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The only way to engage with a bad faith instigator is to laugh at them. He's only tolerated in cined because he's got a cargo cult propping his bullshit up. SMG's not as awful as BravestOfTheLamps was, but he's still a useless tit who thinks he's an auteur film theorist who is further up his own rear end than Gene Roddenberry could ever hope to be. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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# ? Jun 13, 2019 01:57 |
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# ? May 30, 2024 14:08 |
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I'm disappointed he didn't like Godzilla but he's still right about Captain America.
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# ? Jun 13, 2019 01:59 |
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:And that’s where you need to look at characterization. There was Ghidorah's high-speed regeneration and immunity to the Oxygen Destroyer, right? At the very least, those traits set him apart from the other MUTO/Titans/Kaiju. And I'm not sure if I'm perfectly remembering that scene, but I think she was just discussing the pertinent meanings and understanding of what dragons were among various cultures and their significance. In that sense, William Blake's art wouldn't be an example of eyewitness testimony, but, at best, the latest chain in a centuries-long game of telephone, with Ghidorah's appearance during humanity's early days making him the progenitor of historic and modern-day dragon-related mythology.
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# ? Jun 13, 2019 02:02 |
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Roland Jones posted:So, basically, if you ignore everything the movie says and shows that contradicts you and deliberately misinterpret the rest, you can draw whatever interpretation from it that you want? Amazing, I never considered that. The movie doesn’t show Ghidorah falling from space, and the movie also doesn’t say anything about it. The characters say things, but they’re obviously wrong. Like Morpheus in The Matrix claiming that human bodies generate infinite energy. That’s obviously not why the machines have them hooked up. There are a lot of misconceptions surrounding this film. Like you’ll see people claiming it’s a modern-day Showa film because those are ‘the campy ones’. For starters, Godzilla 2 is really overtly condensing the entire plot of the 1990s Versus Series into a single film. Characters are combined or switched, but (for example) the entire thing with the ‘Oxygen Destroyer’ in the film, and then Godzilla being reawakened from a period of dormancy, is a repeat of the Anti-Nuclear Bacteria plotline in Godzilla Vs. Biollante and Godzilla Vs. King Ghidorah. Mothra’s death is derived from Godzilla Vs. Mechagodzilla 2, and so-on. But then the film is, narratively, a remake of Giant Monsters All-Out Attack, with ‘Guardian Beasts’ from ancient temples rising up to cleanse the homelands. There’s almost zero similarity to any Showa film. None of the films have this overwhelming preoccupation with royalty and usurpation. Godzilla 2 is a ‘Millenium Series’ film more than anything. [The very concept of a Showa film is questionable, being arbitrarily based on plot canon within the franchise more than anything. Some people try to divide the early films into the ‘real’ ones and the ‘kids movies’ of the 1970s (i.e. the ‘Champion Series’). But the split actually occurred much earlier, at the tail end of 1965 - the date that Ishiro Honda’s contract with Toho ended.]
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# ? Jun 13, 2019 02:17 |
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:There are a lot of misconceptions surrounding this film. Like you’ll see people claiming it’s a modern-day Showa film because those are ‘the campy ones’. All else aside I *do* largely agree with this stuff. Except for the movie being a "narrative remake" of GMK, that I'm not so sure about.
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# ? Jun 13, 2019 02:22 |
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HannibalBarca posted:All else aside I *do* largely agree with this stuff. Except for the movie being a "narrative remake" of GMK, that I'm not so sure about. It’s the same story, except bloated with all those Vs. References. What characterizes most of the ‘Millenium Series’ is the overwhelming reaction against Godzilla 1998. Suddenly you have all these jokes about how that’s not the real Godzilla - obviously motivated by a degree of insecurity. Godzilla 1998 remains one of the top-grossing films in the series. Godzilla’s often fought clones and doppelgängers over the years, but there’s never been this fear of ‘losing his crown’ before 1998.
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# ? Jun 13, 2019 02:28 |
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Godzilla 2014 already posited a world where believing in Titans was a fringe conspiracy theory, only for the conspiracy theorist's ramblings to be proven completely correct. This is actually a pretty significant distinction from the vast majority of Godzilla movies, where the existence of monsters is either an already-established fact of life that is alarming but not secret, or an origin story where nobody expected the Godzillasaurus to suddenly be reborn into the modern day through the power of the atom or whatever, and his appearance completely ruptures our assumptions about reality. Based on that, it seems far more likely that KotM is validating the kind of kooky ancient aliens pseudoscience that leads to the conclusion that Ghidorah is, in fact, a space alien. It's natural to want to object to this, but arbitrarily substituting your assumptions about reality (correct or not) for what the film shows you is, ironically, exactly what led to all the nonsensical criticism directed at Prometheus.
