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LesterGroans posted:While I love Godzilla '14 I think the complaints about it are off-base but kind of accurate. Instead of more Godzilla action there should probably just be less human stuff. It could absolutely be a shorter film. It has the perfect amount of big old monster fightin' though. the human element would be fine if it was interesting like in Shin Godzilla. Most of the movie not involving Cranston in G14 is excruciating to sit through and very color-by-numbers. Either go for extreme procedural aspects like Shin G or just go batshit insane like Final Wars.
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Aug 2, 2018 16:14
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Happy Noodle Boy posted:Since were talking screen time here you go. Godzilla ‘14 has around 10 minutes of the big G, a full minute more than the original Godzilla. It speaks volumes that Invasion of Astro-Monster, one of if not the best Goji films, has the least amount of monsters both screentime and percentage-wise. Again, it makes up for it in just weirditude.
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Aug 2, 2018 16:28
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DLC Inc posted:the human element would be fine if it was interesting like in Shin Godzilla. Most of the movie not involving Cranston in G14 is excruciating to sit through and very color-by-numbers. Either go for extreme procedural aspects like Shin G or just go batshit insane like Final Wars. Shin Godzilla's high octane governmental committee meeting action is loving 
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Aug 2, 2018 18:02
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DLC Inc posted:the human element would be fine if it was interesting like in Shin Godzilla. Most of the movie not involving Cranston in G14 is excruciating to sit through and very color-by-numbers. Either go for extreme procedural aspects like Shin G or just go batshit insane like Final Wars.
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Aug 2, 2018 18:03
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I feel like we’ve discussed this
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Aug 2, 2018 18:17
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K. Waste posted:It speaks volumes that Invasion of Astro-Monster, one of if not the best Goji films, has the least amount of monsters both screentime and percentage-wise. One thing I love is that a good portion of the fandom have (correctly) just decided that Monster Zero is one of the BEST Godzilla movies over time People beyond the forum that are Godzilla nerds that I talk with have even brought that up when talking about the movie
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Aug 2, 2018 18:24
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Naw, I'll agree that 2014 should have expanded on Hawaii or else added another monster beat at that point in the movie. Its not a problem of total monster screentime, its a problem of pacing. Astro Monster gets away with so little monster time because its human plot is already a great sci fi b movie.
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Aug 2, 2018 18:28
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Terrible Opinions posted:You say this as though Kong Skull Island didn't exist or wasn't boss as gently caress. You had Kong vs helicopters, Kong getting octopus sushi, and Kong vs regular Skull Crawlers, all of which weren't extended fights. Imagine if every fight was Kong vs Skull Crawlers. That poo poo would get tired. The Transformers fights are always Transformers destroying Transformers, but just more and more of the surrounding areas getting destroyed. Only so many times that in the film before it gets boring.
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Aug 2, 2018 18:45
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You also have a whole island of interesting monsters that non-verbally let you know exactly the sort of world Kong comes from. One where everything except Kong and the Skull Crawlers have to use camouflage because of how completely those two groups dominate the ecosystem. Though I guess I'm just down for more creature feature and environmental storytelling whenever possible, even if it isn't all that giant or specifically the headlining characters.
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Aug 2, 2018 18:55
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Davros1 posted:You had Kong vs helicopters, Kong getting octopus sushi, and Kong vs regular Skull Crawlers, all of which weren't extended fights. The movie filled the other down time through of Marines vs Monsters (or rather Marines trying to survive while something new picks one off) so while the Kong vs Something stuff wasn't that long there was always Marines vs Something going on.
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Aug 2, 2018 19:13
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Spider forest is probably one of the more memorable moments in a recent monster movie. Pure terror.
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Aug 2, 2018 19:20
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G14 should have given us something of the Hawaii situation, maybe not the resolution but at least the start. More than OH HEY ITS GODZILLA. It's a huge tease and the payoff is another 1/3rd of the film away. It does not surprise me that child me loved watching vs Hedorah, and MechaGodzilla 2 both of which have a ton of monster screen time. Skull Island is so boring. I still don't know how with that concept and that cast you make such an imminently boring film.
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Aug 2, 2018 20:08
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I don't know how you'd call Skull Island boring I mean, I GET how, you'd type the words out B-O-R-I-N-G, but it don't compute dude.
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Aug 2, 2018 20:11
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CelticPredator posted:I don't know how you'd call Skull Island boring I wasn't that entertained by the spectacle and felt very little tension. It's kind of all over the map when it comes to tone. Is it a scary movie? A funny movie? It doesn't seem real sure. It's got this really loaded cast who all seem to just sorta be phoning it in, and Kong is I dunno fine but the whole film lacked the sort of weight and atmosphere that G14 I thought did a great job developing. I never cared about anything that was happening. It was boring to me, even though objectively all the pieces said to me it should have been super fun.
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Aug 2, 2018 20:33
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Accordion Man posted:Killing off Cranston's character was the movie's biggest mistake. Cranston's son should have been killed instead and then Cranston just starts going Captain Ahab on the MUTOs for taking his family away from him while Ken Watanabe tries to convince him not go completely off the deep end. If Cranston didn't die then Godzilla would never have arrived.
