Legendary Pictures' Godzilla

[Gym Leader Devil]

Ten years later, this thread is still relevant. Godzilla still a true classic that Nevers goes out of style

My only gripe from trailers for GxK is that Kong seems like he's taking a lot of focus again (I tend to assume its because apes emote more like humans... cause we're apes) when I really care more about Godzilla.

 

[Gym Leader Devil]

You know, I wasn't around for a long time and never got to share my thoughts about GvsK. So, fuck it, quick double post so I can do that

I said way back when that I just couldn't see Kong as a legit threat to Godzilla, and this movie did not dissuade me. Kong impressed me (and I think Godzilla too) by taking so long to lose. By pulling out the stops to get a surprisingly good showing. But even with the axe in Kong's hands to even then ngs up a bit, Godzilla remains completely indomitable.

In the end, G pinned K down and exchanged roars with him... then turned and left to get back to hunting down Mecha G. He spared the defeated monke. And then Kong's heart failed. He was dying from the sheer trauma of that fight. Godzilla killed Kong... by... accident. Someone pick up that phone, cause I fuckin' called it

 

[Lulcielid]

Saw Godzilla x Kong: New Empire

Legendary is truly channeling that Showa Era energy.

 

[X-SOLDIER]

So, I have a REALLY hard time considering New Empire a "Godzilla" film – because it's inherently a King Kong movie where Godzilla is a fundamentally misused plot device, but my issues with the film go a LOT deeper than that.

To start with, it's important to remember that King of the Monsters established that the other Kaiju are openly subservient to Godzilla THIS INCLUDES SCYLLA.

However, in the opening of the movie, Godzilla is suddenly fighting Scylla in Rome and then sleeping in the colosseum (literally because the director was inspired by how his cat sleeps in her cat nest). There's no reason for the conflict taking place given what they established, and if Godzilla is protecting humanity then why aren't the other Titans under his rule following him still?

In the 1975 Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, Anguirius attacking Godzilla is used to show that something is wrong because they shouldn't be fighting one another and this is because it turns out that Godzilla is just Mechagodzilla in disguise who the other kaiju can tell is a threat and not ACTUALLY Godzilla. This is the sort of thing I was hoping for, but we didn't get at all – and instead it just gets even more strange.

That's sort of the whole point of him being the ruler of the surface world & Kong being made to manage Hollow Earth in the following film with Godzilla vs. Kong. They're each in charge of their respective domains. Per the plot of the film, there's an Iwi prophesy about the Scar King coming back to the surface and causing the ice age (which doesn't address the ludicrous lifespan that this implies for both Scar King & Shimo, but let's just ignore that inconsistency for now).

So, as soon as the Iwi's psychic signal starts going out, Godzilla picks up on it and immediately sets about soaking up radiation to prepare for a fight... except that Godzilla's not fast. Let's also just ignore that the entire purpose of the Hollow Earth in the first place was to explain how Godzilla was capable of fast travelling around the world undetected at such unexpected speeds... which is specifically not possible if he & Kong have to constantly remain outside of one another's respective domains with the end of Godzilla vs. Kong which this film reinforces. So, everything with Godzilla is all happening off screen and in really brief flash cuts to him wreaking havoc over various areas. Instead we're just following lonely Kong with a toothache bumbling about deeper into Hollow Earth. But the next part is where this gets REALLY bothersome.

Godzilla goes to Tiamat's lair, and – rather than forcing her to join up against this emerging threat – something that he's CLEARLY been shown capable of doing in the past when he is aware that there is a significant threat – he straight up just atomic breaths her to pieces, eats her, and absorbs the solar energy from her lair to turn himself pink (with an unspecified energy source that is apparently the perfect counter to Shimo's power).

Again, in the 1975 Godzilla Vs. Mechagodzilla, Godzilla stores up a bunch of electricity in his body in order to create an electromagnetic field to rip off Mechagodzilla's head, so Godzilla drinking up energy to use it as an unexpected plot device isn't new... but it's more clearly represented, and he's not murdering the other Titans to do it – he's explicitly working WITH them, because he needs the ape-like King Caesar's assistance in order to win.

The ENTIRE FILM, Godzilla has been following this psychic signal and tracking the emergence of where the threat is going to be, and those things are happening off screen and there's no team of humans following him about, because they're busy chasing Kong through Hollow Earth the whole movie. So, what does Kong do?

He accidentally frees Scar King and gets injured, where it's shown that Scar King is forcibly controlling Shimo with a crystal he has on the end of a spinal cord whip. There's no explanation of what the crystal is or why it works. There's no justification for why it functions when he holds it, or why it doesn't break as he's smashing it into everything at the tip of his whip. This is made worse, because the eventual solution is just to have Baby Kong smash it with the axe made of Godzilla's dorsal spine like it's a piece of ice... so if he so much as attacked Godzilla with WAY more kinetic energy using it as an actual whip (the tip makes the cracking sound because they turn fast enough to break the sound barrier), he'd have obliterated his most powerful asset. Scar King is LITERALLY a non-threat to Godzilla, especially since he'll lose control of Shimo the moment he attacks given the details that the film itself established.

