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SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN
This trailer fucken rules.

Elfgames posted:

show me the japanese film where godzilla is an "apex predator" instead of the result of a nuclear attack or weapon

Gojira 1984.

Also: Gojira 1954.

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SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Elfgames posted:

In Tokyo, Okamura realizes by looking at pictures that the monster he saw was a new Godzilla. Maki writes an article about the account, but the news of Godzilla's return is kept secret and his article is withheld. Maki visits Professor Hayashida, whose parents were lost in the 1954 Godzilla attack. Hayashida describes Godzilla as a living, invincible nuclear weapon able to cause mass destruction. At Hayashida's laboratory, Maki meets Okamura's sister, Naoko, and informs her that her brother is alive and at the police hospital.

A Soviet submarine is destroyed in the Pacific. The Soviets believe the attack was perpetrated by the Americans, and a diplomatic crisis ensues, which threatens to escalate into nuclear war.

wrong

and the 1954 one is so wrong that i can't wait to here your rebuttal

The 1954 Godzilla is an apex predator that is woken up by a bomb. Metaphorically, the creature represents Serizawa's research into the Oxygen Destroyer.

The 1984 Godzilla is an apex predator woken up by an undersea volcanic eruption. Metaphorically, the creature represents a generalized sense of malaise.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Elfgames posted:

the oxegen destroyer is a bigger bomb, of course they represent each other.
You are basing these assertions on a mix of wikipedia articles and fantasies.

The 'Oxygen Destroyer' is not a bomb, and the monster does not represent it.

The monster in the film represents pure drive - in this case the scientific drive to pursue knowledge for its own sake, regardless of the consequences.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Elfgames posted:

the oxegen destroyer is basically a bomb

and yeah the two are the same, A thing which becomes a weapon and must be destroyed

However, in a more accurate sense, it isn't a bomb at all and you are unconcerned with whether what you are writing is true.

The Godzilla of 1954 had been worshiped as a pagan demon-god for untold centuries before the existence of nuclear weapons.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN
Right. So bombs are powerful and god is powerful, therefore people in biblical times worshiped the atomic bomb.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:

I will grant you Ghidorah, Mothra and Biolante. Biolante's story is especially cool, Mothra's is probably the most unique.

Godzilla x Mechagodzilla is top 3. Making an entire movie about one of those 1960s MASER Tank drivers is so obvious (in retrospect) that it's a shock it took them like 30 years to do it.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Heavy Metal posted:

GMK (2001) is the one where he's a villain with Ghidorah as a good guy etc. Other than that though, Godzilla has not been the villain in most of the movies in the past 20 years. At least he's usually considered the lesser of two evils, and he kicks some other monster's rear end. In Final Wars he kicks a lot of monsters asses.

Godzilla is the villain in both GxMG and Tokyo SOS as well.

Also, on this note, I've rarely been more disappointed in a movie than when I found out GMK was originally envisioned as 'VBA': Varan, Baragon, and Anguirus teaming up to take down Godzilla.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Violator posted:

I can't remember where I read it, but he was supposed to be very calm and collected at all times to (a) reflect his training in the military and bomb squad unit and (b) to contrast with his animated and emotional father. During filming Taylor-Johnson supposedly went somewhere where he wasn't recognized as an actor and the folks around him thought he was in the military because he was informally in-character since he was used to acting stoically and mechanically for the role. I think this might have been in that Art of Destruction making-of book where Edwards discussed it.

I've never really had a problem with his performance because it's how I figured someone like him would act, but I can see where other folks would want something more dynamic. I feel like he comes off basically like a military version of Grant from Jurassic Park, but a Malcolm-like character would be more fun. Or even just Cranston as is the common consensus.

It's like when Pirates of the Carribean came out, and Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow got all the attention, when the actual best performance came from Geoffrey Rush.

That's not to say that Taylor-Johnson did a better job than Cranston, but that he had the vastly more difficult job of being quiet and internal. All subtle gestures and ambivalent expressions.

