Omni's Random Video Noise

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
ChatGPT recommendation.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
This was a much better ChatGPT recommendation than Coherence, because while I'm always game for a psychological thriller, I'm relatively hard to impress in the drama department, and this was a movie that I think actually did pretty good in the drama department... up to a point.

Your premise of the hour is Main Girl is a space nerd recently accepted into MIT. While leaving a party intoxicated she looks up into the sky in response to the radio jockey announcing the discovery of another visible, habitable planet, which is later determined to be a copy of Earth, and gets into a car crash killing 3 and leaving a 4th in a coma.

She's sentenced to 5 years in prison, is let out in 4, and returns to her life thoroughly detached from the world around her, even as "Earth 2" descends upon them. She follows a shuttle journey lotto planned for Earth 2 but in taking a job as a high school janitor she decides to come clean to the man she put in a coma and killed the family of since we recently woke up... but she chickens out and instead agrees to "come clean" his house on a regular basis, which eventually stirs him out of his drunken stupor.

Eventually it's determined that Earth 2 not just looks like Earth but also consists of the same people and a theory is floated that it may be a "cracked mirror" in that Earth 2's reality is yet somehow different from Earth 1's and Main Guy's family may still be alive on that other planet. This leads Main Girl to give Main Guy the ticket she wins in the lotto and after he leaves with it we timeskip to the reveal that Main Girl 2 traveled to see Main Girl 1. Cut to credits.

Overall, I'd like to say that the presentation of this movie is very nice, it opens with a great head-boppin' beat, we establish the central conceit very quickly, the overall pace of the movie is very brisk and we still get plenty of solid establishing shots, with eerie sci-fi melodies, voiceover of various programs speculating about the Earth 2 phenomenon, all while we watch a relatively low dialog montage of Main Girl going through life day to day, either cleaning up student graffiti, trying to kill herself, or pursuing any number of other minor plot beats in the story.

I LOVE the presentation, and Main Girl's performance was decent enough to where I really didn't need her to say a whole lot to imagine what she must be going through. Making a friend of the man she otherwise ruined the life of is basically the only thing that keeps her going, but her understanding of the futility of keeping the context of their relationship a secret still drives her to want to escape to Earth 2, whatever it may be.




I cannot help but think though... that this movie took a fat ****ing nosedive into the ******* ground at the 50 minute mark.

At the 50 minute mark, Main Guy presents some terrible counterargument to going to Earth 2, citing Plato's Cave, arguing that ignorance is better than the unknown... which is the opposite reason just about anybody cites Plato's Cave.

He gets irrationally upset and drives her out of his home but later returns to apologize and creepily asks her to leave her Mom and come see something late at night. That something turns out to be a private performance in which he bows a handsaw, which creates some weird sounds and evokes images of astronauts in space, which are awkwardly superimposed over her face as she thinks about them. Easily the worst bit of editing in the whole movie.

Thinking about astronauts and some old guy you slaughtered the family of playing a handsaw for you apparent made her gushing wet because this scene immediately hardcuts to consensual sex which just RUINS this ****ing movie for me.

You secretly killed this man's wife, son, and unborn daughter and you're intentionally having sex with him?


I can honestly imagine a slightly alternate scenario where he pressures her into it, or even rapes her, or maybe there's actually some sort of romantic development, but no it goes from cleaning his house, to playing Wii Boxing, to snogging his face off. That absolutely WRECKS my opinion of this movie.

I can kind of appreciate the ending because the alternate reality outcome was only a possibility up until we see Main Girl 2, and the existence of Main Girl 2 implies the possibility of Main Guy's family still being alive.

But Main Guy's family getting killed was also presented as a motivation to go to the other Earth in the first place, and simply revealing Main Girl 2 and cutting to black without answering any questions is not the sort of cliffhanger I enjoy, and I do enjoy some cliffhanger endings.

