Godzilla vs Kong

[tekering]

3 hours ago, CoryHolmes said:

Godzilla 2014 still is at the top of my G-movie list.

Whether he's directing Star Wars or Godzilla, Gareth Edwards has proven to be the real King.  

[Retracting Head Ter Ter]

On 4/1/2021 at 9:43 AM, azrael said:

That shot reminded me of Shin Godzilla when we first see the atomic breath.

Well, Shin's was strong and cut like a laser on butter thru all the buildings but its ace was the crazy accuracy, being able to knock falling bombs and high flying stealth bombers out.

GvK-G could sort of cut thru the HK buildings too (e.g. a quick flick slashed the tower Kong was on top of) but bring able to bore through the Earth's crust (with a hole big enough for Kong to fit) requires many magnitudes of power output beyond slicing skyscrapers.

And unlike Shin which shuts down like a thrice overclocked GPU after shooting, GvK-G just didnt run out of steam all the way. He took a lot more beating from MechaG than Kong and was still looking like he had a full heath bar at the end too!

Its plot armor but the charge axe just stuck on his leg, while the same thing sliced MechaG's limbs off.

[Retracting Head Ter Ter]

13 hours ago, CoryHolmes said:

 

I'm a bit disappointed with how Kong fought.  I was hoping more of his agility and ability to outmanouver Godzilla would come into play more than it did.  Big G has some decent judo skills for having such stubby little limbs, too.

 

If you had to do Judo against an opponent of the same height, but his hips/thighs were 3-4x your width and ALSO came with a tail almost the same weight as the body, it aint gonna be a fair fight. The bottom half of G is crazy thicc compared to Kong. I think the Director intended to show G's superior mass/strength when G flings Kong much harder than Kong could. Also the effect of the 2 respective punchs on the flattop was telling.

[CoryHolmes]

1 hour ago, Retracting Head Ter Ter said:

 Also the effect of the 2 respective punchs on the flattop was telling.

That was the trailer shot that sold me on the movie, and the movie itself didn't disappoint   Love that haymaker, right to the snout!

[pengbuzz]

4 hours ago, Retracting Head Ter Ter said:

If you had to do Judo against an opponent of the same height, but his hips/thighs were 3-4x your width and ALSO came with a tail almost the same weight as the body, it aint gonna be a fair fight. The bottom half of G is crazy thicc compared to Kong. I think the Director intended to show G's superior mass/strength when G flings Kong much harder than Kong could. Also the effect of the 2 respective punchs on the flattop was telling.

Yeah...G's theme song should be Baby Got Back! lol

[sqidd]

That was pretty dumb. Not as bad as I would have thought though. Or I was in the right frame of mind to watch a dumb movie.

Mechagodzilla was pretty cool. I wonder if there will be toys now that the movie is released. I could see myself getting one of those.

 

Spoiler

It was nice that there was no pretense that Kong was going to win that battle. Kong was actually pretty lame. Godzilla would have drown him in that first encounter if it weren't for human interference. And Kong would have been killed by that flying dragon/sake/monster thing if it weren't fir human interference. 

 

[sqidd]

 

[kajnrig]

I feel like they could have done a lot more with

Spoiler

 

the axe, which by the way did anyone else assume it was a Godzilla back spike? because that was my immediate first thought. If its gimmick is that it can absorb Godzilla's atomic breath, they could have played with that idea in such a way as to make that one trailer shot not look quite so dumb. Like... just aim at Kong instead, Zilla. Just... Just tilt your head a little.

But yeah, make it so that the axe actually attracts Godzilla's atomic breath, and even forcibly moves his head to face it. He pins Kong to a skyscraper or something and makes to blast him in the face, Kong braces for it, but then they're both surprised when the breath arcs over to the axe instead. Godzilla is momentarily taken aback, which allows Kong the opportunity to strike him with it, and the axe, which up to then has been ineffective, sinks into G's flesh.

Now they're on more even footing. Now it feels more like a fight instead of a one-sided ass-whooping. When Kong leaps towards him, G uses his atomic breath more out of desperation, and it makes sense that he would seem to be "aiming" for the axe instead of Kong.

I'd have loved to see the origins of said axe. If it was indeed a Godzilla back spike, they could have started the movie with (a?) Godzilla attacking a troop of Kongs in the Hollow Earth, just laying waste to them. They're trying to fight it off, attacking it ineffectively with tree "clubs," one of which gets stuck on a spike. The Kongs wrestle with it, one of them manages to wrest the club free and rip a back spike off with it. Godzilla ABs the Kong, but the Kong is surprised to use the spike as an effective shield. The remaining, dying, Kongs pile onto the dying Godzilla, and the Kong with impromptu axe rushes at it to finish it off, whereupon Godzilla uses a version of the KotM blast wave and wipes everyone out, itself included, leaving behind only the axe.

