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Walking into the theater right now to see this!

Excited - but dammit Rodan better not get offed!!!

Saw it...thoughts in the spoiler.

Reading through some of these comments, I recommend that none of you go see the original 1954 Gojira. You'd be deeply offended by how 'GINO' and anthropocentric it is.

 BaronIveagh wrote:
Reading through some of these comments, I recommend that none of you go see the original 1954 Gojira. You'd be deeply offended by how 'GINO' and anthropocentric it is.

It's good in its own way. Like Rambo, the Godzilla series became something very different from the excellent first movie, and fan expectations will generally fall on how the series became rather than where it started.

Well, I saw it and I enjoyed it - quite a bit!

Even made me care about/like Mothra - and that's no mean feat!

One thing which I found odd at the end:



And while I suppose it is an honor to have your city trashed in a Kaiju film, man, someone has it out for Boston, and the Red Sox!

Yep. The original film was a metaphor for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and the evils of nuclear warfare. It was quite brilliant for it's time.

And yes, the sequels became something very different from that original metaphor, becoming a sub-genre of the action-adventure movie instead of the deep philosphical examination of Gojira.

The Sequels maintains the heavy focus on the Human characters though, that never went away. To my knowledge there were only a couple that were extremely limited in human interaction. Those were the one that have Minilla and the kid, and Final Wars.

The former, is probably the worst Godzilla movie to come out of Japan. The latter is probably in the "So bad its good category."

Final Wars is that perfect mix of terrible but also super watchable.

 Alpharius wrote:

And while I suppose it is an honor to have your city trashed in a Kaiju film, man, someone has it out for Boston, and the Red Sox!

Won't lie. .. as a Yankees fan, that certainly warmed my heart



Weirdly, this is the 2nd film in the "new" series of films, and each one has used Blue Oyster Cult in the end credits, and yet, I dont think Tokyo has made a single appearance in any of them??

 Ensis Ferrae wrote:
Weirdly, this is the 2nd film in the "new" series of films, and each one has used Blue Oyster Cult in the end credits, and yet, I dont think Tokyo has made a single appearance in any of them??

Isn't this the 3rd film? Godzilla 2014, Kong Skull island, and now King of Monsters. Godzilla Vs Kong is in the works

-

 VictorVonTzeentch wrote:
The Sequels maintains the heavy focus on the Human characters though, that never went away. To my knowledge there were only a couple that were extremely limited in human interaction. Those were the one that have Minilla and the kid, and Final Wars.

The former, is probably the worst Godzilla movie to come out of Japan. The latter is probably in the "So bad its good category."

I love Final Wars. It knows exactly what kind of movie it is. It's brilliant in its own way.

My favorite Godzilla movies tend to have very stylized human scenes that know what kind of movies they're in, such as a Final Wars, Monster 0, Biollante, Skull Island, and terror of Mechagodzilla. This latest movie has some characters like that, the military people, sidekick scientists and Charles Dance, but the main humans just dragged.

 Galef wrote:

 Ensis Ferrae wrote:
Weirdly, this is the 2nd film in the "new" series of films, and each one has used Blue Oyster Cult in the end credits, and yet, I dont think Tokyo has made a single appearance in any of them??

Isn't this the 3rd film? Godzilla 2014, Kong Skull island, and now King of Monsters. Godzilla Vs Kong is in the works

-

Technically. . . I mean yeah, Kong Skull Island is in the same universe. . . but they didn't play "Godzilla" by BOC (or some remix of it) in the end credits, so not a "godzilla" movie within that specific series. . . ATM, I'd liken Kong to the Han Solo movie: we all know its in the same universe, and somewhere on the timeline, but it isn't a part of a main trilogy.

 Ensis Ferrae wrote:

 Alpharius wrote:

And while I suppose it is an honor to have your city trashed in a Kaiju film, man, someone has it out for Boston, and the Red Sox!