"What makes Godzilla more significant than just another summer blockbuster is Ford’s personal rectitude and his steadfast profile. The back of Taylor-Johnson’s neck and head are as unbowed as his spine. His wide eyes show a sensitive alertness the worried scientists lack. Courageous and daringly eager, he’s an action figure for a war-weary age."
-Armond White

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Bob Quixote posted:

GMK is such an odd movie. Its one of my favorites of the Millenium series in terms of monster design and the crazy battles but I was never quite sure what Godzilla was supposed to represent.

Was he the souls of the dead taking vengeance on Japan for their war of conquest? Was he attacking because they tried to forget about the war or push some of the nastiest aspects of it under the rug?

It's been a while since I've seen it, but that part was puzzling.

Everything in GMK centers around a quick reference to the Blair Witch Project, and a more exhaustively-explored theme of kids these days not being afraid of Godzilla anymore:

Manager: Attention: Godzilla is approaching. Everyone evacuate this store at once.
Shopper: Godzilla... who cares?

Yuri (host of a cheesy 'ghost hunter' show): You don't sound interested [in Godzilla].
Her boss: Godzilla is passé.

Since (in the continuity of this film) this is the first kaiju attack in ~50 years, the idea is that only the 1954 film was 'real'. The whole 'nuclear holocaust' aspect has been pushed to the wayside as every subsequent film moved away from the horror genre. GMK is a film about how Japan has been at peace for decades, so what use is Godzilla?

The film's answer, in a subtle sort of way, is that Yuri uses the creation of a Godzilla movie to bond with her father - a Hiroshima survivor.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Improbable Lobster posted:

He was pretty good but I think everyone was expecting Cranston to be the main character.

The thing is that Cranston's character comes back from the dead as Godzilla himself, so he's the titular character and continues to appear throughout the film.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Dylazodelan posted:

G'14 put on a clinic in terms of misleading marketing. The very first trailer, with Godzilla rising out of the rubble and Oppenheimer doing his "I am death" speech, prepared me to see a film where Godzilla was death incarnate and rearing to tear humanity a new one. Instead, he was pretty chill and only wrecked people and stuff when it was explicitly in his way (the shot with him being flanked by Navy ships was cool, but I feel like that wouldn't have flown with the Godzilla we were shown in the trailer).

Watch it again. The teaser was, secretly, a sequel to the film - showing that Godzilla continues to save the world from monsters, after the MUTO attacks.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

GhostofJohnMuir posted:

All this Godzilla history talk has me curious, I've only seen the 1954 movie, Final Wars and 2014. Can somebody give me a short list that I should definitely check out?
Keeping things 'in continuity' is a good way of narrowing things down. For example:

Mothra -> GxMG -> Tokyo S.O.S.

Godzilla x Mechagodzilla is the film Del Toro ripped off for Pacific Rim, so here's a version of that that doesn't suck. After 1954, these three films are not only among the best, but tell a perfectly self-contained story of Godzilla's rise and fall.

Mecha Gojira posted:

Godzilla vs. Mothra, Ghidorah the Three-Headed Monster, and Godzilla vs. Monster X make up a cool little trilogy, and I'd highly recommend it.

Check out Mothra and Rodan's solo movies too. The original 1960's Mothra might be my all time favorite Kaiju film. The model work is amazing.

This is truth also. The five here form a sprawling, Avengers-like narrative centered around Godzilla's evolution into a hero. Unlike The Avengers, though, the entire thing is actually great because each entry was directed by Ishiro Honda himself.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Choco1980 posted:

You could argue also that the first three films share continuity at least in that Raids Again is a direct sequel, obviously, but at the end of it, they trap Godzilla in a glacier, and sure enough that's where he pops out of in King Kong Vs. I'd like in my head to think that vs. M follows directly too, but they clearly gave zero fucks about explaining Godzilla's return, and we're all the better for it, as it's probably one of his best entrances.

There's certainly plot continuity bridging the films, but Raids Again and King Kong Vs. Godzilla are extremely skippable.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Wizchine posted:

I watch movies about monsters fighting, but they're highbrow, you see, because they have plots and characters and everything...

You know what movies often have better plots and characters than Godzilla movies? Movies with no giant monsters in them at all. Giant monsters are clumsy metaphors - often literally clumsy because they fall on top of buildings.

