2019-06-08, 10:00
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Link #23 |
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Sekiroad-Idols Sing Twice
Join Date: Oct 2009
Location: Blooming Blue Rose
Age: 33
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Four monsters, two hours, one planet, a lot of fight scenes. I won’t blame anyone for jumping at the chance to see this film, and it does deliver exactly what it advertises. That would normally set the right mindset for an experience like this. Unfortunately, the movie is both painfully straightforward while subverting expectations in a highly unsatisfying fashion. But instead of making another joke at The Last Jedi’s expense, let’s look at Godzilla: King of the Monsters
Godzilla: King of the Monsters stars Raymond Burr as reporter Steve Martin, as he investigates sightings of a behemoth that has attacked ships off the coast of Japan Wait, that’s the wrong movie Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) is about ancient monsters awakening around the world, while the military and an organization known as Monarch try to handle the damage caused by these giant animals. As the enormous creatures start vying for supremacy against each other, humanity finds itself in the crossfire as the planet’s largest battle for dominance is reignited Or at least, this is what the story attempts, but “attempts” might be too generous. To say the movie crashes while flying its premise would imply it took off the ground at some point, but even three aerial monsters in the film didn’t let it happen. The earliest sign of trouble with this story appears when the first of these titans rears its head and its features are barely noticeable The decision to obscure these giant animals unfortunately extends to the territory battles between them. The fights are spaced far apart enough to not overwhelm the audience, but frequent enough to continue the thunderous footsteps. Unfortunately, on top of the behemoths being obscured by rain, snow, clouds, or smoke, the “camera” work involved with these CGI creations is close and chaotic to the point of being nearly indiscernible. There’s rarely a steady point of reference to sell the size of these titans, and the “color” filter with their scenes only serves to hide them further even in plain sight What stands out the most about these monsters is the sound design, both the roaring movements and their musical motifs. The roars of the giant animals are excellently powerful, frantic, majestic, and threatening to match the titan. The vibrations of the tremors and trails from the wake of these behemoths emphasize their size and being where the visual framing does not. But by far the audio highlight in the best way possible are the creature’s themes. Beautifully crafted masterpieces that invoke a sense of history from these ancient beings, while constructing a mythology and presence to reflect the nature of these leviathans. The extraordinary amount of care in this score is absolutely haunting, and by far the best part of the movie It makes it all the more confusing that the film doesn’t shut up. The fight scenes are spread out, but most of the space between them is intent on using loud tracks even when nothing cinematic is happening. Here would be a great time for the movie to let the audience catch its breath after its taken it away. It doesn’t give time for the spectacle to settle, not for the frequency of the setpieces, but for the barely noticeable difference in “volume” between downtime and destruction time. The film wants to retain the viewer’s excitement when the monsters are not on-screen (if they were even visible in the first place), but instead comes across as auditory hijacking. It overcompensates for itself and comes across as lacking confidence because of it The most damning thing of all, however, are the human characters. If the monsters’ presence is bombarded by inconsistent audiovisuals, then it’s left in a heap by the infuriating human characters, and not because of military firepower either. Amidst the miscellaneous soldiers and scientists running about the story, are three thruline characters throughout the plot. One lacks purpose and personality in favor of being an audience surrogate. One is hyper-competent to a degree so as to nearly invalidate everyone else. One displays motivations that make less than no sense. And all of them are connected by tragedy via destruction from these behemoths The dramatic thrust shared by these three characters is decimated by how poorly written they are. This is not okay. In 1954, there was a monster movie which had characters genuinely fearful both of the monster, and the consequences of what may happen should they take a certain step to destroy that monster. In 1989, there was a monster movie where a scientist was desperate to bring his deceased daughter back to life, only for it to backfire horribly. In 2004, there was a monster movie where the main hero’s journey paralleled that of a monster fighting against an alien invasion Those films are Gojira, Godzilla vs Biollante, and Godzilla: Final Wars. They are different in tone from one another, but share in common a strong enough human element that contextualizes the sweeping spectacle of 50 meter, 80 meter, or 100 meter tall titans. Without that human anchor, action scenes featuring these giant animals can only carry a film so far before becoming boring. Not cheesy. Boring. This is even assuming the set pieces are compelling on their own in the first place This movie hurts. Even if the human characters were unremarkable, there's a baseline here that should have been highly entertaining for two hours. But not only are the human characters just milquetoast, they are aggressively aggravating. And the creature spectacle itself becomes tiring because of how haphazardly it's crafted. This film isn't painful because it could have been great, it hurts because there's a lot of care undermined by incompetence. It knows how to pace itself for breathers but doesn't let its downtime do what it needs to. It would have masterful sound design if it didn't insist on being loud all the time to the point certain music pieces can't shine through. The monsters themselves look great when they're not obstructed from view, while the roars and sounds from these giant animals project a lot of personality This film should have been an atomic blast but was instead a nuclear meltdown. After the studio behind this movie released two very solid monster films in 2014 and 2017, what should have been a three-peat didn't happen. The expectations on this movie weren't even the highest, because the monster films from 2014 and 2017 still had noticeable flaws themselves. Even carrying that tempered anticipation, this movie still hurts. I don't drink, but maybe Godzilla: King of the Monsters would be a better time if I wasn't sober
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2019-06-10, 22:19
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Link #24 |
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Black Steel Knight
Join Date: Jul 2011
Location: Indonesia
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A fair review of KOTM (+ Dark Phoenix):