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Aug 2, 2018 20:43
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What the hell was Cranston's old rear end gonna do to get "revenge" on the MUTOs?
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Aug 2, 2018 20:45
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There was nothing exciting about Cranston in the film anyways. He's just a screamy and crazy old man.
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Aug 2, 2018 20:49
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The Notorious ZSB posted:I wasn't that entertained by the spectacle and felt very little tension. It's kind of all over the map when it comes to tone. Is it a scary movie? A funny movie? It doesn't seem real sure. Like a lot of good adventure films, it has elements of horror, comedy, suspense, and drama.
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Aug 2, 2018 20:51
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The Notorious ZSB posted:I wasn't that entertained by the spectacle and felt very little tension. It's kind of all over the map when it comes to tone. Is it a scary movie? A funny movie? It doesn't seem real sure. It's got this really loaded cast who all seem to just sorta be phoning it in, and Kong is I dunno fine but the whole film lacked the sort of weight and atmosphere that G14 I thought did a great job developing. I never cared about anything that was happening. It was boring to me, even though objectively all the pieces said to me it should have been super fun. it's called an adventure movie
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Aug 2, 2018 20:51
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"is indiana jones a horror, a comedy? it seems like its unsure what it wants to be and that's why its loving TRASH"
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Aug 2, 2018 20:51
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Vintersorg posted:There was nothing exciting about Cranston in the film anyways. He's just a screamy and crazy old man. I think people just wanted more Cranston because Godzilla was his first major role after Breaking Bad ended. And I don't blame 'em, he's' a good actor.
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Aug 2, 2018 20:53
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K. Waste posted:What the hell was Cranston's old rear end gonna do to get "revenge" on the MUTOs? Sounds like mutineer talk to me, Ishmael.
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Aug 2, 2018 21:36
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Sounds like mutineer talk to me, Ishmael. "General, I'm a former nuclear supervisor with only one tidbit of useful inference that's gonna prove completely useless in a couple of hours and an inherent distrust of all authority built up over 15 years - but I just feel like I could be doing more, and you've gotta let me do it!"
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Aug 2, 2018 22:03
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CelticPredator posted:Like a lot of good adventure films, it has elements of horror, comedy, suspense, and drama. Peanut President posted:it's called an adventure movie So then I think it was a bad adventure film? I just think it wasn't successful in pulling off what it wanted to do. I didn't like it. I didn't care about anyone or anything in it, so there was not much drama for me. I did not find it suspenseful. Enjoy this differing opinion. Boring is a straight forward definition. I am also surprised that's how I feel about it, but it is. I am attached to those elements in Indiana Jones, but they felt misplaced or misused in Skull Island.
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Aug 2, 2018 22:37
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The Notorious ZSB posted:So then I think it was a bad adventure film? I just think it wasn't successful in pulling off what it wanted to do. I didn't like it. I didn't care about anyone or anything in it, so there was not much drama for me. I did not find it suspenseful. Enjoy this differing opinion. It's almost like they could have slightly adjusted his character to provide him reasons to stay and be active in the film, just like the contrivances set up for white bread action star III.
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Aug 2, 2018 23:10
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Caros posted:It's almost like they could have slightly adjusted his character to provide him reasons to stay and be active in the film, just like the contrivances set up for white bread action star III. Generally, more contrivance is not preferable to less.
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Aug 2, 2018 23:28
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Peanut President posted:it's called an adventure movie Skull Island is actually an action comedy. It's mostly dark humor, but things like the flashbulb popping off after the camera (and John Goodman) got eaten, or the helicopter getting grabbed and thrown by Kong just after Sam Jackson's crash are definitely humorous. The ending is upbeat, further qualifying as a comedy.
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Aug 2, 2018 23:42
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K. Waste posted:What the hell was Cranston's old rear end gonna do to get "revenge" on the MUTOs? I think Godzilla 2014 is good by the way, the human protagonist just really sucks, especially compared to Shin Godzilla which I recently got around to watching. King of the Monsters looks like it won't have the problem though with the human characters and I hope its going to be as rad as it looks.
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Aug 3, 2018 00:06
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Accordion Man posted:Nothing, hence the Ahab reference. I think that would just be more interesting than the boring rear end whitebread army dude protagonist we got. Ahab doesn't do nothing. Brody is like an exact occidental replica of the uncannily reserved and unceremonious characters in Shin. The movies have way more in common than they do different.
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Aug 3, 2018 00:20
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Accordion Man posted:Nothing, hence the Ahab reference. I think that would just be more interesting than the boring rear end whitebread army dude protagonist we got. I think they’re massively telegraphing that the real King of the Monsters is MOM
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Aug 3, 2018 00:58
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mllaneza posted:Skull Island is actually an action comedy. It's mostly dark humor, but things like the flashbulb popping off after the camera (and John Goodman) got eaten, or the helicopter getting grabbed and thrown by Kong just after Sam Jackson's crash are definitely humorous. The ending is upbeat, further qualifying as a comedy. well most adventure movies have action and comedy, and most horror is comedic, so it's an action horror comedy adventure movie.