Won't lie. .. as a Yankees fan, that certainly warmed my heart

I'm guessing someone involved was one as well, and didn't like what happened last year either! (Or maybe even in '04!)

Still wondering how Kong is going to get upgraded so that he can at least maybe reach up to Godzilla's waist?

I mean, Big G has got about 300 feet (!) on him...

EDIT!

New Godzilla also got just big enough (again!) to be the tallest version!

The biggest version is over 300m tall. Its the one from the gak netflix anime ones.

Man, that Godzilla is so cool, it didnt deserve that series.

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
Man, that Godzilla is so cool, it didnt deserve that series.

I actually liked how they did the Mechagodzilla in that series, but man was King Ghidorah done so bad.

Well, this was...boring. It reminded me of some latter-day Peter Jackson movies, or Transformer movies that there was way too much going on. Heavy-handed ecological message, tacked-on human family drama, tons of characters with not enough to do to define their characters or justify their existence in the movie.

2014 Godzilla and to some extent, Skull Island, were much simpler movies. Particularly in the first, director concentrated to, well, direct the movie, setting up scenes and shots so they looked, sounded and felt great. Godzilla wasn't on screen much, but when he was, it was throughly awesome. By contrast here we had monster overload, they were popping up left and right so sense of marvel was gone quite quickly. All the attempts to set up emotional highs fell flat because there were too many of them. And the plot was much too contrived even for a monster flick.

And yeah, what's with the blue toning? It's as if they started shooting "Hey, we only brought blue filters. -Oh I am not walking back to warehouse to search other filters, we shoot with these."

Also, I am REALLY sick of the following cliches:
-extremely specific technical malfunction which forces characters to do in person something incredibly dangerous which otherwise would be simple
-people looking at something extremely dangerous for a minute, standing still with their mouths open like idiots and only starting to run away when the really dangerous thing is right on top of them
-Aircraft armed with weapons with dozens of km's range coming within touching distance of the target.

I frickin' loved this movie! I especially liked the ending.

Backfire wrote:
Well, this was...boring. It reminded me of some latter-day Peter Jackson movies, or Transformer movies that there was way too much going on. Heavy-handed ecological message, tacked-on human family drama, tons of characters with not enough to do to define their characters or justify their existence in the movie.

2014 Godzilla and to some extent, Skull Island, were much simpler movies. Particularly in the first, director concentrated to, well, direct the movie, setting up scenes and shots so they looked, sounded and felt great. Godzilla wasn't on screen much, but when he was, it was throughly awesome. By contrast here we had monster overload, they were popping up left and right so sense of marvel was gone quite quickly. All the attempts to set up emotional highs fell flat because there were too many of them. And the plot was much too contrived even for a monster flick.

And yeah, what's with the blue toning? It's as if they started shooting "Hey, we only brought blue filters. -Oh I am not walking back to warehouse to search other filters, we shoot with these."

Also, I am REALLY sick of the following cliches:
-extremely specific technical malfunction which forces characters to do in person something incredibly dangerous which otherwise would be simple
-people looking at something extremely dangerous for a minute, standing still with their mouths open like idiots and only starting to run away when the really dangerous thing is right on top of them
-Aircraft armed with weapons with dozens of km's range coming within touching distance of the target.

Pretty much...I didn't want to go too heavily into what I didn't like, but my brother asked me about it, and my response was "painfully mediocre". Which is almost worse than being bad in many ways. There's a joy and catharsis in seeing something so utterly gak (read: Battlefield Earth levels of gak) and partaking in the conversations to that effect. There's also joy in celebrating something that brings joy to your life. And then there's...stuff like this. Did I waste my $6.75 or my two hours? Nah. Will I remember anything about this movie in three weeks time? Unlikely. Would I watch it on Netflix out of boredom in three years? Perhaps.

You nailed a lot of the critiques though. Just a really flat movie with a bunch of CGI flash and convoluted plot elements.

