THIS IS THE KIND OF FUTURE I’M HERE FOR
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Is that Jet Jaguar as the Glico man
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I saw it. The monsters were very good. The humans were very bad.
Why the fuck was there katakana on a many thousand year old relief. What the fuck. The Japanese on the boat didn’t freak out that there was fucking katakana on the wall of an ancient below the earth’s crust ruin why the fuck was it there???
Egyptian? Roman? No turns out it is medieval court Japanese.
The reason shin godzilla works is the destruction favors no one. There is no plot armor. And that this film is all about plot armor and the entire US military trying to help a family that just committed genocide is insane. We are supposed to care about this family at the excuse of dehumanizing literally everyone else on Earth (except one son and daughter in Mexico and a really upsetting scene of watching fighter pilots profile pictures go red.)
I could also have done without all the shakey-cam just let me see those monsters jerks! Oh another matter pulverizing shockwave that does nothing to anyone. I actually liked all the star trek shaking and stupid spaceship and james bond world trotting but it was all in service of this family of jerks. Nothing else fucking matters.
I swear when Main Guy said “I don’t want to lose my family,” Sam was going to say “But I am your family.” And then they would kiss. Then like two scenes later I thought Ken Watanabe and Main Guy were going to kiss. Also fortune cookie racist???
“The event five years ago that changed our world forever.” And “The greatest disaster in human history” might be the worst lines ever commited to film.
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An airhorn should have gone off everytime they mentioned Kong
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Whoever thought of Class Six Hurricane should be slapped.
Final post for now for all the premium @shrug content of operators operating operations. Look how Black and Female our military is. Also a beard that is wet-works, rescue, osprey pilot, grunt, and highest clearance advisor? Were the writers 13? They don’t seem to understand how the military or scientists or governments or divorce or weathers or eco-terrorists or
Did y’all see Dragon Ball Broly where Goku melts those ice ridges and it is fucking awesome? Anyways here’s some too close shakeycam with slow focus on the monsters eyes so you can’t tell what the fuck is happening.
They seriously say Long Live The King three times just to tie a bow on it?
What if we have seriously impossibly titanous visuals and also have thunking dialog to explain them?
Why did the closing credits song shop a map marking Tokyo when the song said “Tokyo” might be the perfect criticism of this film.
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during the first big fight with 3 Heads there’s a shot of the Dad laying on the ground just staring up with his mouth agape like a baby in his crib looking at a mobile while the loudest most ridiculously cardboard destructive action is happening. my gf had briefly fallen asleep and was just waking up when that shot happened and i looked over at her and we both just started busting up laughing, making that face it was so stupid.
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Dwelled for a while.
There was surely less total monster time in 2014 and obv. fewer monsters and fewer Big Toho Boys but I think the actual fights were better staged and coherent? The Nuclear Barf Down Throat finisher was much better than the Big Pulse Super anyway.
In King of Monsters it’s just snatches of Fight then cut to people unmoored from fight for 30 seconds then back to some snatches then
2014’s monsters were so physical and so bound to the world in a way that King’s are not. Everyone’s teleporting (beneath the sea?!). It’s trying to be bananas but still Somber dwelling in the shadowland between the two shoulda stamped on the gas shed the operators and introduced more aliens or something.
I like the vaguely rubbery look of the computer monsters. Ghidorah looks awesome esp. Some of the shots are just this painterly chiaroscuro that’s sure striking! But they don’t last long! I don’t know. Apol’s old bud has Goji v. Kong maybe that’ll be real cray we’ll see.