I like that Jay actually gave Shin Godzilla a try after he watched KOTM and he really likes it. He can actually see its greatness. Big plus for Red Letter Media *salutes*. Also, for those who don't know, the skit at the beginning is a jab at Kristian Harloff's rant about not being invited to the Disney's Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge theme park  .For those who don't know, Godzilla movies are practically divided into two types: the "serious" ones and the "popcorn" ones. The serious ones consist of Gojira (1954), Godzilla (1984), Shin Godzilla (2016) and probably Hollywood Godzilla (2014) if you want to count that one (at least it gets A for effort). The rest are either flat-out silly "popcorn" movies or straddling the lines (with mixed results). But most of them are still fun to watch. Fun fact: the 60s era of Godzilla movies actually have better special effects compared to Hollywood's effect-laden sci-fi movies at the time and simply look richer. So, Japanese Godzilla movies already surpassed Hollywood movies for a good decade. To this day, there's still no contender for a serious Godzilla movie that can stand on the level of 1954 and 2016. Hollywood have yet to make a truly great serious Godzilla movie. The 2014 can only reach the level of 1984 at its best. ___________________________________ Now it's time for my own impression: So, I just watched Godzilla KOTM and…damn, what a ride! It might not mean much for non-fans but there’s just so much love that this movie has for all the Toho kaiju lore. The monster fights are fantastic and half of that excitement is generated from seeing the familiar kaiju in this shiny Hollywood makeover done by a director who is a fan of Godzilla. But of course, the movie has shortcomings. The human story is basically just nonsensical filler except maybe for a couple of plot points in the movie. But I’m grateful that none of the human characters are annoying (for me, at least). Most of them are just meh except for Serizawa who gets a well-deserved scene for himself. Actually, my main nitpick for the movie is something that Shin Godzilla & even Kong: Skull Island already fixed, which is: things being obscured either by snow, smoke, cloud, rain or thunderstorm. I just don’t get it. Michael Dougherty is a Godzilla fan, so I think he would like to see the monsters in more broad daylight setting and in steady panoramic shot. But even he seems to insist to have the monsters fight in heavily atmospheric environments. Whether it's budget or purely artistic choice, I don’t know.  The monster scenes that we actually got are already beautiful to look at, but it would have been better if the fights took place in a clearer day with nothing obscuring the view. Even if Ghidorah canonically brought thunderstorm with him, why couldn’t they make the fight happen during the day? Also the camera & now-let's-cut-to-human-while-the-kaiju-fight-is going-on moments is kinda annoying. It’s not quite a shaky-cam like in Bayformers, but the camera sometimes move & zoom so much which can be distracting at times. Also, Oxygen Destroyer...it's so poorly depicted.......what have they done to you, my boy! Still, all in all, for this Godzilla fan, KOTM is an enjoyable ride worth the price of admission. I heard that KOTM’s opening weekend box office is weak and have a high chance to underperform. Well, in that case, I’m glad that they already wrapped up shooting for Godzilla vs. Kong so they can’t really cancel it now. They already put so much money for the project. GvK will probably be the last Hollywood Godzilla movie that we’ll ever get in this decade (and probably the next) not only because there’s not much money in it anymore (even though Godzilla 2014 & Kong 2017 made more than enough profit) but also because Legendary’s contract with Toho will be over after 2020. Right now, Toho is probably waiting for the contract to expire before they make their new Godzilla movie (probably continuation of Shin) and frankly, I’m more interested in Toho’s next project than Hollywood ones. Hollywood already has a Godzilla solo movie, a Kong solo movie, a Godzilla movie with Ghidorah-Mothra-Rodan in it, and the upcoming Godzilla vs. King Kong movie (they even managed to showcase their own original kaijus throughout those movies). Those are pretty much the essential movies that need to be adapted by Hollywood for the novelty of big budget CGI. The rest is more fluff than anything. So yeah, if GvK marks the end of the MonsterVerse, I think I'll be content (assuming GvK is good enough and not a disaster). My expectation & excitement will then be directed at future Toho outings.
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2019-06-13, 03:28
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Link #25 |
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Confused Shark
Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: Atlantis
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The monster battles were awesome
But the pacing problem stands out After mass release of monsters, we instead got so many boring human scenes But anyway, the Ghidorah here is better than that of in Netflix 3rd episode
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2019-06-15, 20:09
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Link #26 |
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Snobby Gentleman
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Monterrey, México
Age: 43
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Later, I'll be delivering my thoughts on the film, which IMO I think it was an awesome film though not without the glaring flaws mentioned previously.
Anyways, the sour reaction from fans due to KOTM performance is making Legendary to push back and forth the release date for Godzilla vs. Kong. |
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2019-09-05, 22:40
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Link #27 |
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User of the "Fast Draw"
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Canada
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Finally got to see it (just didn't have the time or money when it was in theaters) and it was good. I do think the human side was once again the weaker element. All the more so since I'm not sure the story knew what to do with them sometimes. The 'mother' of the movie was a crazy eco-terrorist. And yet the movie was trying to create an "oh no" reaction when she was ready to sacrifice herself and even gave her one of the last big lines of the movie. The creators know she was the villain right? Things spiraled out of control more than expected, but her plan was still to unleash a bunch of monsters and have them kill billions of people.
The monsters were great. Ghidorah was cool and did some nice work in this movie. When the movie could stay on the monsters it was a ton of fun. We got some great action, visuals, and entertainment value. It was a lot better than the previous Legendary Godzilla movie. And they did a pretty decent job balancing the various creatures. Too bad it didn't do as well financially. But it had some good moments and I enjoyed it as a whole.
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2023-08-17, 16:55
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Link #37 |
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Black Steel Knight
Join Date: Jul 2011
Location: Indonesia
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Monsterverse is building a solid universe so far. After GvK, we got Skull Island cartoon and now this:
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Graphic Designer
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