So, what's Kong doing? When his attempt to fight Shimo goes wrong and he gets the help from the humans, he goes to the surface to get Godzilla to come down... except that Godzilla has been getting the signals about this THE WHOLE FILM while Kong was blindly stumbling about totally unaware. Godzilla was headed towards the threat anyway and didn't NEED Kong to be there, and all that does is incite the ONLY conflict he has thus far that makes sense given what the previous films established.

So the two of them fight and destroy the pyramids for no reason before Mothra deus ex shows up (thanks to the human plotline, which is still connected to Kong & Skull Island for some reason). Mothra functions as an even MORE minor random plot device to speak to both of them and get them to join forces before descending into the Hollow Earth... which STILL fails and the fight comes up into the surface anyway. Why? All because Shimo needs to ice attack the sky so that there's a point for Godzilla's new pink energy to perfectly reverse that.

So instead of having Tiamat remaining on the surface or bringing her along to have a team fight with a Manda-like serpent who would be motivated to attack the Scar King who's using a serpent kaiju skeleton as a weapon to abuse a kaiju who is specifically a counter to her powers, she just just insta-gibbed.

Also, as soon as Shimo is freed from the Crystal, she joins up to fight against the Scar King because APPARENTLY now Kaiju are capable of following Godzilla's authority rather than just needing to be indiscriminately murdered for no fucking reason... Except that, instead of going to live in the ice lair that Tiamat no longer occupies – Shimo goes back to live with Kong and all the other giant apes in Hollow Earth where she was originally imprisoned in a volcano... The Apes are apparently the protectors of humanity whereas Godzilla is the protector of nature... except that ALL of humanity is on the surface and the whole world of Titans are below in the Hollow Earth.

To top this all off, Monarch is fundamentally incapable of being able to send advance warning to help evacuate the locations where the Titans are attacking despite kaiju monitoring basically being the ENTIRE reason that they're supposed to even exist in the first place. Even though Godzilla 2014 established that they're moving natural disasters and even the wake from Godzilla WALKING in the ocean nearby is causing tidal wave effects, this has him diving off of cliffs into the ocean and knocking through bridges full of vehicles as just passing destruction, rather than giving ANY consideration towards this the way that the original Legendary film had whole setpieces focusing EXCLUSIVELY on how fucking horrifying this is. So the "victory" at the end of the film is that hundreds of thousands of people died across multiple cities that the movie never ONCE even acknowledges.

So, not only is it a failure for the basic considerations still present in the more casual Showa-era "Vs." films, but it doesn't even have a meaningful message attached to it about what was causing all of those things or how exactly this is supposed to impact everyone's perspective towards Godzilla... instead he just goes back and sleeps in the colosseum of Rome – which is one of the only things that the film established about humanity as the Italians are EXTREMELY concerned about this and not ok with it.


Just... I dunno man. It feels like it manages to be a Kong-centric movie using Godzilla Kaiju as throwaway plot devices in a way that also fundamentally misunderstands not ONLY all of the Legendary films that it's building off of directly, but ALSO fails to understand everything about the Toho films that preceded it and when & why those less heavy films are able to work so well. I really WANTED to enjoy this, but it just feels like it's failing at absolutely everything it's doing, no matter which way you try to look at it.



X

 

[Gym Leader Devil]

The sad thing is it only takes a little work on screen for all of this to make more sense. Scylla's coloration is different in the Rome fight than it appeared in KotM, a throw away line about how it had powered itself up and started defying Godzilla would have excused that fight. A reference to Godzilla: Dominion and G's encounter with Tiamat there would show how much a team player Tiamat isn't, justifying Godzilla deciding to take her power for his own use over trusting her to back him up. One person speculating that the upper levels of the hollow earth must be neutral territory would clear up Godzilla still moving around so fast without issue. The issue with all this is that no one is tracking and paying attention to Godzilla, they're all with Kong. If the movie would just stick with Godzilla more we could see these things, or be told by someone like Rick Stanton. But no, we must focus on Monke till the bitter end

It'd still leave your issues with the lack of evacuations and such, which are pretty big in and of themselves, but to just do the above would greatly enhance my enjoyment of this film and make it all make more sense. I'm of the opinion that the thing to do is stop crossing these two over. Kong was at his best in Skull Island, let him have his own movie if we want him to be the big star, he can fight lesser kaiju in the hollow earth, maybe get that Kong vs Ebirah throwdown Toho intended back in the day. And let Godzilla have his own movies, fighting the big time kaiju like Destoroyah or Biolantte that Kong just can't handle. Stop trying to force them into the same film where there's no time for necessary exposition on why the top billed character is doing what he's doing.