If I could get this presentation in another movie, that'd be great, but apparently this movie was written, edited, produced and directed all by the same guy? And he's only done all of that for like 2 other movies? And at least one of them is a romance?

The worst part about this movie is the romance, I'd have given a much higher score if it didn't have the ****in' romance.

Anyway, this movie was 90% my style, but maybe 40% my writing. I may try watching it again at some point.


Final Verdict:

[Okay]

Attachments

   

__________________
Movie Reviews | Anime Reviews
Top 100 Action Movie Countdown (2015): List | Thread
"Well, at least your intentions behind the UTTERLY DEVASTATING FAULTS IN YOUR LOGIC are good." - Captain Steel

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I've seen some exceptionally positive reviews for this movie from Western critics and trailer looks kinda cool. Godzilla looks way better in this one than he did in Shin Godzilla and it's a postwar period piece which is pretty different from what I've come to expect from these movies.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
I've just come back from seeing this movie in-theater. It was being shown dubbed at a great time so I figured seeing a kaiju movie on the big screen would be a pretty good way to experience what seemed like a pretty promising movie. This is the first time I've seen a new movie in theaters since Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which I am only now realizing was 8 years ago.

Sadly, movie theaters seem to have heavily fallen out of favor recently and I was 1 of only 3 people at my screening. I can't blame other people too much though, the tickets were twice what I thought I'd have to pay. I guess they were only showing this movie in the big cushy heated seats with footrests and a display the stretched the edges of the frame across the adjacent walls to feign an IMAX experience.

Frankly, I'd have settled for fewer features for cheaper tickets and the theater experience itself seemed a bit wasted in this case because this is not the epic monster slugfest of the Legendary Godzilla films.

Which reminds me, I feel like I have to caveat my opinions by stating that I have not seen the original Godzilla, let alone many of it's most popular installments. I grew up with a VHS copy of Godzilla 2000, which I personally assume to be a decent entry point into the series... while also being very aware that the Tri-Star Godzilla which I also had was popularly maligned both on release and for years to come.

It makes me feel like I haven't enough proper Toho Godzilla movies, which is funny because while I'm preoccupied with the fact that I've seen the last three Legendary Godzilla movies up to date, it hasn't really occurred to me that I've also seen the last three live-action Toho Godzillas; Godzilla Minus One, Shin Godzilla, and... Godzilla Final Wars.

These three movies are so wildly disparate in their production quality, tone, and overall goals, it's weird to think that any one of them can really individually capture what Godzilla is as a series.

BUT, I'd like to open the review proper by offering a hypothesis of what I think an ideal Godzilla movie could be.

Now I have to preface this by conceding up front that there are at least two significantly different roles that Godzilla plays in the movies he features in.

The first is the VILLAIN, as he was originally portrayed, a monster-of-the-week, a vague incarnation of nuclear war visited upon Tokyo. The second is the HERO, or ANTI-HERO, in which Godzilla protects Tokyo by proxy through fighting and defeating an even greater threat, or even as an explicitly benevolent force.

In movies where Godzilla plays a hero, it's virtually always a monster vs. monster affair, and the intended appeal of the movie is the spectacle of the fight itself.

But what if we want to portray Godzilla as he originally was? By 50s standards, Godzilla may well have been a legitimately frightening presence on-screen, but that's just not going to fly today. Shin Godzilla also attempted this by redesigning him to look overtly evil and incorporating various forms of body horror, though eventually succumbed to presenting him as a very stiff upright creature, reminiscent of the range of motion costumed actors used to have.

You could present Godzilla similar to how he appears in the Legendary films, as a fully articulated CG giant, but seeing the devastation he can wreak in those films really only serves to thrill the audience, not demoralize them, or scare them, or otherwise associate Godzilla any of the oppressively negative feelings that the actual cast is supposed to be experiencing.

