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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Mothra and Godzilla are, incestuously, declared a married couple via a deluge of sex jokes, etc. It’s really bad stuff. What the gently caress? Where are you even pulling the idea that there are (literal or metaphorical) incestuous implications between Mothra and Godzilla? Where is there anything, narratively or metatextually, even remotely indicating that Mothra and Godzilla are related species, let alone siblings?
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Jul 3, 2019 17:31
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Squidtentacle posted:Where are you even pulling the idea that there are (literal or metaphorical) incestuous implications between Mothra and Godzilla? Where is there anything, narratively or metatextually, even remotely indicating that Mothra and Godzilla are related species, let alone siblings? In this particular film, the characters are all like "haw haw they have the bug is loving a dinosaur. Gross." In the broader context of the series, as outlined in my previous post, the grossness stems from the fact that Godzilla and Mothra are coded as siblings. Specifically, in Three-Headed Monster, Godzilla grows to fill the role of Mothra's twin sister (after her offscreen death). The family relationship between the two characters parallels the sibling rivalry between Det. Shindo and his sister, Naoko Shindo. Things get stranger when you take into account the references to the Versus Series. The scene of Mothra sacrificing herself to supercharge Godzilla was copied from Fire Rodan's death in Godzilla Vs. Mechagodzilla 1993. In that film, Fire Rodan is Baby Godzilla's brother/guardian, who doesn't actually have a relationship with Godzilla at all (Godzilla and Baby Godzilla aren't related until Godzilla is convinced to adopt him at the end). This imagery was mashed up with Mothra and Battra, coded as a divorced couple in Godzilla Vs. Mothra 1992, to generate a custody-battle narrative for this film. In short, Godzilla 2's mix of references inadvertently mashes sibling imagery together with marriage imagery.
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Jul 3, 2019 18:23
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Not entirely sure this is the right thread for this, but I just saw Rampage for the first time after avoiding it. Most game to movie projects are just awful. Rampage was fun. Just what I want in a kaiju movie. Not much more to add, no deep thoughts about man's inhumanity to man or anything. Fun to watch, which is all I was looking for.
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Jul 4, 2019 00:30
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Flint Ironstag posted:Not entirely sure this is the right thread for this, but I just saw Rampage for the first time after avoiding it. Most game to movie projects are just awful. I like that the villains have the arcade cabinet for it in their office.
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Jul 4, 2019 02:07
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Was listening to the Now Playing podcast and they said The Rock was originally supposed to turn into a giant monster at the end but he nixed it. They speculated it was when he got shot. I think it was in the comic book thread where folks were talking about how he changes movies he’s in to make them more marketable and/or fit his image.
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Jul 4, 2019 02:38
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The Rock himself transforming into a giant monster would actually have been faithful to the original game (where the giant monsters "devolve" into humans upon being defeated), but would have been a complete and jarring tonal shift from what was otherwise a pretty fun monster movie.
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Jul 4, 2019 04:28
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Flint Ironstag posted:Not entirely sure this is the right thread for this, but I just saw Rampage for the first time after avoiding it. Most game to movie projects are just awful. Agreed and also unlike KOTM, it featured Angiras.
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Jul 4, 2019 04:57
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GATOS Y VATOS posted:Agreed and also unlike KOTM, it featured Angiras. It also featured Varan for like half a second, which is pretty faithful to the record of Varan appearances all things considered.
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Jul 4, 2019 06:07
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:In this particular film, the characters are all like "haw haw they have the bug is loving a dinosaur. Gross." In the broader context of the series, as outlined in my previous post, the grossness stems from the fact that Godzilla and Mothra are coded as siblings. Specifically, in Three-Headed Monster, Godzilla grows to fill the role of Mothra's twin sister (after her offscreen death). The family relationship between the two characters parallels the sibling rivalry between Det. Shindo and his sister, Naoko Shindo. This is not something that was in Godzilla 2. Please don't insert your random fetishes into movies.
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Jul 5, 2019 02:19
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LORD OF BOOTY posted:I can cut this particular Gordian knot: nobody really cares about Rodan outside of the hardest-core kaiju geeks. He's basically cast filler, a monster who can fill any "just throw some random kaiju here I guess" role needed, regardless of the specifics; he's closer to Anguirus in this regard than he is to Godzilla himself. Rodan is the Tien of Godzilla. He jobs just as much as Anguirus (the Krillin of Godzilla), but everyone deep into the series acts like he's the coolest thing because he has some neat tricks. Meanwhile, those who don't care much about the franchise just go "who?" and wonder when more Godzillas are going to show up.