It writes itself, man. C'mon.

 

 

21 hours ago, Keith said:

No talk of the "Asuka Strikes" inspired boat fight?

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought that. Though that said, they could have made it substantially better by substituting Godzilla with a sacrificial kaiju and going all in on paying homage. Have Kong fight a giant shark, have him pull open its jaws, have two battleships intentionally scuttle themselves and shoot the shark kaiju point blank in the mouth. I was so hoping!

[CoryHolmes]

2 hours ago, sqidd said:

 

"Big, Dumb, Fun" accurately describes my feelings about this movie.  Had fun, won't be watching it again anytime soon.  Leaves me wanting more, so that's a good thing.

[Retracting Head Ter Ter]

4 hours ago, kajnrig said:

I feel like they could have done a lot more with

  Hide contents

 

*edited for length*

It writes itself, man. C'mon.

 

 

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought that. Though that said, they could have made it substantially better by substituting Godzilla with a sacrificial kaiju and going all in on paying homage. Have Kong fight a giant shark, have him pull open its jaws, have two battleships intentionally scuttle themselves and shoot the shark kaiju point blank in the mouth. I was so hoping!

 

Yeah man, there are so many opportunities for more sacrificial kaiju and military hardware* display. The tin foil man and the 2 teens were really unecessary and irritating. Worst parts of the movie. More techno-babble and build up on MechaG would be nice too.

 

*Given that Titans were known since the 40s, you would think the Earth's militaries would have developed more specialised anti-titan weaponry. Even ignoring sci-fi Masers, but rail-guns (anything super high velocity really for piercing their hides) and guided bunker busters. Frankly, if G was a real thing, I would think rail guns/hypersonic missiles are the solution. Their hides can be pierced as seen in their fights with enough force, so hypervelocity weapons where impacts create liquefication should be the solution.

[eXis10z]

On 3/27/2021 at 2:02 AM, Retracting Head Ter Ter said:

I am really disappointed by the human bits in GvK.

That's why it's a good Kaiju movie.

[renegadeleader1]

2 hours ago, Retracting Head Ter Ter said:

Given that Titans were known since the 40s, you would think the Earth's militaries would have developed more specialised anti-titan weaponry. Even ignoring sci-fi Masers, but rail-guns (anything super high velocity really for piercing their hides) and guided bunker busters. Frankly, if G was a real thing, I would think rail guns/hypersonic missiles are the solution. Their hides can be pierced as seen in their fights with enough force, so hypervelocity weapons where impacts create liquefication should be the solution.

They knew of "A" titan in the 1940s and as far as they knew it got nuked to death by the Castle Bravo Bikini atoll test.

 

By 1973 Monarch was on the verge of being defunded until John Goodman's character convinced the senator overlooking the project to fund an expedition to Skull Island.

 

With Kong largely confined to Skull Island and vulnerable to conventional weaponry Monarch likely didn't have a lot to do until the Muto spores in the Godzilla skeleton were discovered and the Janjira attack occured in 1999.

 

It's only from there and the result of the battle in San Fransisco we see "anti-titan" weaponry and containment kick into overdrive resulting in what we see in KoTM and GvK.

[Big s]

After how terrible KOTM was, I was surprised to enjoy this one. Everything was so bad in the previous film to the point that I wanted every human character to just die. I think the kotm monster fights were good, but not enough

 This movie had a dumb plot, but not a frustrating one and some likable characters and even managed to make Kong into an actual character as well. There’s some stupid stuff, but the good far outweighs the bad.

 If you got HBO max it’s definitely worth a free watch 

[hutch]

Really wanted to like this but it was just dull as dishwater.  The plot was awful.  The monsters were as dumb and nonsensical as the humans. Made me sad at the end of it. 

[tekering]

On 4/6/2021 at 4:37 AM, hutch said:

Really wanted to like this but it was just dull as dishwater.  The plot was awful.  The monsters were as dumb and nonsensical as the humans. Made me sad at the end of it. 

Ryan George makes it fun, as he always does. 

He covers most of my criticisms so succinctly I've decided to abandon my own review video, which was just bitter and sarcastic. 