 

[X-SOLDIER]

EXACTLY. The reason that the writing is so frustrating is that there are SO MANY WAYS to have easily addressed the contradictory decisions being made to have them make sense and feel justified – but there's a MASSIVE lack of exposition where it would support things that need it, and actually makes the film suffer without it having those simple explanations that happen all over the place for smaller things.

Exactly what you said with Scylla & Tiamat makes PERFECT sense but we don't get any of those historical precedent to their relationship to one another, and BECAUSE we don't have that justification it oversimplifies Godzilla to look like a big mean lizard who just kills anything else on the surface and is only capable of nuance when Mothra is around. That's the whole reason it's important for the humans to follow Godzilla and to provide the direct exposition – because those things AREN'T always apparent as they are with Kong as a more human analogue where those things are easier to show not tell. The film isn't utilizing its storytelling resources to help things where it needs to.

I have no issues with team-up films and if you want to make "Kong & Godzilla" films... do that. "Godzilla x ____" titled films imply that they're about Godzilla's story – and Godzilla had NO development in any way in this movie aside from a pilfered power from Tiamat that was a plot device where he expended that energy and then went back to sleep, where he'll almost certainly just wake up as regular ol' Cherenkov Radiation Blue Godzilla. He LITERALLY goes back to exactly where he was in the opening scene of the film AND likely resets his status quo on top of that.

Kong had MULTIPLE arcs of character progression starting out from being alone & needing the humans to care for him and replace his tooth with an artificial one, to finding other apes & baby Kong because he needs social bonds – but who are hostile to him, to finding out their hostility was because of the oppression of the Scar King, to then attempting to help them and being critically injured but Shimo's ice and needing not JUST the human's help to recover by getting a mecha gauntlet, to ALSO needing Godzilla's ACTUAL strength to win the day, to where even the establishment of the titular "New Empire" is that Kong is replacing the role that the Scar King held over the other Apes with Shimo at his side. ALL of those things in Hollow Earth are things which Godzilla isn't involved with in any way whatsoever, and they ARE the entirety of the story.

Labelling this as being a Kong x Godzilla movie would just be setting expectations up in a more reasonable way that reflects what the film is actually about, which you can tell with a simple post-movie litmus test assumung that they both got a solo movie next:

• If you want to know what happens with Kong by his next film, you HAVE to watch this movie. There's an entire kingdom of other gigantic Apes Kong is living with and a big ice lizard Kaiju hanging out with him. Everything in Hollow Earth and with the Iwi tribe are NOTHING like what things were like in his last movie – and that's EXPLICITLY Kong's [strikethrough]Kingdom[/strikethrough] New Empire that experienced change.

• If you want to know what happens with Godzilla by his next film, you could literally cover Godzilla's energy being hot pink & the pyramids being wrecked with a single line of dialogue – if that's even required since Godzilla's Tiamat-energy-powered state will likely have subsided the same way that Burning Godzilla's energy did at the end of King of the Monsters, and the film might not ever show Cairo at all. Nothing in his domain changed aside from the deaths of both Scylla & Tiamat – who, like the MUTO in King of the Monsters can just reappear as a descendant without audiences even asking.

If you can miss a film and it doesn't change anything for that character – it's not that character's film.



X

 

[Gym Leader Devil]

That whole post, X? This is why we're friends I feel everything you said. And it hurts a little, Godzilla has been a big feature of my life since I was tiny. Sharing his movies with my kids is a highlight of my adult life. And let's be honest, if you're gonna be a real G-fan you gotta take good with bad. When you're in as many films (and shows, comics, etc) as Godzilla has been, questionable writing decisions, pacing problems, real issues are going to happen. I can live with that to a point.

It's just... the problems here are just so thoroughly preventable. I can get behind some of their decisions, like Godzilla being overzealous with taking the violent approach to conflict resolution. It fits the overarching character of the many incarnations he's had. Legendary G has never willingly taken a step back from anything that challenges him. Even when he really should have, like when confronted by Mecha-Godzilla in Hong Kong. I wouldn't mind him jumping the gun to "fuck it, execute 'em" only to have Mothra reason with him now and then at all. But for that to work with what's been shown to us since 2014, everything needs to be on the table explaining it. Hell, I personally view Godzilla's basic indifference to humans in 2014 and KotM differently after GvsK. It now feels to me like he didn't realize the humans were trying to hurt him before, like at the Golden Gate bridge. Now? He knows what those naval guns are trying to do, and he hits them back even though they have no hope of actually hurting him. I just need it acknowledged on screen, dang it. I need people pointing out that the beast who used to carefully dive under naval ships will swim right through them now if they fail to hold their fire. That the big guy who tried to go around buildings in 2014 is fine with cutting through multiple occupied bridges, and why. Give him development, like Kong constantly gets. Let him meaningfully change, instead of getting temporary power ups to sell toys.

I want to like this movie, I want to continue loving the Monsterverse as a whole. But I need Godzilla to be important, to be a character not a plot device. If Godzilla can be replaced by a sexy super-powered lamp in any given film, I want out.