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Jul 5, 2019 08:31
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Beamed posted:This is not something that was in Godzilla 2. Please don't insert your random fetishes into movies. The Godzilla and Mothra characters obviously don’t mate in this film either; a sexual connotation is projected onto their banal interactions by the human characters. (Mothra doesn’t really do anything in the movie - shines a light then dies, not exactly racy stuff.) The question is both why the human characters are thinking this way, and why the filmmakers effectively decided to have their Superman marry Supergirl (aren’t they cousins? “Not in this continuity!”) And the answer in both cases is that people are evidently very heavily invested in making Godzilla not-gay - not "a very unusual he", as they say of the 1998 version. Note that Zilla’s asexual reproduction (and the final image of a surviving egg, promising his resurrection) is pushed onto Mothra in this film. Godzilla is scrubbed of whatever ‘feminine’ traits, which are transferred onto his ‘wife’. From 1954 to 2014, Godzilla is a character who tears couples apart (literally, in many cases). In the original, monstrous Serizawa stands between Hideo and Emiko, preventing their marriage. Godzilla Vs. Mothra, Godzilla threatens the divorced couple who pull together as a family to defeat him. Etc. Mothra is evidently called “queen of the monsters” on the wall of an ancient Chinese pyramid, so everyone immediately concludes that the giant moth species evolved to serve the Godzilla species and bear its children or something. But that doesn’t make a lick of sense - as with all the talk about “alphas”, and when they pixelate the image of a MUTO delivering food to its nest...??? It’s extremely stupid. You don’t have these issues in the earlier films, because Godzilla and pals were simply brothers in Christ.
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Jul 5, 2019 13:59
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Soooooo there's gonna be a Pacific Rim anime series. I'm cautious since Uprising was "meh"
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Jul 5, 2019 14:32
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Kaiju Cage Match posted:Soooooo there's gonna be a Pacific Rim anime series. I'm cautious since Uprising was "meh" Yeah, the premise is kinda  but if it's set before the first movie at least we won't have to put up with any Uprising bullshit.
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Jul 5, 2019 15:07
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Well the first movie was so good and established a neat world in the opening scene so I'd like to see Jaegers used by some more militant dicks in the program to put down some Kaiju doomsday cults and force a hackneyed "man is the real monster" message while teenagers drive the Jaegers in the Franxx style pilot configuration.
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Jul 5, 2019 15:17
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Beamed posted:This is not something that was in Godzilla 2. Please don't insert your random fetishes into movies. Insert The Goofy Movie quote here. It always applies.
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Jul 5, 2019 15:38
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:You don’t have these issues in the earlier films, because Godzilla and pals were simply brothers in Christ. I disagree with about 90% of what you post, but goddamn I cannot deny the awesome power of nonsense like this.
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Jul 5, 2019 16:00
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HannibalBarca posted:I disagree with about 90% of what you post, but goddamn I cannot deny the awesome power of nonsense like this. Mothra's personal symbol (in nearly every incarnation) is a cross laid over the sun. The characters in Mothra (1961) interpret this as a Christian symbol, accompanying Mothra's defense of the meek:  The nuance is, of course, that Mothra-worship predates Christianity. What Mothra represents in '61 is a new-age synthesis of pagan sun-worship and Christianity. Mothra is a proto-Christian figure. This is why, when we get to Ghidorah The Three-Headed Monster, Mothra and her fairies are doing the talk-show circuit, singing songs about happiness, while the Cold War is escalating and the globe is warming (in 1963!). It takes an encounter with an actual Christian doomsday prophet to get Mothra off her rear end, and it's this newly-converted Mothra who successfully rallies Godzilla and Rodan against Ghidorah/Gorath. The fairies explain that, while they and Mothra have communication powers, they lack an ability to predict the future. This inability to prophesy is Mothra's initial ideological limitation: she stands for harmony, when Christ doesn't bring peace but a sword. So it is unfortunately meaningful that the Godzilla 2 people changed Mothra into simply Godzilla’s wife. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 16:40 on Jul 5, 2019 |
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Jul 5, 2019 16:37
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I'm gonna see this movie and be really disappointed if there's no Godzilla X Mothra loving scene
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Jul 5, 2019 16:59
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McSpanky posted:Yeah, the premise is kinda I don't think it's before the first movie. Siblings finding and using abandoned jaegers doesn't make much sense back when the jaegers were still a big international military program.