It's beginning to look like K. waste is right, and Godzilla fans do not actually like Godzilla.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN
Gojira 1984 ain't the best, but it's really good specifically because Godzilla is presented as a demonic statue, like Pazuzu in The Exorcist. He's almost invariably filmed head-on, usually motionless. Emphasis is always on the glassy cartoon eyes. The point is specifically that the character is 'unrealistic' - that no rubber costume can fully capture the divinity of the creature.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

K. Waste posted:

More specifically, it's clarified by the last shot of the film that Godzilla has not simply been 'killing' people. He's been absorbing and assimilating them.

Even more specifically, the point of the opening scene is that Godzilla is Goro Maki, emerging directly from Goro's suicide. And this means that Godzilla is, simultaneously, Goro's legacy and his message: the red paper crane, left behind as an ambiguous 'gift'. (The link from the origami to the '1000 paper cranes' story is fairly obvious.)

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN
Things have changed since '62, since Godzilla is (currently) the one who deserves to win. Skull Island is basically the origin story for a flawed, antiheroic character who's only really good within the confines of his island - and who cannot cope with the outside world.

You don't see Godzilla avenging his dead parents, for example. He's already beyond such things.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN
Monsters: Dark Continent is a top 3 Kaiju film, but admittedly not pornographic.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

The Bee posted:

I would love to see a movie where Sixth Form Godzilla is the opponent. Maybe a Godzilla from a parallel Earth that got to that state and is now arriving on our Earth.

That's Vs. Hedorah.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Improbable Lobster posted:

A brand being poison doesn't mean they aren't making money.

That's literally the only thing that means.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:

Right. What's the actual concern here, the brand, or the art?

It's an objective confirmation of my theory that people can only articulate their feelings in terms of imagined box office.

'Suicide Squad was a massive hit, but I feel like it lost money.'

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN
Gojira is explicitly the name of a (fictional) minor kami specific to Odo Island. The Shinto ceremony shown in the film is fairly legit - it features offerings of food and sake to Gojira, and a satokagura performed by dancers in tengu masks to chase away the 'impurities' thought to have provoked the attack.

Even the stuff about human sacrifice as part of a Shinto ritual is plausible, although based more on popular imagination and noh plays. See, for example, Ikeniye (which can be translated as either The Pool Sacrifice or The Living Sacrifice), a short play from the 1500s about a village that makes annual sacrifices to its local dragon-god by placing a randomly-selected person on a boat and setting it adrift.

The point of the film is not that Gojira actually is this kami, however, but that the scientists took the name from the villagers, who took it from nebulous 'earlier' traditions. (And the Americans 'mistranslate' it even further.) The name in-and-of itself apparently just means "the spirit that's eating all our fish". That spirit wasn't this physical dinosaur; Godzilla was asleep at the time.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Vintersorg posted:

I actually liked the human story in G14 and don't get the complaints.

The truth is that there isn't any exposition: Ford never explains how he feels, and people get confused. (Meanwhile, Cranston's character is really angry! And he's not afraid to tell you how angry he is!! Not only that, but he'll list the specific reasons behind his anger!!! They killed his wife, and that's bad!!!!)

The actor's performance is also extremely understated and naturalistic, hence why he's referred to derisively as 'Army Guy': a normal person, not different from any other of the soldiers.

People also treat characterization as something that exists in isolation, and overlook how the cinematography and editing generate characterization. Godzilla and the MUTO are intimately tied to Ford's character; these are his gods.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN
Bad

Idea

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Arcsquad12 posted:

I'm trying to get my friend into more Godzilla movies. He likes Legendary Godzilla but j want him to watch some more rubber suit Goji movies. Would selling him on a double feature of Godzilla against Mechagodzilla and Tokyo SOS be a good bet?

GxM and SOS are great, but they’re also fairly direct sequels to Gojira ‘54 and Mothra. (SOS is even a quasi-remake of Mothra vs. Godzilla.)

You lose a lot without the 60’s context. Like, the big joke in GxM is that the protagonist is a MASER Tank pilot who’s spent decades fighting low-level Gargantuas and stuff.

