Godzilla and Pals Series (Edwards/Dougherty, 2014/2019)

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Movie-Brat · #26 Post by **Movie-Brat** » Mon May 19, 2014 4:28 pm

Michael Kerpan wrote:On the issue of serious Godzilla sequels -- anyone else see Kaneko's "Godzilla, Mothra & King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack" (2001)? Definitely serious and even distressing. Too much so, as Toho retreated into "friendlier" fare after this.

Really? It didn't seem like that the first time I saw it though I guess you could say that when it treads back into the Hiroshima allegories.

jindianajonz · #27 Post by **jindianajonz** » Mon May 19, 2014 5:23 pm

I got the impression that Edwards was very conflicted with what he wanted this movie to be. He obviously pays homage to some of the hokier elements of the Godzilla franchise with

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Godzilla being a "good" monster who saves us from the evil MUTOs, eventually becoming something of a celebrity despite destroying quite a few cities

yet he never seems to have fun with it, instead treating it as solemnly as if it were a Holocaust flick. I can't recall a single joke, quip, or humorous moment (though the audience I saw it with had an annoying tendancy to crack up every time Watanabe said "Gojira"). If the disaster/horror movie advertised in the first trailer had been fleshed out, this may have worked, but as others mentioned we get a lot of contrived situations that appear solely so that the wooden protagonist has something to do, and this deflates the tension felt throughout. Without humor, tension, or a sense that anything is really at stake (to paraphrase a well known axiom, "destroying one city is a tragedy, destroying five is a statistic."), I have a hard time understanding what this film aims to hang its hat on.

I also wonder why

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Juliet Binoche is even in the film- indeed, the entire 1999 prologue seems like it could easily be excised without impacting the story too much. Binoche is there to set up a character (Cranston) that was ultimately just used to set up another character (Taylor-Johnson)

I think this is a good metaphor for how the film as a whole felt for me- Edwards spent too much time dipping into the how's and why's of everything that was happening instead of just letting us sit back and have fun with what is actually happening.

oldsheperd · #28 Post by **oldsheperd** » Sat May 24, 2014 6:15 pm

The monster stuff was good, but the human part was too convenient and pedestrian.

I agreed with the guys at RedLetterMedia that:

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They should have stuck with the Bryan Cranston character instead of his son. I lost all interest in the actual story after Cranston died. They also wasted Ken Watanabe. They tried to give him some sort of stake with his Dad being at Hiroshima, but that just seemed totally tacked on at the last minute.

#29 Post by **domino harvey** » Thu Sep 18, 2014 9:31 pm

Well, I enjoyed this more than the tiresome Pacific Rim, but sadly this one is no match for Edwards' work in Monsters and the problems here are so multifarious that it's a wonder in retrospect that I liked it at all (and I kinda did-- it's a solid two and a half star kinda flick). I won't go as far as some of you (C'mon, nitpicking the Binoche cameo is absurd and you know it), but there's certainly a laundry list present. The script is awful and lacks any kind of proper causality. Though I'm far from a fanboy, I'll cosign the unanimous praise of Cranston and disappointment in his eventual marginalization in the film. I'm surprised no one's mentioned by far the most underwritten and wasted role here, that of the worrying wife played for no good reason by Elizabeth Olsen, who is given literally nothing to do. I kept expecting the fact that she's a nurse and that she stays behind during the final battle to amount to her getting a moment to shine: heroics, either of the nurse kind or action movie sort, would befit the role as presented. But instead we get nothing. An anonymous bus driver with a minute of screentime shines brighter and is given more to do by this film than its most prominent female lead. And while I know praising the 90s Godzilla is outre, at least that Godzilla moves and looked like a lizard. This one has for whatever reason been designed to look like a human in a suit (yes, I know the reason but that doesn't stop it from being a straight-up stupid choice), and the results are ludicrous. Sure, the "MUTOs" have the misfortune of appearing a year late to the party Pacific Rim pretty much owned, but at least they're offering us more than Jesusosaurus. Edwards would have been wise to push harder on making something closer to the quiet eerieness of his previous films, as any of the moments that work in this film are echoes of the same surreal strangeness of the utterly inconceivable intruding on everyday life-- indeed, the film's real climax as far as I'm concerned was the entire Hawaii set-piece, the only part of the film that fully works (though it too must end with the familiar as an elevated train meets a predictable obstacle). I doubt very much that I will ever forget the sad and beautiful finale of Monsters, which made me feel so much with so little, both monetarily and on the screen. This cost untold amounts more and amounts to so much less.

