the power of nature in this new film.
The wife is the most obvious as she's killed when the reactor goes, but it's also a symbolic slow death of her husband. The loss consumes him and becomes his obsession which ultimately consumes his entire being. He died the day of the reactor explosion but like a victim of radiation poisoning he suffers in prolonged agony until he perishes. Because of the father's obsession with the destruction of the plant he is also lost to his son long before he actually dies.
That's reflected on when they return to the house which shows the last day that the family was alive, and like the mothers body being left to rot, so too was the corpse of that home.
Paulson Games parts are now at:
www.RedDogMinis.com
like a victim of radiation poisoning he suffers in prolonged agony
A creative but very tenuous reading.
Spoiler:
Joe's obsession is not a sickness. The sick one is Ford, who has become repressed and detached to the point that his wife has to remind him that his father is part of their family. Joe is presented as vital and in-touch. He's not wasting away, but burning for the truth. This is why Ford has a sense of shame and regret when he admits to Serizawa and Graham that he did not listen to his dad.
Maybe the entire bomb plot of the film could be seen as a reaction to the original Godzilla film? We saw the atomic bomb and started to think ourselves so powerful as to be the rising masters of the universe. In this film, the bomb is our greatest weapon. The height of our ability to destroy and defend ourselves. And it doesn't work. If anything, our mastery of the atom has allowed Godzilla and the Mutos to return and threaten us. Nuclear power is not a height of human achievement, but merely another power we toy with. A force of nature we delude ourselves into believing we control. A dangerous one that could destroy us.
That kind of manages to fuse the themes of this film to the 1954 film creating a direct line in the symbols and themes for both iterations of the Big G. EDIT: While the 54 film focused on the power of the atom unleashed, this one focuses on something bigger. The human arrogance of believing its power could ever be ours to unleash?
This message was edited 3 times. Last update was at 2014/05/16 06:59:06
I think you're onto something in pointing out that nukes are the go-to "only way to be sure" option. The Japanese one-upped nukes from the beginning of the franchise, however, with the oxygen destroyer. The 1954 film thus becomes a meditation on Japan's allegedly unique maturity regarding mass destruction. Well, the US also has a unique maturity, or at least experience if you like, regarding mass destruction. Someone who really appreciated and understood the '54 film might have explored that angle in this picture.
Instead, we got a movie with no insight on destruction or responsibility. The consequence is Godzilla seems out of place in a movie with his name for the title. It's not that they crammed Ford's story into Godzilla's movie. It's that Godzilla accidentally wandered onto the set of Ford's movie so the studio just went with it and changed the marketing direction.
Automatically Appended Next Post: To be perfectly clear, here is what I suspect actually happened:
The studios got $160 M together for a Godzilla movie and the film makers agreed to do it but then shot a bizarre version of the Odyssey with pasted-on references to the 1954 Godzilla film.
This message was edited 4 times. Last update was at 2014/05/16 07:22:18
So, forgive me if this is stupid...is Godzilla actually a Kaiju? I'd never even heard the term until Pacific Rim. I realize I lose nerd points for this question.
Reality is a nice place to visit, but I'd hate to live there.
Manchu wrote:I'm a Catholic. We eat our God.
Due to work, I can usually only ship any sales or trades out on Saturday morning. Please trade/purchase with this in mind.
Godzilla is a daikaiju (giant monster), but yes, the Godzilla movies have been in the genre of kaiju eiga (monster movie) for a long, long time.
Pacific Rim just massively exposed western audiences to the name by specifically calling them kaiju by that term in the movie. Lots of times. Then beating you over the head with it if you didn't get it the first dozen times.
Ok. So, as somebody who only saw the old Godzilla movies a long ass time ago, is Godzilla from another dimension, like the ones in PR? Or a genetic anomaly caused by radiation on earth? Or some other, third thing?
Reality is a nice place to visit, but I'd hate to live there.
Manchu wrote:I'm a Catholic. We eat our God.
Due to work, I can usually only ship any sales or trades out on Saturday morning. Please trade/purchase with this in mind.
timetowaste85 wrote: Ok. So, as somebody who only saw the old Godzilla movies a long ass time ago, is Godzilla from another dimension, like the ones in PR? Or a genetic anomaly caused by radiation on earth? Or some other, third thing?
Godzilla is a byproduct of atomic weapon testing - the movie first appeared in Japan in the mid 50's, so it was sort of an analogy for nuclear weapons and how they're an uncontrollable force.