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# ? Jun 13, 2019 02:29 |
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Godzilla 2014 already posited a world where believing in Titans was a fringe conspiracy theory, only for the conspiracy theorist's ramblings to be proven completely correct. This is actually a pretty significant distinction from the vast majority of Godzilla movies, where the existence of monsters is either an already-established fact of life that is alarming but not secret, or an origin story where nobody expected the Godzillasaurus to suddenly be reborn into the modern day through the power of the atom or whatever, and his appearance completely ruptures our assumptions about reality. Yeah, I mean there's the joking about the Hollow Earth and secret underground passages through said Hollow Earth, but then the submarine randomly gets moved, a character shouts "I knew it! The hollow earth is real!" etc, and, importantly, nobody discounts him, and no alternative is suggested or implied . Clearly, in the setting of this film, some/all of the Ancient Aliens-esque theories are correct.
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# ? Jun 13, 2019 02:38 |
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He's got a good point: Ghidorah being from space is something explained entirely in dialogue. Honestly, it's a shame they didn't have an astronomer turn up and show them some classified files from the Venus probes (or the Mars rovers) with evidence that Ghidorah destroyed an ancient civilisation there. That would be an excellent callback to the original films, add yet another hilariously batshit crazy conspiracy theory to the mix, and actually convey that he's from space more effectively. Or have him be inside an asteroid rather than an ice sheet, though that obviously robs them of one of the better shots of the film, with Ghidorah's heads trapped in the Antarctic ice sheet.
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# ? Jun 13, 2019 02:44 |
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ungulateman posted:He's got a good point: Ghidorah being from space is something explained entirely in dialogue. Thank God(...zilla) some of you don't write these movies. IMO the last thing KotM needed was more science rambling and dialogue-y scenes with glossed over ideas
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# ? Jun 13, 2019 02:48 |
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:There are a lot of misconceptions surrounding this film. Like you’ll see people claiming it’s a modern-day Showa film because those are ‘the campy ones’. I kinda got Gamera 3: Revenge of Iris vibes with the opening scene depicting Godzilla as the destroyer of families within a flashback. It and GMK getting referenced are great in my book, I love Kaneko's Kaiju movies! ungulateman posted:He's got a good point: Ghidorah being from space is something explained entirely in dialogue. I'm still mad that they nixed Ghidorah whispering to the researchers from the ice and enticing them to betray one another/humanity. I still think that would have been extremely cool.
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# ? Jun 13, 2019 02:50 |
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In the old movies was it Ghidorah who would fly to earth as a giant Diamond
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# ? Jun 13, 2019 03:09 |
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Mokelumne Trekka posted:Thank God(...zilla) some of you don't write these movies. IMO the last thing KotM needed was more science rambling and dialogue-y scenes with glossed over ideas All you need is a shot of the Mars Canals, except it's actually a series of artificially-constructed canals, torn apart by an unknown force. Uncle Wemus posted:In the old movies was it Ghidorah who would fly to earth as a giant Diamond Spacegodzilla did that. Ghidorah first appeared as a magnetic metorite, then demonstrated the ability to fly through space.
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# ? Jun 13, 2019 03:11 |
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Godzilla 2014 already posited a world where believing in Titans was a fringe conspiracy theory, only for the conspiracy theorist's ramblings to be proven completely correct. You can’t rely too much on the other films; Godzilla 2 retcons a ton of things. One of the most interesting ideas in 2014 is that Godzilla isn’t ‘awakened by the atom bomb’. He’s always been on the move, and he’s awakened because he wants to kill the MUTOs. The atom bombs were an attempt to kill Godzilla, remember? Godzilla wasn’t, like, asserting dominance in the previous film; he was exterminating the other species. (And there’s that MUTO‘s EMP effect at the end?) quote:Based on that, it seems far more likely that KotM is validating the kind of kooky ancient aliens pseudoscience that leads to the conclusion that Ghidorah is, in fact, a space alien. It's natural to want to object to this, but arbitrarily substituting your assumptions about reality (correct or not) for what the film shows you is, ironically, exactly what led to all the nonsensical criticism directed at Prometheus. The scientifically proven existence of Thor doesn’t mean Odinism is the correct religion. It means Odinism ceases to be a religion altogether. The existence of the ancient civilization in this film, likewise, does not mean that Godzilla worship should supplant Christianity or whatever. (Why did they die out?) (The idea that the monsters were worshipped by lost, dead civilizations, as it happens, comes from the Versus Series. The Infant and Skull Islands were very much populated in earlier films.)