chatterjees · #30 Post by **chatterjees** » Thu Sep 18, 2014 10:43 pm

Loved your assessment, domino harvey. These were my almost exact thoughts after I finished watching this film. I am glad I didn't have to pay more than $9.99 (at BestBuy) for this set. Although the 1998 version was not a great film, but it was a better one than this current one. I felt like an idiot when I first realized that it was all about MUTO, not Godzilla. Godzilla is the Good Samaritan here, who timely showed up to save the California people from the outrages caused by a half robot bat couple, and then when the deed is done, leaves quietly. I think the director wanted to create Godzilla as the new superhero. I mean, in general, that's what Batman, Superman or Spiderman does, right?
Also, that face of godzilla looked like face of a burnt dog. To me, that poor script didn't do justice to a single character in the film, except for MUTO. I read somewhere that Binoche regretted for not accepting the role in Jurassic Park. I am sure she is regretting now for accepting this cameo. I also feel bad for Bryan Cranston, Ken Watanabe and Elizabeth Olsen. The director totally failed to utilize their acting powers. I honestly hope that Godzilla 2 will bring us a more powerful and Godzilla centered story.

#31 Post by **matrixschmatrix** » Fri Sep 19, 2014 1:15 am

I wasn't so much nitpicking the Binoche cameo as wishing that they had Binoche in way more of the movie. You're not wrong about Elizabeth Olsen, though- and I'd entirely forgotten that Sally Hawkins was in the movie until reminded of it by imdb.

#32 Post by **domino harvey** » Tue Oct 21, 2014 2:35 pm

Binoche says the prologue made Quentin Tarantino cry

#33 Post by **swo17** » Tue Oct 21, 2014 2:52 pm

^ Spoilers

colinr0380 · #34 Post by **colinr0380** » Thu Nov 06, 2014 9:30 pm

Spoilers:

I want to get this off my chest first: if you are going to kill off Juliette Binoche fifteen minutes into your movie, you'd better have something damn impressive to replace her with! Sadly all the special effects in the world cannot match Binoche doing a winning smile to her husband. Somehow I don't think the film figured that out. Oh well, you've killed off Binoche, at least we've still got Bryan Cranston....oh.

I'm joking a little, but a film which gets rid of its most charismatic actors in the first quarter of its running time only to leave us with our nominal hero, Lt. Blandy McBland, acted by someone who makes me yearn for the dramatic range of a Sam Worthington in the role, doesn't seem to understand what potential is being thrown away.

I have a few qualms about this film beyond the lack of human interest too. This seems like a film that is strangely in thrall to and weirdly incurious about military might and the potential for that might to be wielded in a brutal or cruel manner. OK, so there is a silly subplot about setting off a clockwork atom bomb that then has to be disabled again (suggesting how easily the military can get diverted off onto the wrong track by their superiors?), but really all the generals and soldiers seem fine and just trying to do their best, and try to learn from their mistakes. There's not even the slightest question that we need troops on the ground here, even if I could not really figure out the purpose that many of them were serving apart from being used almost immediately as expendable monster fodder (This was often the only way that I could tell Lt Blandy McBland apart from the rest of the interchangeable army guys, in that he was usually the only survivor of every encounter!) Has the emphasis on the environmental balance theme, rather than man's warlike nature, somehow enabled the idea of needing an all powerful secret organisation and then military complex that takes over from the secret organisation to justify themselves in this film?

I guess in these post-Iraq War times there's just no way to even portray the military with even a slightly cynical or jaded eye, even in fantastical fare? But there is almost a deafening silence here surrounding this aspect of the film. (The film that this issue reminded me of in a strange way was that time travel film The Final Countdown in which Kirk Douglas pilots a modern US aircraft carrier back to just pre-Pearl Harbor and has to decide whether to intervene or let the attack get carried out. But beyond this intriguing story, the filmmakers were obviously far, far more interested in showing shots of aircraft taking off and landing on top of the aircraft carrier that they were given special permission to film on. The enthralling logistics of military hardware end up taking precedence over the story, and in a way the same applies to this film, as we get almost endless shots of helicopters and boats and equipment to pad out the running time)

And it is not just in the military aspect but the way that the film uses almost a 'greatest hits' mash up of imagery of real world disasters from the last couple of decades - not just 9/11 dust clouds, or Fukushima radiation zones, or the Thailand tsunami chasing crowds, or the final imagery of a post-Hurricane Katrina-esque Superdome, but all of them lumped together in a context-free montage in which almost personality-less victims of tragedy are all seemingly given the same scream sound effect to their scenes of blind panic.