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You'll note the helicarrier there -- la plus ca change !
The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all
We love our superheroes because they refuse to give up on us. We can analyze them out of existence, kill them, ban them, mock them, and still they return, patiently reminding us of who we are and what we wish we could be.
"the play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king,
I can remember really liking that comic book as a kid (I was in single digits when it came out!), but damn, that's a crappy looking Godzilla, and damn, those are some dumb stories!
It's the actors. They're all stone faced. The only person who seems to walk onto the set and realize "omg we are so screwed" is Joe, who promptly dies after realizing these. Everyone else seemingly realizes they're in a movie and is just going through the motions. There's no sense of dread or terror from any of the main stars about what's happening. At most they seem surprised or in the case of Ken creepily fascinated. Ford has less emotional depth in this film than anyone, seemingly just going 'huh, well here we are' every moment.
Compare this for example to Liam in Taken. He manages to portray a man who is both angry, terrified, and cold blooded all at the same time, and its what really made that movie work. The human side of the story in Godzilla doesn't work, because the actors feel like dolls reading lines of a script and then posing for a commemorative photo shoot.
It sets the human side of the story off kilter and kind of causes the whole thing to splinter.
The studios got $160 M together for a Godzilla movie and the film makers agreed to do it but then shot a bizarre version of the Odyssey with pasted-on references to the 1954 Godzilla film.
I got a good sense that the people behind the film had a passion for what they were doing but the execution, as in so many movies, was off. It's a sad trend in films. The people with the passion often botch the execution, the people with the execution have no passion :(
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2014/05/16 12:47:05
LordofHats, regarding your last point, I would say thats a symptom of the film industry and the desire to make money. The execution is botched because they have to temper the passion with mass market appeal, resulting in a half-assed movie that attempts to have its cake and eat it too. When the execution is successful but the passion isn't there, its generally because the filmmaker is smart enough to know he can't have his cake and eat it to, and so he 'sells out' and compromises, etc. in order to produce a decent film, but loses the passion for it because it isn't the film he wanted to make, just the film he had to make.
CoALabaer wrote: Wargamers hate two things: the state of the game and change.
Passion is not the question. The question is, what is the film's take on Godzilla. Despite a lot of lip-service praise in the script, the film doesn't quite seem to know what to do with him.
As for the performances:
Spoiler:
While Cranston's character is alive, there might as well be no one else in the film. His acting is the real Godzilla of this movie in terms of dominating our attention.
Watanabe managed to look somewhere between confused and disgusted for every second in front of the camera. It's like he's just heard super offensive joke and can't quite believe it. Or just had a stroke and it left a weird, gross taste in his mouth.
Aaron Taylor-Johnson was so generically Action White Man that one wonders if he was developed by EA. He, David Strathaim, and everyone else playing a soldier (excepting Victor Rasuk) was a Call of Duty robot.
Elizabeth Olsen did a good job being worried in a lot of different shades but unfortunately didn't get to do much else after her good wife scene.
IMO the show stealer was Sally Hawkins. Her look and energy stand out in a film with too many super safe casting choices. She lends Watanabe's performance a lot of credibility, managing to evoke a whole career's worth of care and worry as his assistant and student.
This message was edited 3 times. Last update was at 2014/05/16 14:04:41
Still have to agree with reviews that the slower pacing made Godzilla's first reveal especially cool, when they pan all the way up from his feet and screams into the screen.
I got every thing I wanted from this movie. I left and immediately turned to my wife and said, "Well, Pacific Rim just got beat to hell." She agreed.
"By this point I'm convinced 100% that every single race in the 40k universe have somehow tapped into the ork ability to just have their tech work because they think it should."
timetowaste85 wrote: Ok. So, as somebody who only saw the old Godzilla movies a long ass time ago, is Godzilla from another dimension, like the ones in PR? Or a genetic anomaly caused by radiation on earth? Or some other, third thing?
Godzilla is a byproduct of atomic weapon testing - the movie first appeared in Japan in the mid 50's, so it was sort of an analogy for nuclear weapons and how they're an uncontrollable force.
The (much better IMHO) origin and science behind Godzilla from this movie. (major monster spoilers)
Spoiler:
In this movie, Godzilla (and the MUTOS which is basically going to be every monster which is not Godzilla) were primordial beasts which lived on earth long ago when there was a lot more natural radioactivity. They survive of radioactivity and absorb it up, and make the planet habitable to other species. Because they directly compete for food, there is great incentive for all of these creatures to kill each other on sight. Godzilla is the Apex predator on planet earth.