[tekering]

So last week, Adam Wingard was interviewed by Den of Geek, and his comments reveal the biggest problem with the film:

Quote

“There’s certainly enough footage to make a five-hour version of this film, I’m sure.  We did shoot more and there were other parts of the plot that we cut out,” he recalls. “There were other actors and stuff. I mean, Lance Reddick is top billed in the film, because he used to be in the movie more, but his role is very small because we tweaked a couple of plot points.”

With FIVE credited writers (and surely more uncredited), there were obviously big script problems... 

Quote

He continues, “Unfortunately, sometimes just a tweak of the plot means that whole scenes have to go because they don’t fit anymore. Ultimately all the stuff we shot was just stuff that worked on its own merits, I think. Some of it did [work]. Some of it didn’t work. But most importantly, it wasn’t supporting the movie as a whole and the experience that I wanted to give people.”

It sounds like the film was rushed into production before they had a finished script, which is always a recipe for disaster. 

Quote

“I always knew that I wanted this movie to be two hours or under,” says the director. “I never wanted it to be over that."

So he shot FIVE hours of scripted material for a film he wanted to be under TWO hours? 

He sounds like an irresponsible idiot, trying to solve problems in the editing bay that should've been solved before millions of dollars were wasted shooting unusable footage.

Strangely enough, the most basic problems of geography haven't been addressed in any online review or YouTube video I've come across:

Spoiler

Like, for instance, the ridiculous coincidence that the very power source Apex needed Kong to find to power their MechaGodzilla just happened to be located directly under their own Hong Kong facility, where their MechaGodzilla had been constructed...

They obviously didn't know it was there, because they needed Maia to transport Kong to Antarctica just to find it.

What's more, since they had already bored a nine-thousand kilometer tunnel from Pensacola to Hong Kong, why would they have needed to construct a whole other facility in Antarctica, just to drill a hole into the Hollow Earth?

Oh, and speaking of which, how many weeks were they supposed to have been flying around down there, as they followed Kong on his ten-thousand kilometer journey across the interior of the Earth's surface, from Antarctica to Hong Kong?

 

[Retracting Head Ter Ter]

3 hours ago, tekering said:

I didnt like that tunnel from USA to Hong Kong either. Thats the GDP of a medium sized country at least. But so was MechaG. And that facility taking up all of Victoria Peak? yeah thats another year's GDP at least.

Another geography problem? From Hong Kong downtown, if you jump into the water (last scene of G leaving), that doesn't go into open sea. Godzilla would have headbutted Kowloon.

I am _assuming_ that hole from Antarctica goes to near the center of the earth (they fell a long distance during the gravity inversion part) so they weren't like right under HK. But that means G's Atomic shot was Star Wars Superlaser strong.

Anyway, the plot is dumb.

  Hide contents

Like, for instance, the ridiculous coincidence that the very power source Apex needed Kong to find to power their MechaGodzilla just happened to be located directly under their own Hong Kong facility, where their MechaGodzilla had been constructed...

They obviously didn't know it was there, because they needed Maia to transport Kong to Antarctica just to find it.

What's more, since they had already bored a nine-thousand kilometer tunnel from Pensacola to Hong Kong, why would they have needed to construct a whole other facility in Antarctica, just to drill a hole into the Hollow Earth?

Oh, and speaking of which, how many weeks were they supposed to have been flying around down there, as they followed Kong on his ten-thousand kilometer journey across the interior of the Earth's surface, from Antarctica to Hong Kong?

 

 

[sh9000]

 

[Dynaman]

6 hours ago, tekering said:

 

He sounds like an irresponsible idiot, trying to solve problems in the editing bay that should've been solved before millions of dollars were wasted shooting unusable footage.

 

  Reveal hidden contents

Like, for instance, the ridiculous coincidence that the very power source Apex needed Kong to find to power their MechaGodzilla just happened to be located directly under their own Hong Kong facility, where their MechaGodzilla had been constructed...

They obviously didn't know it was there, because they needed Maia to transport Kong to Antarctica just to find it.

What's more, since they had already bored a nine-thousand kilometer tunnel from Pensacola to Hong Kong, why would they have needed to construct a whole other facility in Antarctica, just to drill a hole into the Hollow Earth?

Oh, and speaking of which, how many weeks were they supposed to have been flying around down there, as they followed Kong on his ten-thousand kilometer journey across the interior of the Earth's surface, from Antarctica to Hong Kong?

 

Depends - you can shoot the same exact scene multiple times to pick the best one.  Shooting 2.5x as much as needed is not the same thing as shooting a 5 hour film and cutting it down to 2 hours.  I'm not giving the film the benefit of the doubt though, not after the last Godzilla movie.

[tekering]

2 minutes ago, Dynaman said:

Depends - you can shoot the same exact scene multiple times to pick the best one.