But to briefly shift away from the carping, I do think Gojira himself comes out of this film with more dignity that he ever has. The title monster is the closest thing to being a hero. Although, to immediately shift back into carping again, I think this causes its own dissonance. The 'human drama' in the film, such as it is, is seemingly all about families, especially fathers somehow failing sons and wives and the next generation trying not to make the same mistakes. Now lets put aside the way that the older family unit actually gets torn apart through forces beyond its control, suffers for the unavoidable tragedy with the father dying shattered by his experiences being something that infuriatingly gets set against the younger family unit being relatively unaffected whilst our hero damningly never even gets close to getting near to his wife and child to help them at all. The even bigger dissonance, at least as far as I see it, is that this whole idea on the human scale level of the primacy of the family unit above all seems utterly undermined by the monster-level action in which Gojira is a lone, single entity which gets spurred into action by the pair of Mutos getting ready to breed and who ends up destroying the (seemingly loving, for all the care and attention paid to the movements and gestures of the two Mutos) couple whilst at the same time our Lt McBland incinerates their offspring!

I guess only human families are allowed to be sacrosanct! (If it wasn't, that ridiculous scene involving the busload of children wouldn't have allowed them to have gotten away so easily!) But I did like the way that it seems that Gojira here appears to be taking a stand for all the grumpy, childless single people in the world! However I did like that at one point it seemed as if Elizabeth Olsen's character was finally going to have a purpose - that of simply being forced to witness an alien mating scene! But the film shies away from showing anything that graphic!

While I'm putting the boot into the film, I also wasn't much of a fan of the overblown score. Particularly during the monster wrestling fights when the score insisted on doing a musical sting to every blow as if it was something out of the Adam West Batman series, but really the whole score is far too bombastic as if afraid to let any event in any scene play without being underlined with musical awe a few times for good measure. The Ligeti piece is the exception that proves the rule, in that suddenly an abstract and weirdly beautiful (if annoying due to reminding me of a better film) piece of music plays, yet it is incongruous by turning up sandwiched between scenes underscored in such a heavily orchestral, yet also blandly anonymous manner.

So, there are a few nice images here, the first quarter or so was interesting, and I like the monsters themselves, but I feel that this film is about on a par with Pacific Rim. Though this Godzilla is far more dour, 'grown up' and self-serious than the 'big kid' Pacific Rim, while strangely feeling sillier for that (and this Godzilla is not quite as good as the Emmerich Godzilla, which the structure of this film far too often copies. Perhaps there are only so many things you can do in a monster movie?). At least Pacific Rim (or Cloverfield, though that dialled the monsters a long way down in order to emphasise its characters) had some emphasis on character development, even if it was all tried and tested archetypal character arcs, and seemed to care about relationships with other human beings and humanity as a whole.

flyonthewall2983 · #35 Post by **flyonthewall2983** » Thu Aug 13, 2015 8:28 pm

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Cranston didn't want his character to die as early as he did.

#36 Post by **domino harvey** » Sat Jul 21, 2018 3:39 pm

Godzilla: King of the Monsters trailer

colinr0380 · #37 Post by **colinr0380** » Sat Jul 21, 2018 4:02 pm

That kind of looks as if they saw that one character's decision at the end of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and decided to up the ante on it to an overwhelming degree. Those darn environmentalists/animal lovers will be the death of us all!

Oh God, Sally Hawkins is going to end up making out with King Ghidorah, isn't she? Which would at least give her more to do than in the first film

(EDIT: Seriously though, a moment of her character wandering up to one monster or other and going "Phwoar! Do you know if he is single?" would be very amusing!)

Big Ben · #38 Post by **Big Ben** » Sat Jul 21, 2018 8:01 pm

Godzilla plots have always been dumb as hell and I'm here for it. Ramp that shit up to eleven and I'll be in the theater no problem.

Morgan Creek · #39 Post by **Morgan Creek** » Sat Jul 21, 2018 9:37 pm

Scoring Godzilla to Debussy is some kind of mashup.

knives · #40 Post by **knives** » Sat Jul 21, 2018 10:57 pm

Big Ben wrote: ↑
Sat Jul 21, 2018 8:01 pm
Godzilla plots have always been dumb as hell and I'm here for it.

Strongly disagree.

Big Ben · #41 Post by **Big Ben** » Sun Jul 22, 2018 12:49 am

knives wrote: ↑
Sat Jul 21, 2018 10:57 pm

Big Ben wrote: ↑
Sat Jul 21, 2018 8:01 pm
Godzilla plots have always been dumb as hell and I'm here for it.
Strongly disagree.