In many ways I actually like 1998 Godzilla. Sure, as a Gojira movie, it is certainly GINO, creature design not all that great, some positively awful acting and so on. But as a generic monster flick - or actually, say, Jurassic Park film - it is quite well set up and directed movie. At the time, French nuclear tests were still fresh up in peoples minds so it was clever to employ them as plot device. Monster was revealed gradually and maintained some aura of mystery. Human drama was kept at moderate levels and they didn't try to go for tacky tear-jerking or putting stupid kids in peril. I feel if they just had put some more thought in casting it and not called it 'Godzilla', it would have been regarded as one of the classics of the genre. Instead legions of Godzilla fans went into movie, saw a wimpy skinny lizard running away from the military and came out full of nerd rage about the film whichs main star was not even remotely Godzilla-like.

Sadly that's where our paths diverge. To this date, that Godzilla was the only movie my friends and I actually walked out of in high school. I never saw the full film till maybe 10 years ago on Netflix and barely made it through then.

I maintain it is a decently directed film, with ok basic script. Much of the cast was bad, though, with too many attempts to campy comedy. As a Godzilla film, sure, it's total failure, capturing essentially none of the original characters spirit. In fact it is more influenced by Jurassic Park than Godzilla.

If you replace all instances of 'Godzilla' from the film with 'Indosaurus', and replace atomic origin with genetic meddling, it would fit right into current Jurassic World continuity.

Nurglitch wrote:
I frickin' loved this movie! I especially liked the ending.

Yes!

Lots of fun, really.

Quite the spectacle and definitely worth seeing on as big a screen as possible!

Saw this yesterday and would firmly agree with the sentiments of it being very mediocre.
The CGI was decent but darn dark in places especially the end fight, characters were ok but paper thin, too much focus on meaningless and frankly boring human plots and not enough royal rumbling from the monsters.
Also Godzillas snout was waaaay off, he looked almost simian which is fail.

Mothra was cool however and the underwater sub/nuke scene was decently done. At least it had a bit of heart to it.

Something I really enjoyed about the movie is how it brought it back to a nuclear allegory, which is pretty topical given how nuclear is one of those things that could be a very green technology with the right logistics, and that handled badly can go horribly, horribly wrong.

So it's interesting that they try the nuke as a desperation move, because it's not like they can kill Godzilla any worse than he already is, with a very eco-feminist position that while saving the planet is nice doing so a waste of time if people aren't around to enjoy it. Maybe Godzilla could have taken Ghidorah in the ocean, and maybe not. The oxygen-destroyer is a nice call-out.

In the first movie there's a considerable amount of effort put into making sure Godzilla (and the MUTOs) don't get nuked, ostensibly to protect the Bay Area. That they feed off of radiation is a plot point, but nukes aren't just radiation. So it's a bit of a stretch that setting off the nuke will help restore her, after Godzilla retreats to a radioactive lair, but then it's a Godzilla movie so stuff like the Pacific Rim's "It's analog" and "pure iron" is just fine. If that's where you draw the line you've gone full Kurtz. The logic can be as fuzzy as a gieger counter stuck between Godzilla's toes.

So at the end when Godzilla goes critical, and I loved the count-down for building my tension, and it's like "It's turns out the monster is Godzilla after all."

Wow this movie was a stinker. I just saw it tonight and I definitely see why it's bombing at the box office in the US. The characters make such stupid decisions on the fly that they'd leave a horny teenager in a slasher flick scratching their head at the lack of common sense and the monster special effects look Eragon-level bad at times with (I kid you not) overly dramatic squirrel meme cinematography on the monsters multiple times throughout the film. Characters "acting" during a scene where they're enduring a category 5 hurricane simultaneously with a 9.0 earthquake while ground zero 9/11 violence is going on next to them look like it's instead a moderately rainy and windy day off of the coast of New Hampshire and they're filming a Gordon's fish fillet commercial instead of experiencing first hand the end of the world. Total garbage... and I typically enjoy these sorts of movies. It's not so bad it's good bad but rather WTF just plain bad IMO.