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Jul 5, 2019 17:23
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McSpanky posted:Yeah, the premise is kinda You know what, gently caress it, the premise is hokey as poo poo, but that's fine. I'll take an excuse plot just to see giant robots fighting giant monsters.
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Jul 5, 2019 17:26
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:And the answer in both cases is that people are evidently very heavily invested in making Godzilla not-gay - not "a very unusual he", as they say of the 1998 version. Note that Zilla’s asexual reproduction (and the final image of a surviving egg, promising his resurrection) is pushed onto Mothra in this film. Godzilla is scrubbed of whatever ‘feminine’ traits, which are transferred onto his ‘wife’. Again, I think you're slightly off- it's not that people specifically don't want Godzilla to be gay, it's that the idea of Godzilla as a sexual being at all is odd and offputting to people. It's noteworthy here that, while the Showa and Heisei movies both give Godzilla offspring, the Showa series never explicitly says how the hell that happened, and the Heisei series has it simply be another member of the Godzillasaurus species that "our" Godzilla adopts. In addition, while translations and English dialogue have typically referred to Godzilla as male, the Japanese dialogue actually uses pronouns closer to it/its. Even in 1998, the reproduction is very explicitly noted as being asexual. Even in KotM, G's relationship with Mothra is more accurately described as symbiotic than romantic or sexual; clearly the giant lizard isn't going to gently caress an insect, and the mental image is sort of horrible, frankly. The humans are just clouding it in flowery metaphor, because they're caught up in humanizing the monsters and viewing their actions through a human lens. The fandom, of course, has run with this, but that's typical for fandom.
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Jul 5, 2019 18:07
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LORD OF BOOTY posted:Again, I think you're slightly off- it's not that people specifically don't want Godzilla to be gay, it's that the idea of Godzilla as a sexual being at all is odd and offputting to people. The claim that Godzilla and Mothra are mates is evidently based on White Dad's earlier assertion that there are only three types of animal interaction: "fighting, feeding, and loving" or whatever. The characters in Godzilla 2 aren't humanizing the monsters; they are specifically 'animalizing' people according to a bad-science understanding of animal behavior. So, for example, it becomes 'natural' for mom to sacrifice herself for her husband and child, because women are by nature submissive-compassionate and the husband needs to step up for his family and be the alpha, etc. This is of course tied in with the quasi-jungian stuff where the monsters are all effectively declared timeless archetypes. What it recalls is Jurassic World, where the male lead fantasizes about being a velociraptor and the female lead fantasizes about being a t-rex - which, of course, culminates in the comedy image of a velociraptor riding into battle on the back of a t-rex.
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Jul 5, 2019 18:55
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:The claim that Godzilla and Mothra are mates is evidently based on White Dad's earlier assertion that there are only three types of animal interaction: "fighting, feeding, and loving" or whatever. Yeah the dialogue (and logic) in this movie is full of evo psych and adjacent bullshit
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Jul 5, 2019 19:23
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Is SMG a holistic movie critic? Nothing contradicts or refutes or provides an alternative, it's all connected and therefore building to an ultimate conclusion
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Jul 5, 2019 19:40
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:they are specifically 'animalizing' people according to a bad-science understanding of animal behavior. So, for example, it becomes 'natural' for mom to sacrifice herself for her husband and child, because women are by nature submissive-compassionate and the husband needs to step up for his family and be the alpha, etc. This is of course tied in with the quasi-jungian stuff where the monsters are all effectively declared timeless archetypes. That complements them humanizing the monsters in spite of what the audience sees more than it refutes it, frankly. Like, the characters are explicitly wrong to do so in my reading: the monsters are animals, straight-up, and are just having human qualities imprinted on them by humans because they are fairly intelligent and emotive monsters. In applying these human characteristics to animals, the humans lose sight of their own humanity and become animals themselves.
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Jul 5, 2019 20:02
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Arcsquad12 posted:Is SMG a holistic movie critic? Nothing contradicts or refutes or provides an alternative, it's all connected and therefore building to an ultimate conclusion Something something highly advanced chatbot.
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Jul 5, 2019 20:04
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https://twitter.com/nyombek/status/1146801537701650432
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Jul 5, 2019 20:15
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Arcsquad12 posted:Is SMG a holistic movie critic? Nothing contradicts or refutes or provides an alternative, it's all connected and therefore building to an ultimate conclusion Inhuman machine jokes aside, I've definitely seen him change his initial criticism if a more convincing reading comes along. Like with Terry's seminal Transformers thread. Umm, that's the only example I can remember with certainty lol. Mad Max?