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# ? Jun 13, 2019 03:25 |
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Like, Emma’s entire plan is predicated on the fact that MONARCH has built massive underground shelters capable of housing Earth’s entire population and presumably protecting them against monster attacks (even though they are basically all subterranean). These shelters are never shown, or even mentioned, outside of like a single line of dialogue. Emma's plans are comprehensible if you think of them as being kind of dumb. I took her as a kind of soft-headed liberal who decides that the Malthusian solution is the only way, and that makes her susceptible to eco-fascism. Releasing the titans is supposed to save the world because they are these big avatars of nature to her, and more nature means more balance, and more balance in turn means the world is saved. The shelters are kind of more of an idea than a reality: Emma has this idea that 'enough' people will survive and rebuild but the morally important reality are the billions of people who will actually die. Asking "but how is this supposed to work?" is kind of the wrong question, because there's no way it works. Her lovely mystical ideas of nature and her self-righteous Malthusianism have led her to take the actions of eco-fascism. it almost certainly could have been realized better, but Emma's motivations do seem to be both comprehnsible and represent a real-world analog.
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# ? Jun 13, 2019 03:31 |
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I think it is interesting actually to think about how the movie succeeds or fails in dramatizing its themes through cinematic language. Ghidorah is said to be an alien in dialogue, but he never really FEELS alien (his design, framing, behaviour), or to be more precise, any more alien than any of the other monsters. Even the music could have helped here, or using the weird classic Ghidorah roar. And this disconnect of the dialogue from the rest of the movie extends to stuff like the conflicting agendas of Godzilla, Ghidorah, Emma, and Tywin. I enjoyed the movie but this seems like a legit thing to talk about, and not trolling.
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# ? Jun 13, 2019 03:31 |
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Uncle Wemus posted:In the old movies was it Ghidorah who would fly to earth as a giant Diamond That was Gigan, that was a cool effect the couple times they used it.
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# ? Jun 13, 2019 03:58 |
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Peacoffee posted:“Now, I gotta warn you about this one...this one...this one—it aint normal, okay?” You're saying the left head's name is Aby Normal?
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# ? Jun 13, 2019 04:18 |
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nemesis_hub posted:I think it is interesting actually to think about how the movie succeeds or fails in dramatizing its themes through cinematic language. Ghidorah is said to be an alien in dialogue, but he never really FEELS alien (his design, framing, behaviour), or to be more precise, any more alien than any of the other monsters. Precisely. The declaration that he’s “an invasive species” is seemingly arbitrary. Like, the MUTOs aren’t? How are those things “part of The Natural Order” if Ghidorah (with his snake necks and distinctive mammalian features) isn’t? Hand Knit posted:The shelters are kind of more of an idea than a reality: Emma has this idea that 'enough' people will survive and rebuild but the morally important reality are the billions of people who will actually die. But that’s Charles Dance’s motivation. This is why it was actually vital to show what the gently caress they’re talking about with these underground shelters - how big are they, how well-stocked etc. Is she saving 6 billion people or 6 million? The Wandering Earth (the year’s best Tokusatsu homage, an unofficial sequel to Ishiro Honda’s Gorath) didn’t gently caress this up. Remember that we have an extremely long sequence showing off a massive but narratively-irrelevant underground base. Why not make that the shelter? Humanity moving underground and giving control of the surface to the monsters is a recurring theme (and evidently what happened to the ancient civilization). So why not show the shelters? Even at the end credits (the best/only good part), the idea of humanity coexisting on the surface with fuckin’ Rodan is handwaved away with a line about how Godzilla just makes it work. What? How?
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# ? Jun 13, 2019 04:59 |
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Precisely. The declaration that he’s “an invasive species” is seemingly arbitrary. Near as I can tell, it's because he's Literal Satan. "The Natural Order" is the film's equivalent of 'the divine right of kings' (i nearly typoed that as 'divine right of kongs', which would be a great direction for the sequel). I don't know if it's particularly surprising that a film subtitled 'king of the monsters' is stridently pro-feudalism, to be honest.