It wasn't a good movie by any stretch, but I enjoyed it quite a bit. The presentation for Mothra was awesome and the final battle pretty damn cool, but unlike Godzilla 2014, the monsters seemed small. The battle was some sort of apocalyptic rumble (and very cool), but humans were surviving it on ground zero? The little girl slowly runnin away from Ghidorah's lightningg blast was ridiculous The trick to a good Kaiju is to make the monster feel as big as they are supposed to be. Godzilla 2014 managed in a few times, but this time, not so much.

If you are considering seeing this...

You are only going to enjoy it if you enjoy monster smackdown type deal. As to the plot.. What plot ?

Seriously though it was the best terrible film ive seen and i enjoyed every second of it. I had zero expectations of seeing anything else rather than mad visuals. I wasn't disappointed!!!

Im surprised how people can bash this film. Did they expect it to deliver a deep and meaningful story? Both me and my friend walked out laughing our heads of it was that bad. But that made it gloriously good if you follow me...

 Argive wrote:
If you are considering seeing this...

You are only going to enjoy it if you enjoy monster smackdown type deal. As to the plot.. What plot ?

Seriously though it was the best terrible film ive seen and i enjoyed every second of it. I had zero expectations of seeing anything else rather than mad visuals. I wasn't disappointed!!!

Im surprised how people can bash this film. Did they expect it to deliver a deep and meaningful story? Both me and my friend walked out laughing our heads of it was that bad. But that made it gloriously good if you follow me...

There isn't anything inherent to a monster smackdown movie that excludes a coherent story; I don't think this personally even came close to delivering that. For feths sake, Godzilla shrinks to half his size at times due to inconsistent special effects/scaling compared both with this and the first movie. A half dozen different special effects houses worked on the movie (I counted during the credits because they were so incosistent and bad) including ILM surprisingly. I'm guessing they didn't do the parts I took issue with as I can't recall a movie where they took the lead on VFX and that stunk this bad.

Actors supposedly in the worst possible hurricane winds in the middle of an active apocolyptic warzone with everything literally being blown into their faces (because the previous camera angle shows it all coming directly towards them) don't even blink let alone avert or cover their faces because the director wanted to show a cheesy tear rolling down a cheek while it's all going on multiple times. Again, I'm not expecting anything close to great acting but this is Coolio on a scifi channel saturday night movie level bad but without the charm despite the obvious talent of most of the key actors involved.

 warboss wrote:

 Argive wrote:
If you are considering seeing this...

You are only going to enjoy it if you enjoy monster smackdown type deal. As to the plot.. What plot ?

Seriously though it was the best terrible film ive seen and i enjoyed every second of it. I had zero expectations of seeing anything else rather than mad visuals. I wasn't disappointed!!!

Im surprised how people can bash this film. Did they expect it to deliver a deep and meaningful story? Both me and my friend walked out laughing our heads of it was that bad. But that made it gloriously good if you follow me...

There isn't anything inherent to a monster smackdown movie that excludes a coherent story; I don't think this personally even came close to delivering that. For feths sake, Godzilla shrinks to half his size at times due to inconsistent special effects/scaling compared both with this and the first movie. A half dozen different special effects houses worked on the movie (I counted during the credits because they were so incosistent and bad) including ILM surprisingly. I'm guessing they didn't do the parts I took issue with as I can't recall a movie where they took the lead on VFX and that stunk this bad.

Actors supposedly in the worst possible hurricane winds in the middle of an active apocolyptic warzone with everything literally being blown into their faces (because the previous camera angle shows it all coming directly towards them) don't even blink let alone avert or cover their faces because the director wanted to show a cheesy tear rolling down a cheek while it's all going on multiple times. Again, I'm not expecting anything close to great acting but this is Coolio on a scifi channel saturday night movie level bad but without the charm despite the obvious talent of most of the key actors involved.

I absolutely agree with you 100%. There were more holes in the plot/continuity/in film reality etc than a cheese grater.
It does not stop it being glorious.