Which era(s) are you referring to? I suppose I should clarify my own statement.

The Showa era films are fairly preposterous in my view. Any "intelligence" in my mind comes from the overall moral of the story rather than well, much of anything else. The films are incredibly easy to digest and they should be, as the Japanese producers began to marker them more and more at children right up until the failure of Terror of MechaGodzilla in 1975. Godzilla went from being a warning about nuclear weapons and the embodiment of a entire nations fears to a camp entertainment in a very short amount of time. By the time Godzilla vs. Megalon came around they no longer even bothered to shoot certain footage simply to demonstrate destruction of a city as Megalon's attacks consited of nothing but B Roll.

The Heisei Period was a return to darker and more serious themes (My mother even confiscated my VHS copy of Godzilla vs Destroyah because it was too violent in her eyes.) but those films as you most likely know are reboot of the franchise. Godzilla 1984 terminated canonically all previous films except the first one. Even then we still retain some camp elements (The Fairies that support Mothra and the Time Traveling Aliens in the Ghidorah Film.). More serious yes, but not totally serious.

I love Godzilla to death and even wrote a term paper on the franchise. But even my two decades long love can't forgive every absurdity. I'll concede again and say that some films are much better written than others. Most of them are simply good fun in my eyes though. The more serious ones are the ones I think should be given more consideration if you wish to talk about those. I haven't seen Shin Godzilla though. Should probably do that. I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts though. I haven't seen some of the older ones in fifteen or more years. (Perhaps mods could make a seperate Godzilla thread? No doubt we'll need one if Criterion puts out a box set or something.)

colinr0380 · #42 Post by **colinr0380** » Sun Jul 22, 2018 6:26 am

I liked the ones where Godzilla ended up becoming a kind of aloof, hard to please father to his desperate for attention son!

knives · #43 Post by **knives** » Sun Jul 22, 2018 9:10 am

Those are indeed fun. I guess my disagreement is not with the equation of children friendly and camp to dumb as well as the dichotomy between camp and seriousness. The smog monster, for instance, is very campy but also very serious dealing with themes of environmental destruction. Even the less serious ones don't necessarily have to be dumb. Just less serious.

colinr0380 · #44 Post by **colinr0380** » Thu Jul 26, 2018 3:26 pm

I don't know whether this counts as a potential spoiler or not, but better safe than sorry!:

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One interesting thing brought up by the recent episode of the Super Best Friend podcast is the idea that the pointedly unnamed on imdb character that Charles Dance will be playing as shown in the Godzilla: King of the Monsters trailer is probably going to be the older version of the Tom Hiddleston character from Kong: Skull Island (that went over my head a bit because Kong: Skull Island is still shamefully in my 'to watch' pile!). So it looks like the groundwork for the Kong-Godzilla crossover is well underway.

Roger Ryan · #45 Post by **Roger Ryan** » Thu Jul 26, 2018 4:31 pm

colinr0380 wrote: ↑
Thu Jul 26, 2018 3:26 pm
I don't know whether this counts as a potential spoiler or not, but better safe than sorry!:
SpoilerShow
One interesting thing brought up by the recent episode of the Super Best Friend podcast is the idea that the pointedly unnamed on imdb character that Charles Dance will be playing as shown in the Godzilla: King of the Monsters trailer is probably going to be the older version of the Tom Hiddleston character from Kong: Skull Island (that went over my head a bit because Kong: Skull Island is still shamefully in my 'to watch' pile!). So it looks like the groundwork for the Kong-Godzilla crossover is well underway.

Stick around for the after-credit sequence in Kong: Skull Island for confirmation!

hanshotfirst1138 · #46 Post by **hanshotfirst1138** » Fri Jul 27, 2018 7:59 am

I'm a lifelong tokusatsu nut, and I'm cautiously looking forward the newest installment. Seeing Toho's big four kaiju in a multimillion dollar blockbuster could be a blast. I thought that Edwards' film was way too dull and dour, and I'm hoping Dougherty will bring some zip and sense of fun to the proceedings. His calling card movie, Trick r' Treat, is a very fun and witty little horror picture, so hopefully, all the money won't swallow all of his distinctiveness. Either way, as a kid who worshiped at the feet of the King of the Monsters, seeing Godzilla, Rodan, Mothra, and King Ghidora on the big screen will certainly be a treat.

Godzilla and Pals Series (Edwards/Dougherty, 2014/2019)

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