I’d actually recommend Space Amoeba as a starting point, even though Godzilla himself doesn’t appear. It’s one of the few Toho kaiju films without any referentiality or other franchise baggage, and it’s also very sincere in its goofiness.

Besides Shin, every Godzilla film assumes you’ve at least familiar with Gojira ‘54. Like, as a contrast to Space Amoeba’s stand-alone nature, one of Space Amoeba’s creatures has a cameo appearance in GxM.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Mechafunkzilla posted:

here's my idea: they should make Jet Jaguar a big robot

Make Jet Jaguar a literal rocket-powered jaguar.

SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 01:20 on Jul 12, 2018

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Tuxedo Catfish posted:

I don't think K. Waste is wrong about Taylor-Johnson's characterization, I just think a lot people of our generation and of the political stripe to be posting on this forum don't care about the inner drama of someone who "submits himself entirely to the social apparatus." It's less to do with inattention and more to do with a spectrum between apathy and outright hostility.

Or put another way, this is basically the same conversation as "it's not a Godzilla movie if there isn't a scene of the military being useless and getting dunked on."

People don't fetishize Cranston out of a desire for paternalism, they appreciate him because a Boomer who's furious with the inadequacy and corruption of the government is perhaps uncommon, but relatable, while a young soldier motivated by a stoic sense of duty in TYOOL 2014-18, especially portrayed as heroic (and unappreciated!) for this reason, might as well be from Planet X.

Exactly. See Zizek’s commentary on David Lynch’s The Straight Story:

“perversion is no longer subversive: the shocking excesses are part of the system itself, the system feeds on them in order to reproduce itself. Perhaps, this is one of the possible definitions of postmodern art as opposed to modernist art: in postmodernism, the transgressive excess loses its shocking value and is fully integrated into the established artistic market.

So, if Lynch's earlier films were also caught in this trap, what then about The Straight Story, based on the true case of Alvin Straight, an old, crippled farmer who motored across the American plains on a John Deere lawnmower to visit his ailing brother? Does this slow-paced story of persistence imply the renunciation to transgression, the turn towards naive immediacy of direct ethical stance of fidelity? The very title of the film undoubtedly refers to Lynch's previous opus: this is the straight story with regard to the ‘deviations’ into the uncanny underworld from Eraserhead to The Lost Highway. However, what if the ‘straight’ hero of Lynch's last film is effectively much more subversive than the weird characters who people his previous films? What if, in our postmodern world in which the radical ethical commitment is perceived as ridiculously out of time, he is the true outcast? [...]

What, then, if THIS is the ultimate message of Lynch's film - that ethics is ‘the most dark and daring of all conspiracies,’ that the ethical subject is the one who effectively threatens the existing order, in contrast to the long series of Lynchean weird perverts (Baron Harkonnen in Dune, Frank in Blue Velvet, Bobby Peru in Wild at Heart...) who ultimately sustain it?”

The call for more batshit mega-acting Cranston is basically a call to bring back Randy Quaid’s pathetic/ridiculous abductee character from the notably unthreatening blockbuster ID4.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Mr. Funny Pants posted:

I think I'm repeating myself but there's a middle ground between blank and dual wielding rocket launchers on Godzilla's back.

The ‘middle ground’ is in understanding that the action in the film is already an externalization of the character’s thoughts and feelings. The MUTO built their nest in a hellish underworld copy of his house for a reason.

By the end of the film, of course, Ford’s pulling a handgun on the death-creature and facing off against a nuclear bomb. A lot of movies have cheapened that sort of imagery, like “ho-hum, of course the hero stops the nuke”. But Godzilla 2014 is actually entirely about that.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Deakul posted:

So, this has probably been asked countless times before but...

I've seen the original 1950s Godzilla a dozen times, Godzilla 2014, the original and 1990s Godzilla vs Mothra, and the 1990s Godzilla vs King Ghidorah... are any of the others actually worth watching?

Watch the trilogy of Mothra, Godzilla x Mechagodzilla, and Tokyo SOS.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN
Rhetorical question: who is the protagonist of this Godzilla 2 movie?