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# ? Jun 13, 2019 05:17 |
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Precisely. The declaration that he’s “an invasive species” is seemingly arbitrary. He's a unique space alien
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# ? Jun 13, 2019 05:35 |
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Watching Hedorah tonight and, boy, that shot of Godzilla propelling himself...
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# ? Jun 13, 2019 09:57 |
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Arcsquad12 posted:The only way to engage with a bad faith instigator is to laugh at them. He's only tolerated in cined because he's got a cargo cult propping his bullshit up. Having an incorrect or contradictory film opinion isn't grounds for probation. Being an rear end in a top hat about your film opinion is, though. So is bringing up old forums drama is. You can tell someone they're wrong without insulting them or postulating their relevance to CineD.
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# ? Jun 13, 2019 12:49 |
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:But that’s Charles Dance’s motivation. This is why it was actually vital to show what the gently caress they’re talking about with these underground shelters - how big are they, how well-stocked etc. Is she saving 6 billion people or 6 million? Emma cares whether people survive, Jonah's happy for everyone to just die. Her plan is in effect the same as his, because her soft-headed liberal Malsthusianism is effectively (or at least gives way to) eco-fascism. Or, in other words, the problem with her plan isn't that she hasn't done the math right about how many people fit in bunkers, it's that she's condemned everyone else to die to satisfy an idea of natural balance. This is why the only time we spend in a bunker is her and Jonah and Madison in a bunker while Boston is on fire, and this is why the conclusion to her arc is her sacrificing herself.
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# ? Jun 13, 2019 13:42 |
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Panfilo posted:The scene made it look like Tywinn was just at the local fish market picking something up. He's like "we'll take it!" and I was half expecting the Mexican guys to weigh the head on a fish scale, ring him up then diligently start wrapping lefty up in newspaper. I half expected a callback to Mothra vs Godzilla, except instead of figuring out the price of the Mothra egg by its equivalent in chicken eggs we're using fish.
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# ? Jun 13, 2019 14:01 |
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The allegory isn't hard to spot : Emma makes a deal with the Devil in the form of Ghidorah to achieve her aims, and it turns against them because she fails to understand the nature of the beast, and eventually must redeem herself through giving her life for both her family and the true king.
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# ? Jun 13, 2019 14:02 |
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quote:None of the films have this overwhelming preoccupation with royalty and usurpation.
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# ? Jun 13, 2019 14:06 |
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Chronojam posted:He's a unique space alien Even if space aliens were proven to exist, they wouldn’t be ‘unnatural.’ And every monster character in the film is ‘unique’ (one of the most bizarre retcons is that, instead of having an entire underground ecosystem as implied in the previous films, here there are only like two dozen monsters total, worldwide). ungulateman posted:Near as I can tell, it's because he's Literal Satan. In 1956, the title “King of the Monsters!” was appended by the Americans for marketing purposes. It refers to other films, such as King Kong and The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms - the films from which Gojira drew its inspiration.* Godzilla was never actually a king over other monsters, even in the films where he would actually interact with other monsters. In this film, Ghidorah doesn’t do anything particularly Satanic. He just flies around. And Godzilla doesn’t do anything regal. More than any other film, the characters are projecting these traits onto them. See also Mothra, where she just sends a beacon to show where Godzilla is and the characters’ reactions - based on effectively nothing - range from ‘they have a symbiotic relationship’ to ‘they’re king and queen’ to ‘they’re loving eachother’. This designation of “King” and “Queen” comes entirely from the characters. So the question is why they’re fixated on the concept. Of all the Versus Series, Godzilla 2 is most heavily derivative of Godzilla Vs. Mothra (the second-best one), where the narrative is based around the reconciliation of a divorced couple with a young daughter. Mothra and Battra team up despite being seemingly altogether different species of ultra-moth who hate eachother. And even in the bullshit Cosmos religion, they aren’t divorced or anything. *To much fan consternation, Godzilla 1998 was not remake or sequel to Gojira but a re-adaptation based on those two films. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 15:00 on Jun 13, 2019 |
# ? Jun 13, 2019 14:10 |
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It's implied that Dr.s Chen and Ling are either the cosmos/fairies/shobojin, or are from a titan-studying family of ladies with several sets of twins going back generations. It might be that all of Chen's research is her just saying things she knows to be true, and googling yellowhydra.jpg as "research" so as to not give away the game. Or ya know, in this universe there really are ancient cave paintings depicting titans doing things. It would have been helpful if they shown those repeatedly, or like, one of the titans spent some time in a temple to itself to really drive home the idea that these monsters are actually the primordial gods of a planet that had forgotten them. If they'd backed up the hollow earth theory with anything, that would have done a lot of good as well.
