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MisterBibs posted:One of the things that isn't really touched on too much is that When he's about to trash the city for the last time, Oscar is actively listening to the reactions from Seoul. I feel that in that moment, his plan on attacking the city isn't to get back at Gloria, but to get some sort of reaction out of someone. He had stopped being cheered or feared. Not actually; the film is based entirely on the bad "Soul" pun. Only Hathaway is struck by the magic lightning. Sudekis has no power of his own; he can only feel powerful by influencing and manipulating Hathaway. Attacking the city of Soul is always specifically an attack on Hathaway's Seoul, so she does some Seoul-searching to cleanse her Seoul, and so-on. This is why the Kaiju aspect of the film is incoherent and narratively inert. Nobody notices that the monster and robot are mass-produced action figures from the 1990s, or that the monster is blatantly miming a phone call. For the film's conceit to work, the entire population of South Korea (if not the entire world) must be more ignorant than Hathaway's character, because they are nothing more than extensions of her character. The only escape from the solipsism is in the minor joke that Sudekis has his own tiny Seoul, that provides him with Seoul food.
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Apr 26, 2017 08:09
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Femur posted:I saw this, and I am surprised it's universally liked here, because I thought it was rather pointless. At first, I found Hathaway's character interesting because I don't see a lot of movies portraying a haggard alcoholic woman spiraling down, and this didn't either. The guy seems to be the alcoholic, and shes pretty much good and fine person who turned her life around immediately and wasn't struggling with inner demons or anything that battle with addictions are often portrayed as. Alcoholism did not prove to be a big deal. Pretty much. The film is that on an accelerated timeline because it's about Hathaway as a former alcoholic who (for the bulk of the runtime) is actually just afraid of admitting defeat - that her job sucks and so-on. "If I lose this lovely job, it'll crush my Seoul." Hence the ending, where her really crazy plan is to just quit both jobs and go on a vacation to South Korea. The point that Soul is specifically Hathaway's Seoul is vital. You can't really flip things the other way around or else you get some nonsense about how 9/11 is a metaphor for a bad relationship or something. As a film about a disaster, it simply doesn't work.
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Apr 30, 2017 16:59
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got any sevens posted:Well why else did they pick Seoul instead of Tokyo, the usual kaiju city? Not only does every aspect of the film match the pun, they even make a point of Hathaway pronouncing "soul" the same way in one scene.
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May 3, 2017 03:25
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Guy Mann posted:South Korea's film industry has a really good working relationship with American filmmakers. That's not the point. The point is to isolate the 'kaiju movie-within-the-movie' and make sense of that. We have a film where South Korea is unwittingly crushed by an oblivious monster who looks suspiciously similar to North Korea's infamous kaiju Pulgasari. Not-Pulgasari apologizes for his mistakes, and everyone loves him, but then he's struck down and killed by an rear end in a top hat (American?) war machine. America attacks South Korea, but Not-Pulgasari reemerges 'more powerful than you can possibly imagine' - as a ghost. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 20:06 on May 4, 2017 |
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May 4, 2017 18:24
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glam rock hamhock posted:As vague as you're trying to be, you should probably spoiler tag some of that Eh, sure. But anyways, for example: Mothra is an aboriginal proto-Christ figure expressing Japanese ambivalence towards globalization in the early 1960s - a fascination with primitive communism as an escape from the postwar 'economic miracle'. It's unclear what the Monster and the resulting conflict in South Korea are all about in this film, unless you talk in extremely nonspecific terms - like it's bad that people die or something.
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May 5, 2017 01:42
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