When the natural levels of radioactivity went down, the creatures all went to the bottom of the ocean to feed off the natural radioactivity of the earths core where they basically were dormant. Due to nuclear subs diving deep in the pacific, we basically brought perfect, refined food sources down into the ocean and awakened Godzilla. All of the nuclear tests and such after WW2 was the government trying to kill Godzilla and he basically 'went away'.
They found an insect-like spore which is like Godzilla (the MUTOS which is an acronym for some gak) which decided to begin feeding on the modern nuclear world. The male attacked Japan and fed on a reactor for 15 years. The Female was thought to be dead and her spore was put in the US nuclear waste dump. Both of them got big and fat and ready to reproduce by the thousands.
Male MUTO in Japan called out "Hey, where my Bitches at?" and the Female in the US was like "Awww yeah, come make some babies!" so they started heading towards each other. Godzilla, hearing all this was like "Awww feth no, not on my damn planet." and basically went to hunt them down.
So during all this, 'humans happened' and one japanese dude looking like he gak his pants always saying "Godzilla must fight". Humans did more damage than Godzilla who was surprisingly kind to both ships and city terrain when he was just walking about. He showed very little direct animosity towards man. Godzilla fights them, is a bad ass, beats their asses but gets overwhelmed... and the tiny human which you identify with is going through his own 'I want to give up' struggles... and he frames Godzillas own 'human will to fight' who comes back and wins.
At the end, Godzilla takes a nap then gets up and shuffles out to sea, assuming he is going back to the ocean floor to suck the earths core until next week's atomic monster donkey-cave shows up.
One note: the human destroying the eggs was critical. If Godzilla had actually lost, there would have been nothing preventing the mutos from finding another source of food. I am not convinced the eggs would have simply died as these atomic beasts seem to go dormant not die from lack of food. While it was all moot because Godzilla beat their asses, if he hadn't killed the eggs, they could have deathblowed Godzilla... So there was a small spark of "Tiny Human saves godzilla" which made the whole irrelevant human story arc which framed the destruction relevant. So I actually liked it.
I like this origin better, and it even Retcons nicely the original origins without ruining it. We *ASSUMED* we made him... we were wrong
Oh, and Pacific Rim is trash compared to this. Utter trash.
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2014/05/16 14:42:46
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Chongara wrote: Just saw it. I enjoyed it a lot. As always I'll need to let settle a bit before my final feelings sink in, but it was good.
Spoiler:
It's odd. So much of what I liked about the movie my party hated, or at least thought was stupid/poorly executed.
I really enjoyed that they showed restraint with the monsters. I also liked that they showed the destruction up close. They let you see monsters but not for long, but lingered on the destruction they caused. I like that they actually showed people being dead, you don't usually see that in big destructo films. They did a good job of showing destruction from a very human scale. I thought this made the final payoff with the big fight have some real impact. Godzilla's fatality at the end just blew me away, when that's a stunt they might have pulled in 15minutes on in another movie.
They seemed to want more stompy-stompy. "It was cool when the monsters were fighting, but everything else sucked".
I also enjoy how clearly and thoroughly it dis-empowered the human characters. At every turn what they do has little to no real impact on events, though not for lack of trying.. I remember one of my buddies saying "The whole thing with the father didn't do anything, you could have cut it out entirely and nothing would have changed and it was a 1/4th of the movie". That's kinda the point though, right? It's not like we can show the personal impact of being entirely devoid of agency in the middle of the action, we needed his frustration and the ultimate irrelevance of all his efforts to give the framing for the later failures of more active characters.
They also said it seemed like somebody was trying to make it a military drama/army porn movie... which I didn't really see at all. You don't make the all that modern hardware so utterly impotent if that's what you're going for.
I also really enjoyed how they managed to make you root for godzilla, without trying to make you feel sorry for him, or make it seem like he had some odd higher agenda.
I'm wondering how split opinions will be as more people see it. Then again maybe I'm crazy. Everyone loved Cpt. America 2 and I almost fell asleep during that one...
Yeah, I had some issues with the humans too, like your friends. But I totally agree with your take on the monsters, that was really well done
It's the tone of the narrative, not the events of it that feel conflicted to me. The scenes all feel straight out of another film and jammed into this one where they feel like they don't fit in as well as they should.