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# ? Jun 13, 2019 14:10 |
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OB_Juan posted:It's implied that Dr.s Chen and Ling are either the cosmos/fairies/shobojin, or are from a titan-studying family of ladies with several sets of twins going back generations. It might be that all of Chen's research is her just saying things she knows to be true, and googling yellowhydra.jpg as "research" so as to not give away the game. That's bringing in plot info from not only other films, but other films that aren't even in the same plotline. Godzilla Vs. Destroyer did include two psychics as a callback to the earlier Godzilla Vs. Mothra - but those characters were not twins because the "psychic" part is more important than the "twin" part. In this film, the characters being twins is this bizarre non-sequitur. OB_Juan posted:Or ya know, in this universe there really are ancient cave paintings depicting titans doing things. It would have been helpful if they shown those repeatedly, or like, one of the titans spent some time in a temple to itself to really drive home the idea that these monsters are actually the primordial gods of a planet that had forgotten them. Those paintings don't depict the same characters as in the movie. Mothra is literally born onscreen in this movie, and we don't really have any reason to believe that cavemen have a better understanding of biology than even MONARCH's idiots. In the Kong movie, Kong is a 'teenager', born recently. He had parents, who died. In a very basic sense, a painting of a dinosaur and a gorilla looking at eachother doesn't mean this is some archetypal conflict destined to be repeated until the end of time.
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# ? Jun 13, 2019 14:28 |
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Concept art is always a treat
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# ? Jun 13, 2019 19:04 |
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Vinylshadow posted:
Cloverfield 2 looking real good.
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# ? Jun 13, 2019 19:27 |
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why do you refer to it as the Versus series and not its actual title?
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# ? Jun 13, 2019 19:48 |
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nemesis_hub posted:Ghidorah is said to be an alien in dialogue, but he never really FEELS alien (his design, framing, behaviour), or to be more precise, any more alien than any of the other monsters. I think he did. The fact that he was way stronger than the others and that none of the weapons worked on him demonstrated it well enough I thought. I had a ton of problems with the film but Ghidorah being a different kind of titan wasn't really one of them.
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# ? Jun 13, 2019 20:22 |
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Vinylshadow posted:
Looks much more fishlike, despite the neck knuckles.
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# ? Jun 13, 2019 20:43 |
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Even if space aliens were proven to exist, they wouldn’t be ‘unnatural.’ And every monster character in the film is ‘unique’ (one of the most bizarre retcons is that, instead of having an entire underground ecosystem as implied in the previous films, here there are only like two dozen monsters total, worldwide). Ghidorah is a space alien, is portrayed as tying into an early civilization legend about a space alien, and is shown to be unaffected by the oxygen destroyer. That makes him "unnatural" and outside the film's understanding of the natural order of the planet Earth (a central theme of the current series). This contrasts with things like the "natural" parasitism vs predation exhibited by, say, the MUTOs and big G's species. I'm not sure if you missed the prior film or forgot, but there are multiples. MUTOs in particular show very distinct sexual dimorphism; another female MUTO shows up at the end of this new one, for example. I'm not sure if you missed the related scenes or forgot, but the new film also discussed the whole "hollow Earth" thing and implies there are other monsters that just aren't awake or dug up. You might've missed or forgotten, but Mothra is also shown to have another egg ready to hatch; if not for Rodan (who is also still without a mate in the current series) there could've been a pair of Mothras running around.
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# ? Jun 13, 2019 21:09 |
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Maybe there's a Rodana napping somewhere in Krakatoa or Mt. Saint Helens IDK
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# ? Jun 13, 2019 22:28 |
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Director confirmed a skeleton may or may not be Anguirus. https://comicbook.com/anime/2019/06/11/godzilla-king-of-the-monsters-director-confirms-classic-kaiju-anguirus-titan-movie/ https://twitter.com/Mike_Dougherty/status/1137479824505622528
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# ? Jun 13, 2019 22:42 |
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Need to rewatch the bit in the underwater city since it looked like there was a ton of shipwrecks there.
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# ? Jun 13, 2019 23:31 |
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# ? May 30, 2024 14:08 |
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Vintersorg posted:Director confirmed a skeleton may or may not be Anguirus. Mike i love the movie but if you killed my boy Anguirus off-screen I will never forgive you.
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# ? Jun 13, 2019 23:59 |