Every film is shot that way, of course; the average shooting ratio on film is 10:1, and much higher for Hollywood blockbusters.  That has nothing to do with a movie's runtime.   Wingard is saying there's five hours' worth of CONTENT, not raw footage. 

2 hours ago, Retracting Head Ter Ter said:

Anyway, the plot is dumb.

No, Independence Day is dumb.  Alien vs. Predator is dumb.

Godzilla vs. Kong is STULTIFYING.

 

HBO Max should add a viewer discretion warning to the effect of "Watching this film could result in neurological illness or permanent brain damage." 

[sqidd]

 

[Big s]

This movie is dumb and there’s no way I can deny it. But it’s dumb fun and pretty much free. It also happens to be highly intelligent compared to kotm. This is one of those check your brain at the door kinda things. The last movie garbage and unlike able while this one was a charming hot mess

[mikeszekely]

1 hour ago, Big s said:

It also happens to be highly intelligent compared to kotm.

In what way?  The Hollow Earth?  The fact that the humans couldn't get there despite being able to build a subway from Pensacola, Florida to Hong Kong?  The fact that the Hollow Earth happens to have a Kong-sized throne powered by a picture of Godzilla?  The fact that a guy who's claim to fame was writing about the Hollow Earth knew enough about the magic Apex hovercraft he just found out about to jury rig it into a Kong-sized defibrillator?  The writers' assumption that such a defibrillator can magically heal you after you've been beaten to death?  The ecoterrorists in King of the Monsters were dumb with a capital D, sure, especially the mom.  But I could write them off as dumb characters, while everything in Godzilla Vs. Kong is dumb.

[tekering]

3 hours ago, Big s said:

This is one of those check your brain at the door kinda things.

As was Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, two other enormously successful films that literally INSULT the audience's intelligence. 

I'm genuinely envious of all of you who are able to "check your brain at the door," and actually enjoy movies that I would've liked to enjoy right along with you...

 

...except my brain doesn't have an OFF switch, see. 

[mikeszekely]

2 hours ago, tekering said:

As was Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, two other enormously successful films that literally INSULT the audience's intelligence. 

I'm genuinely envious of all of you who are able to "check your brain at the door," and actually enjoy movies that I would've liked to enjoy right along with you...

 

...except my brain doesn't have an OFF switch, see. 

I can accept that some movies are better appreciated if you don't think about them to much.  I... actually kinda liked The Rise of Skywalker.  I liked Jurassic World, and I was entertained enough by King of the Monsters that I actually saw it with a buddy then took my mom to see it a week later.  But sometimes a movie is just so dumb that even with your brain turned off, even with low expectations for a popcorn movie, it just does not make sense.  I'm with you on Fallen Kingdom.  Most of the Transformers movies were pretty bad, but The Last Knight had me shouting "That's not how science works!" in the movie theater.  And you have to go back to the late '60s/early '70s to find a Godzilla film I liked less than Godzilla vs Kong.

[tekering]

34 minutes ago, mikeszekely said:

I... actually kinda liked The Rise of Skywalker.

Most of my Japanese friends did as well, which I found a little disconcerting... I mean, "hyperspace skipping" was every bit as stupid as the bright sunlight in Hollow Earth. 

38 minutes ago, mikeszekely said:

Most of the Transformers movies were pretty bad, but The Last Knight had me shouting "That's not how science works!" in the movie theater.

Yeah, The Last Knight was a special kind of bad.

41 minutes ago, mikeszekely said:

And you have to go back to the late '60s/early '70s to find a Godzilla film I liked less than Godzilla vs Kong.

Oh, even I wouldn't go that far.  Certainly, the Showa films were the nadir, but the Heisei series has a lot to answer for, too:

Whereas the failure of Godzilla vs. Kong is almost entirely at script level*, most of the Japanese films represent cascade failures at every stage of production, be it story, design, dialogue, performance, editing, or visual effects.  I find most of them unwatchable, right up to Final Wars.

Godzilla vs. Kong pissed me off with its drooling idiocy because I was holding it up to a higher standard, the standard set by the previous films of the MonsterVerse (yes, even King of the Monsters, which is still better than most Japanese monster movies).  It reflected poorly on Gareth Edwards' Godzilla and Jordan Vogt-Roberts' Kong: Skull Island, and both of their superlative films are retroactively tainted by Godzilla vs. Kong.  Nonetheless, on a production level, it remains superior to most of the Toho films.

 

* Okay, the scale inconsistency issue is a whole 'nother rant.  Don't even get me started. 