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Jul 5, 2019 20:43
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One thing that stuck out to me in the film was the particular imagery of King Ghidorah creating/traveling within a hurricane. SMG brought up how originally Ghidorah had "gravity beams" but in KOTM Ghidorah its lightning is pretty explicitly lightning. The takeaway is that Ghidorah is not associated with some intrusive unnatural climate (despite the dialogue) but with fierce yet earthly storms. In the same manner, Rodan is associated with volcanoes and Godzilla is associated with oceans. (More specifically, the light-less depths and the oceanic hollow earth tunnels: the abyss.) This imagery suggests KOTM was at one point a chaoskampf story – where a hero in the storms battles against a monster of the sea. It ties in with the "natural order" stuff, except the ecological themes invert the hero/monster dynamic. So Ghidorah is seen as unnatural, not because it's from space or anything, but because its association with storms and rain water is further associated with human farming, civilization, and further industry and pollution or whatever. Godzilla is natural because of his association with unpotable ocean water and the parts of the world humans cannot easily exploit. The weird thing is while the general imagery remain in the films, whatever payoff there was going to be is absent. Ghidorah rides a storm cloud as a chariot and charges up by plugging into the Eversource Energy powergrid and Godzilla has ocean tunnel fast travel and a temple hidden from the sight of the sun, but what can you take from it? You can imagine a film where, as ecoterrorists, Emma and Jonah free Ghidorah from the antarctic (fresh water) ice not to set it loose but to make it vulnerable to Godzilla – defeat climate change by having a totem of the "natural order" kill the totem of human progress. Or you can imagine it not being a coincidence that the US Navy's Oxygen Destroyer just happens not to effect Ghidorah. (Wasn’t Ghidorah going to whisper to people through the ice in an early draft? Who was listening?) I recall K.Waste theorizing about how the film might go certain directions theologically back when all that had come out were promotional images. And, again, there's still enough of that imagery present in the film to be pretty certain there were designs to explore such themes at one point. Who can even guess how the hell that movie would have turned out?
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Jul 5, 2019 23:13
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LORD OF BOOTY posted:Like, the characters are explicitly wrong to do so in my reading: the monsters are animals, straight-up, and are just having human qualities imprinted on them Ok, so: what are the monsters’ actual qualities, then? The Mothra egg “wakes up”, after centuries or millennia, and hatches into a big larva. It’s never really explained why this happens, but Mothra presumably ‘senses’ the arrival of Charles Dance somehow. Then the ORCA’s “alpha signal” seemingly pacifies her and she goes to sleep under a waterfall. Now, the film does an extremely bad job of establishing what the alpha signal is/does, but you can puzzle out the basic idea that it sounds like Godzilla and causes the monsters to behave as if Godzilla is nearby. So, is Mothra easily duped? Or is the ORCA bullshit? Mothra will later completely ignore the ‘alpha signal’ coming from Ghidorah. Implicitly, the very concept of an alpha signal was invented by White Dad based on his pseudoscientific theories about wolf behaviour. And if you think about it for even two seconds, there’s no reason to for him to believe Rodan and the other monsters would behave as a wolf pack at all - especially given that they’re all different species. That’s insane. The only good conclusion is that the ORCA machine doesn’t really do anything - or at least not what it’s advertised as doing. Mothra actually calmed down because she saw a woman and her child cowering in fear, and the fact that this coincided with the sound is probably coincidental. [Note: on top of the Versus Series and GMK, Godzilla 2’s third main influence is Destroy All Monsters. This is where the ‘alpha signal’ plot point comes from - yet there was no confusion in Honda’s film, because the monsters there were simply implanted with mind-control chips. Why is Godzilla 2’s tech so needlessly elaborate and poorly defined by comparison?] Anyways, Mothra then flies to the MONARCH secret underwater headquarters so she can tell them... Hold up; this part only makes sense if Godzilla called Mothra up with his super-sonar and told her “Mothra, I need your help. I’m dying. Go to this underwater base at coordinates XYZ and convince the nice people there that they need to nuke me in the face. I know from experience that nuclear weapons make me stronger. Thanks.” Mothra was pretty much literally born yesterday. She doesn’t know where this base is, she has no reason to expect these people will help - and she certainly doesn’t know what a nuclear weapon is. Godzilla had to have told her all this. And this means that Mothra spends most of her screen time doing what she’s told, not coming up with her own plans or acting of her own volition.