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WRITING OLDER THAN EGYPTIAN KVNANUSIFKZMKSたひたまさまはやさたらたまさかまはた
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it was a fart, okay
Godzilla let a big one rip while sitting on Gidorah’s three heads and the nuke and beans he just had were too much for all three noses
I just had my colon inflated by forced air so a camera could get the best possible view up in there OK I know a fart when I see one and that was not a fart it did not have a fart’s energy pattern it did not propagate in fart-fashion we did not see any sign of that Classic Nuclear Anus being directed for impact this was not a Fart Attack we have not reached the giddy incredible heights of Nuke Flatulence
I am not giving legendary pictures credit for a smelt that was not delt
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Saw King of the Monsters finally. Overall, didn’t like it much, but it had a lot of things in it I kind of liked. There’s potential there, I’m just not particularly hopeful later movies will embrace the weird rather than go safer.
Spoilers below the cut:
Summary
Stuff I liked:
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That Monach jet thing is sweet. Love how their main vehicles are Ospreys, too, Evangelion-style.
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Designs of all the monsters are awesome.
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I like the Monarch concept and whatnot a lot. Feels very Godzilla-ey, like the Anti-Megalosaurus Force and all the other random anti-Godzilla orgs that’ve popped up over the years.
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Most of the actors are good, even though their characters are real bad.
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So it sucks that all the monsters are not created by nuclear radiation at all, but, the ancient Earth stuff was cool.
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I really love the idea of the shobijin mothra twins having infiltrated modern-day scientific and military orgs, to serve Mothra in a practical way - one’s a lead scientist, one’s in Monarch leadership. I’m working off the assumption that the two twins we see in the movie know each other and knowingly serve Mothra.
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Digging how Monarch is now in conflict with the US military, and apparently has a massive budget allowing for tons of jets, helicopters, engineering projects, etc
Stuff I didn’t like:
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Main character once again is an incredibly uninteresting “dad who will protect his family” type who almost fucks up everything four different times.
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The fact that nuclear weapons are again and again used for good, saving the day, drives me insane. In this one, Ken Wantanabe’s character, who carries a watch that was stopped by the Hiroshima bomb, ends his arc by bringing a nuclear weapon into Godzilla’s chamber and detonating it to super-charge him to victory. Like, “thank god we have nuclear weapons” keeps being a thing and I loathe it.
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Similarly, the fact that we have a massive standing military is seen again and again as this godsend, the only thing between us and certain destruction by unjust evil monsters.
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The end of the movie has, I shit you not, all the different monsters reversing all of the effects of global warming, pollution, over-fishing, deforestation, all that. They’re “returning balance to the Earth,” which is not at all how they initially sold it. Initially the monsters are supposed to be like the Earth deploying a fever to kill off the virus, with the monsters rising up to wipe out the scourge of humanity. But then they add on this bizarre note where humanity does not change anything whatsoever, and Godzilla protects us, allowing us to continue as we’ve been going unaffected. It sucks.
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Villain sucked, weirdly became forgiven for wiping out an entire city at the end of the movie and goofs around with the main character and her daughter.
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Super background villain was a non-character. He’s presented as a crazed “eco-terrorist” for trying to expedite the rise of the monsters, but then his plan falls apart immediately, and he just runs away.
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I know this is a Godzilla staple by why do soldiers ever shoot at the monsters with bullets?
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Godzilla’s final victory was him just like, becoming invincible and winning.
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Movie is in perpetual dark-blue storm lighting, making it all feel samey.
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Ancient civilization stuff was interesting but very quickly glossed over and never explored.
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Radiation is depicted as this life-gifting force that causes trees and forests to sprout up???
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Main kid is seemingly the main character, then just gets side-lined into a box for the whole movie.
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Wild how the Monarch superjet gets Rodan’s attention, then flies directly over the heavily populated city, ensuring all within are killed. Bonus points for eye-rolling “US marines save foreign mother and child in Rodan attack” scene.
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i thought the main characters were the monsters and the little girl
and even more than the 2014 movie, the military were shown to be completely useless. like the guy says “this time, we’re fighting alongside him”, and then all the missiles they fire aren’t even noticed by ghidorah, who wrecks every aircraft practically by stretching his wings and yawning
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Thought a bit about how focusing on single characters never seems to work in kaiju movies, particularly when they’re not directly effecting the monster stuff.