[mikeszekely]

8 hours ago, tekering said:

Oh, even I wouldn't go that far.  Certainly, the Showa films were the nadir, but the Heisei series has a lot to answer for, too:

I don't mind Junior.  Was he cuter than he had to be, especially as he seemed to get cuter between Godzilla Vs Mechagodzilla II and Godzilla vs Space Godzilla?  Arguably yes.  But it was already established that Godzillas reproduce; the entire Heisei era is a sequel to the original Godzilla and establishes from the beginning that Godzilla in Godzilla Returns isn't he same one Serizawa's Oxygen Destroyer killed.  Junior started as an egg, and while kid-friendly and cute he eventually grew to a regular Godzilla.  That's more than we can say for Minilla.

But hey, I already established myself as a Heisei fan.

In all seriousness, while effects (both CGI and practical) have gotten a lot better since 1954, and yes, Hollywood has a slickness to it that Japanese cinema doesn't really match, I enjoy older films as a window into another time and I can find a lot to enjoy even in the early Showa Godzilla films.  Given the choice, I'd rather watch any of the Heisei or Millennium Godzilla films, Shin Godzilla, or the other two Monsterverse Godzilla films before watching Godzilla vs Kong again.  And even among Showa movies you have to get to Ebirah: Horror of the Deep before I'm thinking about siding with Godzilla vs Kong, and even after that I'd still prefer Godzilla vs Gigan, Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla, and Terror of Mechagodizlla.

Oh, IMHO the '98 Tristar movie is simply not a Godzilla film.

[TangledThorns]

Re-watching Godzilla 2014 and its such a better film, including the SFX. The film could have been better if they kept Cranston's character alive but its the best Godzilla film of all time IMHO. Yes, its better than the original 1954 version.

[no3Ljm]

S.H.MonsterArts MechaGodzilla (Godzilla Vs. Kong)

https://www.taghobby.com/archives/534743

[sh9000]

 

[sh9000]

 

[CoryHolmes]

5 hours ago, sh9000 said:

 

One of the better HISHE.  Doesn't top the Predator one, though.

[Bolt]

I wasn't expecting a masterpiece. Pretty much got out of it what I expected. So, overall, I really enjoyed it. 

[CoryHolmes]

7 minutes ago, Bolt said:

I wasn't expecting a masterpiece. Pretty much got out of it what I expected. So, overall, I really enjoyed it. 

Indeed.  Monsters were good.  Fights were good.   Humans weren't absolutely terrible.  So not bad.

 

Plus I still love that clip from the first trailer, with Kong just wholloping Big G with that right haymaker. 😁

[TehPW]

On 3/8/2020 at 3:12 PM, mikeszekely said:

The Godzilla figures in the SH Monsterarts line get some discussion in the SH Figuarts/D-Arts/Monsterarts thread, but doesn't look like there's much discussion of the NECA stuff (although there's plenty of discussion on their Aliens and Predator stuff).  So I decided to look for a Godzilla thread, and I found one for this movie, the 2019 KotM film, the 2014 Legendary film, two for Shin Godzilla, one for Final Wars, and even one for Godzilla 1985/The Return of Godzilla.  Just a thought, but maybe we should just have one Godzilla superthread?

Anyway, I was at Target yesterday and I saw they have some new NECA Godzilla releases.  Unlike the blister packages they used to have at Target these ones are in nicer window boxes, with movie poster cover flap.  I picked up the last remaining Shin Godzilla, and I gotta say that I'm pretty pleased with it.  Now, this is the only NECA Godzilla figure I own, and I can't directly compare it to an SH Monsterarts Shin Godzilla.  The only SH Monsterarts figure I have is the 2019 KotM version.  And here's the thing, I think the articulation, the sculpt, and the paint are definitely better on the SH Monsterarts figure.  But the NECA Godzilla figures look like they're under $25, and SH Monsterarts look like they usually retail for over $70.  While I think the SH Monsterarts are probably worth a premium over a NECA figure, I don't think (for me at least) they're really worth triple.  So I think I might sell my SH Monsterarts 2019 Godzilla and pick up a few more NECAs.  I think right now my biggest complaint with the NECA line is that while they have several different Godzillas and some of the other monsters from KotM they don't have more of the Toho Kaiju.  I'd love to have all three Mechagodzillas, Space Godzilla, a '90s King Ghidorah and Mecha King Ghidorah, '90s Mothra, '72 Gigan, and '04 Gigan at the minimum.

Facebook  Someone made a Shin Godzilla far more terrifying... on FB!!!

Edited August 24, 2021 by TehPW
Derpyiness