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

HannibalBarca posted:

Mark and/or Emma probably come closest to fitting the bill.

Well, sort-of. You could argue that Serizawa is the protagonist of the first half, then it switches to Emma (who is ultimately the strongest candidate. But it’s more accurate to say that the film doesn’t have a protagonist, just because things are really badly conveyed.

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.

Consequently, Emma’s motivations - and the motivations of all the other characters trying to stop her - are quite incomprehensible.


Totally not.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Burkion posted:

Okay you're banned so this literally doesn't matter but

gently caress off dude. You're purposely misremembering and obscuring BASIC rear end poo poo from the movie in an attempt to try and call this, of ALL movies, incomprehensible.

One big glaring thing you decided to include that really betrays this?


Unless you're just actually having trouble watching movies or parsing information, you know this is a blatant lie.

They made shelters to protect SOME people in SOME places of the world.

Emma knew, straight up, that she was condemning most of the population of the world to die. Charles Dance out right said that to her in the middle of her plan. By releasing Ghidorah and throwing in with Dance, she's already committed genocide.

Her love for her daughter, and to a smaller degree her husband and former co-workers, does not conflict with her desire to save the world in a way that doesn't make sense. It is entirely comprehensible, loving watch the movie and try to pay attention next time.

That’s an oddly hostile response.

The entire Mexico scene is based around there being shelters. Millie B. is upset because they were supposed to evacuate people first before deploying the weapons.

People in the thread have been fairly confused as to where all the people are evacuating to (there are ~17 million people in Boston and San Fransisco, as just one example), and the answer is given in that dialogue.

Many would inevitably die in a global evacuation and the resulting massive refugee crisis. But the fundamental conflict between the Emma character and the stupid Charles Dance badguy is that, in grand Marvel tradition, she is attempting to minimize casualties - by using shelters, shelters that presumably hold enough people to keep Millie B. from crying.

Again, it’s really poorly conveyed - like a lot of things. Like, for example, Ghidorah isn’t a space alien in this film.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Arcsquad12 posted:

Yes he is. Zhang Ziyi brings up his origin mythology and Kyle Chandler proposes his alien status.

And that’s where you need to look at characterization.

As in Jurassic World, anything Dr. Mark says about biology is immediately suspect because of his belief in ‘Alphas’ and poo poo. He’s a bad scientist - which is why he was initially part of MONARCH before the events of the film (another thing that’s extremely poorly conveyed - the reveal that he and Serizawa are close friends comes out of nowhere). MONARCH are pseudoscientists on par with the “ancient aliens” nerds in Prometheus, stumbling rear end-backwards into trillions of taxpayer dollars.

An example of Zhang’s methodology: attempting to ascertain Ghidorah’s origins, she does a high-tech Google Image Search for “yellowish dragons” and brings up dozens of images - including William Blake’s 1803 watercolor The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun. Her theory, unquestioned by anyone, is that these images are actually eyewitness testimony. But unless Ghidorah battled Godzilla in 1800s Britain before being chased to the arctic and frozen, that’s obviously bullshit. What she’s actually doing is effectively trying to reverse-engineer lion behaviour from watching The Lion King and Voltron. It’s nonsense.

Outside of Zhang’s ‘analysis’, there’s no indication that Ghidorah is any different from the other MUTOs. Yet everyone keeps going on about “The Natural Order” in this strangely cultish way.

SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 01:38 on Jun 13, 2019

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

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.]

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

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.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

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.)

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

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?

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

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.

"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.

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

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

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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SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Mantis42 posted:

why do you refer to it as the Versus series and not its actual title?

Japan’s Heisei Era actually only ended like two months ago, so really everything since Godzilla Vs. Biollante has been a Heisei film. (Gojira 1984, meanwhile, was actually made in the Showa Era).

As with the Showa Series, the categorization used by most people is based mainly on plot continuity. There isn’t much thematic or stylistic difference between Takao Okawara’s three entries in the Versus Series and Masaaki Tezuka’s “Kiryu Saga”, for example. So it’s really more useful to look at the Heisei Series as a much broader category split between Versus and Millenium: pre- and post-Godzilla 1998.

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