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Aug 3, 2018 01:06
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City on the Edge of Battle was just as joyless as the first anime Godzilla movie, and somehow had worse sound mixing. It's hard to have a dramatic moment when you can't hear the dialogue over the blaring music. So I figure Mefties wants to use Godzilla to lure out Gidorah so one can kill the other, and then the Mothra people will send out the larva to negotiate or to spray them with webs. Considering how lame and slow this Godzilla is I doubt it will be a very engaging fight with Gidorah. Earth Goji doesn't even have atomic breath, he's just got a laser beam that emanates from in front of his nose. Also surprisingly spindly legs. Arc Hammer fucked around with this message at 02:46 on Aug 3, 2018 |
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Aug 3, 2018 02:07
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I'm sorry I keep harping on the same issue, but it seems to me that the praise of Bryan Cranston's performance and the consequent idea that the film should have been about him 'going Ahab' on the MUTOs is super fetishistic and has no actual basis in what would be an organic motivation for the character. To be clear, Joe Brody is in no way in a similar position to Ahab. Ahab is a career wailer who has a specific megalomaniacal vendetta against a creature who not only took his leg (symbolically castrating him), but undermines his entire implicit belief system in man's superiority over nature. Joe Brody is just a guy whose wife died. And she didn't die because of the MUTO. She died in a nuclear reactor breach caused by an earthquake, which was the result of his superiors ignoring his persistent warnings about irregular seismic and sonic activity under the plant. In the hypothetical scenario where his son is killed fifteen years later by the MUTO, there is still no continuity between this event and an Ahab-like vendetta. Folks praise Cranston's performance, but there is fundamentally no understanding of his character. He is not mad at the MUTOs. He's mad at people, specifically the people who have the power to make informed decisions to protect life but don't for the sake of profit and maintaining their authority. When he's arrested and brought to the Monarch facility, he is not speaking in terms of a fanatical drive to kill whatever has been awakened by the plant. He has already accepted that there's no going back, that "it is going to send us back to the stone age." In the hypothetical scenario where his son dies, he's not going to do a sudden heal turn to be like blaming this heretofore faceless, blameless animal. He's going to retire to the broken, fetal position of a man who's now lost everything because of man's arrogance in believing that nature is in his control and not the other way around. His arc as a character is over the moment that his worst suspicions are confirmed. When he dies, his narrative continues through his son, and then through Godzilla.
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Aug 3, 2018 04:25
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I thought his wife died due to the male muto and the earthquake was just a coverup edit: though it has been like 4 years
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Aug 3, 2018 04:50
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LesterGroans posted:While I love Godzilla '14 I think the complaints about it are off-base but kind of accurate. Instead of more Godzilla action there should probably just be less human stuff. It could absolutely be a shorter film. It has the perfect amount of big old monster fightin' though. The link Noodle Boy posted directly before you bears this out--Godzilla '14 has more Big G on camera time than nearly a third of the other films, yet is second only to Invasion of the Astro-Monster, one of the more interestingly plotted films of the series, for lowest percentage of total run time he shows up in. Like, I can live with our soldier man being a blank cypher for the audience, but the big misstep was spending so very much time away from the kaiju action while still being blank porridge. That's not engaging the audience into their proxy if it's dull. Like for the second act of the film, his whole motivation is to find his wife and son, which to be fair, trying to find your family in the middle of a disaster zone makes for good drama. Then suddenly the whole subplot about the analog bomb (that ends up not at all working) comes in, and his concern for them completely vanishes. That's just lazy scriptwriting and completely cuts out any reason for us to care.
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Aug 3, 2018 04:55
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It's not even hard to imagine what Cranston's arc would have been: learning to let go of his past trauma and anger, choosing to reconnect with the family he does have. Also something involving Godzilla.
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Aug 3, 2018 04:59
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Mantis42 posted:It's not even hard to imagine what Cranston's arc would have been: learning to let go of his past trauma and anger, choosing to reconnect with the family he does have. Also something involving Godzilla. That’s a stupid arc that directly invalidates the MUTOs as antagonists
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Aug 3, 2018 05:17
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I don’t feel it’s lazy script writing. He is a husband and soldier and in the face of what they are fighting man is fallible and their own devices fail and put them at risk and he has to act to protect his family and people. Godzilla is brought forth as Bryan Cranston’s soul anguished cry for justice. It awakens him. It’s divine almost. There are many layers.
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Aug 3, 2018 05:22
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Like, there's calling the military protagonist of a giant monster film whitebread, and then there's saying the solution to this is to have a story about an baby boomer granddad journeying across the world to see the daughter-in-law and grandson he's never met. This paternalistic attachment that folks have to Cranston is uber-whitebread. It's Pixar whitebread.
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Aug 3, 2018 05:25
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K. Waste posted:Like, there's calling the military protagonist of a giant monster film whitebread, and then there's saying the solution to this is to have a story about an baby boomer granddad journeying across the world to see the daughter-in-law and grandson he's never met. I prefer what we got but if it were gonna be about a boomer’s quest for meaning the right choice would be Ken watanabe’s character, or maybe Sally hawkins’s
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Aug 3, 2018 05:48
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