It’s really hard to have a human character’s story mean anything when there’s a battle-for-the-fate-of-the-planet clash of ancient gods happening just overhead. Kind of gives me the same vibe as that whole weird scene in Man of Steel with Lawrence Fishbourne helping a single person out of the rubble, when thousands of people are dying all around them constantly. There’s a real broadening of empathy that happens in disaster movies that makes it hard to really care about one person when the disaster is still happening unimpeded.
With Shin Godzilla, I know a lot of that movie is meant to be a sendup of the paralyzing effect of bureaucracy, but the key moments of action by humans are these massive engineering projects that really worked for me. The climax focuses entirely around trying to execute a difficult, awkward plan with cranes and multiple teams working in tandem, with backups and adjustments made as things develop in unexpected ways. Anno loves doing these sequences, I’d guess because they hit on the very Japanese idea of the many working selflessly toward the good of the whole.
The key set sequences Anno did in Evangelion usually revolve around some enormous engineering feat, involving the entire country or city working in harmony to execute on a grand vision - using all the electricity in Japan to fire a single shot, shaping/shifting the city to catch a falling satellite with an unclear path, or even just running the mechs and keeping them contained at all - everything in that show requires everyone to do their part just so, or the whole thing falls apart. It’s like hundreds of people’s full-time job to get it all right. There’s this constant implication that everyone in that world is keenly aware that if they fail, the world’s over, and that clarify of vision is kinda fun in an escapist way.
I think that’s partly why Pacific Rim worked for me, the scale of the task was so great and it required hundreds upon hundreds of people working in tandem to meet the challenge. With KotM, that’s probably why the Monarch stuff worked too.
Long and short of it is: If they’re going to go really big, and if they really need to have humans in it, at least give the humans some huge engineering project to achieve. Individual characters just don’t feel like they effect the larger story unless they really really hamfist it somehow.
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and it’s especially tough in film because it goes against what everyone is taught – that narratives are about humanizing systematic stories by focusing on individuals. Only a few can fight for and tell the stories on that broader scale.
It’s a big tension in science fiction, which is often torn between pulp storytelling and the societal stories the genre is built around, and especially noticeable in filmed sci-fi (on a sidenote, I think one of the better ways to handle this is with fewer and more archetypal characters – the flat, abstract characterization of 2001, Moon, Under the Skin pushes the story away from being about these characters by their very formlessness).
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NEWS RELEASE – A NEW FILM “SHIN ULTRAMAN”
Tokyo, August 1st 2019 – A new film production of “SHIN ULTRAMAN” was publicly announced today. The new movie will come to theaters in 2021.
Hideaki Anno will join a film team, Higuchi-Gumi led by Director Shinji Higuchi, taking charge of Produce and Screenplay. First draft script has been finished in February 5th, 2019. Anno will fully join the project after finishing his “EVANGELION:3.0+1.0” film.Presented by: Tsuburaya Productions Co., Ltd.
Toho Co., Ltd.
Khara, Inc.
Distributed by: Toho Co., Ltd.
Release: 2021Toho Co., Ltd will take care of public communications. Please get contact with Toho regarding this project.
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i’m expecting wall-to-wall crucifixions
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Do Shin Jet Jaguar you cowardddd
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no don’t you see, this will be an opportunity for Anno to remake his college Ultraman Fanfilm on the big screen
it can’t possibly be as good as Akio Jissoji’s episodes.
I keep expecting someone to bring up that Criterion set. I heard rumors this thing was coming for years. Still I was blindsided by the Japanese cut of vs King Kong!!! As a kid I heard it was dramatically different, later in a college library I read it was just a twist of the dialogue, now hardcore nerds are telling me it’s substantially different again. I’m excited to finally get to the bottom of this.
Also glad I hadn’t dove into any of those Sony Blu-Ray packs already.
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