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Jul 5, 2019 23:35
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Blood Boils posted:Inhuman machine jokes aside, I've definitely seen him change his initial criticism if a more convincing reading comes along. Avatar.
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Jul 5, 2019 23:40
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Mothra and Godzilla are, incestuously, declared a married couple via a deluge of sex jokes, etc. It’s really bad stuff. Rick makes this joke but he's an alcoholic savant. As you often describe with the Showa films, what one human says isn't always the truth when you compare to the film as a whole. Mothra's egg is probably not worth its weight in chicken eggs, but that's what it sells for in MvG. Indeed, Mothra is depicted as her name implies - that of mother - not just for some characters but for all of humanity. She acts very maternal to our primary monster, mourning him as a mother would and laying down her life when the need presents itself. In spirit of your Christianity imagery, she is Mary. Truly the mother of Godzilla. Her and Madison also obviously share a bond at the start. She's meant to replace Emma Russell as a mother figure, similar to how Cranston was succeeded by Godzilla. This is not represented in the physical sense of Emma being dead (though that comes into it later), but by filling the void of motherly protector Emma left when she went crazy. Madison feels tethered to her mother but even she knows she's nuts at the start of the film. Also like Emma, the first Showa Mothra had two kids and one of them died. When Emma realizes she's hosed everything up and kills herself, she's pulling a Darth Vader - obviously her horrific crimes can't be erased, but she attempts one final act to make peace with who she left behind. This happens around the time Mothra exeunts the story. Her role in this incarnation is fulfilled, and the next Mothra will presumably have her own arc with some human characters. We actually see the same Mothra in every time and continuity, reincarnated - as we know from Mothra 3, the species is capable of time travel. It is the logical progression of her character, similar to how Rodan was born because his parents nested in a volcano in 1956 as Dougherty has made clear. When you combine Mothra with who she represents in this argument, Emma Russell, you have a character close to Yui Ikari. The Golden Gael fucked around with this message at 23:58 on Jul 5, 2019 |
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Jul 5, 2019 23:51
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I keep saying that the human characters are best read allegorically. (I learned it from watching you, SMG! I learned it from watching you!) Monarch's scientists are a bunch of nerds and weirdos who are thrown into importance in what until very recently has been a field for cranks and crackpots, and are desperately throwing out whatever ideas seem to make sense for what they're seeing. They do have evidence and apparently footage that Kaiju are sexual beings and that they gently caress, since the MUTOs represent a different theme of the ultimate literal nuclear family and potentially as Kaiju-sized locusts. (there's actually an episode of Godzilla: The Series that's basically about that idea, btw) In their fancy Helicarrier they watch through screens and windows and spitball ideas between each other and the various military officers around- they're the audience. Serizawa knows that one shouldn't jump to conclusions about the creatures, that humanity barely understands anything about them and probably never will be able to fully understand them, but it is certain that they are not like humans but also not like animals, they are intelligent and aware of what is happening around them, even if they likely don't understand humanity much better than humanity currently understands them. Humans constantly frame relationships with and among the Kaiju in crude, human terms; as pets, in sexual relationships, with discredited animal theories, because they're unready to accept that the one that works is the relationship with the true divine, in its awe and terror, and being willing to accept their own humility as having to accept others as equals to their civilisation, that they cannot unilaterally control and exploit but need to communicate with. Rodan is very Just There and that's not a bad thing to be; he's a creature that exists and is a colossal pterosauroid, and representative of the assorted kaiju we see on the news and showing up at the end; creatures that exist in the world and have their own things going on but not at the level of individual importance as Godzilla, Mothra or Ghidorah.
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Jul 6, 2019 07:06
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 Finally got them framed, hell yeah.
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Jul 6, 2019 19:19
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Happy Noodle Boy posted:
Those are beautiful.
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Jul 7, 2019 00:49
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Make sure they are flush to the ceiling.
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Jul 7, 2019 13:37
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Vintersorg posted:Make sure they are flush to the ceiling. I'll never not laugh whenever this is mentioned. gently caress those posts were great, lmao.
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Jul 8, 2019 07:44
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When you realize those strangle metal birds are making you fly to that giant hurricane in the distance
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Jul 9, 2019 01:41
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do you have a version of that that isn't one giant artifact
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Jul 9, 2019 10:08
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Captain Invictus posted:do you have a version of that that isn't one giant artifact It's a relic from a bygone era, so unfortunately no
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Jul 9, 2019 12:06
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