Perhaps the biggest weakness across all of the Godzilla movies I've watched is the throughline of a human arc, that there are human characters on the ground experiencing the disaster first-hand. It's difficult to reconcile that human-centric obligation with Godzilla just being ****ing cool.

THUS is my theory, and potentially the entire impetus for this movie:

Godzilla needs to represent something.

Suppose we follow Main Guy, it's the end of World War II, and he's deserted his duty as a kamikaze pilot. The war ends in a decisive defeat and he returns home to find his family dead, his home in ruins, and is haunted by his own cowardice.

During this time, Godzilla grows from a benign lizard into an ecological predator, and eventually mutates through exposure to America's nuclear tests in Bikini Atoll into the gargantuan living warhead that eventually attacks Japan.

Godzilla's attacks threaten the well-being of what family Main Guy's managed to assemble in the wake of the war and he finds himself once again confronted by his own cowardice.

The key here is that Godzilla isn't just a monster, but a living, persistent representation of the war itself. He's a literal product of weaponry and his growth, persistence, and oppression reflects the war's post-traumatic effects on Main Guy.

You could think of Godzilla as a sort of Paranoia Agent, which is also a (much more subtle) postwar commentary on human behavior. He's functionally a manifestation of human fallibility, and the destruction he causes is in some way karma for a mistakes we don't want to accept.


The problem is I don't like to headcanon out the flaws of the movies I see, so while I'm willing to accept that this may very well have been the intended read of the movie, I gotta admit they disappointed me.

My two biggest issues with this movie is that they don't take the time to let this idea simmer and build organically, and they just can't deliver on the emotional gutpunch they're trying so hard to evoke.

I appreciate that they give us a taste of Godzilla, by having him attack and slaughter an airbase in a smaller pre-nuclear form, wherein he is only known by locals. He also demonstrates a sort of violence that I really haven't seen from any of the Godzillas since the Tri-Star movie, wherein he's basically just a big dinosaur that will happily stomp and eat people.

The conventional Godzilla really only seems to kill people by proxy; either by destroying buildings or vehicles people are in or around, or by retaliating against military weapons, so it's strange to see him crushing swathes of humans underfoot and snapping up individual people like the T-Rexs from The Lost World: Jurassic Park.

That said, this movie feels so much like they skimmed the Godzilla development I mentioned above that there really isn't even a third act. There's the very brief intro in which Main Guy deserts the war and fails to intervene in Godzilla destroying the airbase, then we fast forward to him getting a platonic family and Godzilla attacking shore for the first time post-nuclear tests, then the rest of the movie is just THE PLAN to kill Godzilla, and executing the plan.

I really think this movie could have benefited from more Godzilla earlier, before he develops his nuclear breath, perhaps he's a recurring menace to the shores and each time he appears Main Guy just falls deeper into hopelessness. By the time of Godzilla's first appearance on the mainland, he can already produce the functional equivalent of a nuclear warhead, so there really isn't that slow burn or threat build-up that a story like this really needs.

Also all the grief that the characters are supposed to be experiencing falls just shy of being believable. Main Guy has an annoying case of Anime Angst, where he's just unrealistically non-communicative and lashes out in what seem like breaks from his character.

There are also multiple scenes in which he and other characters are screaming or crying, but there isn't a single teardrop in sight. These are the driest cheeks in Japan and these are supposed to be sad moments, but the one child actor is very obviously acting, and the actual actors don't have the benefit of a simple ****ing eyedropper so they can fake some ******* tears.

The final twist of the movie is the reveal that Main Girl actually didn't die offscreen (which was one of multiple predictable plot points), and she looks perfectly fine and is just sitting upright in bed wearing unstained bandages and a sling. The movie teases some weird black thing creeping under her skin which relates to literally NOTHING that I'm aware of, so all this scene really does is take me out of the moment by presenting me three characters, who should all be weeping in each others arms, but for the fact that
one of them is a child is hasn't been directed to act sad,
one of them is a man who can't look convincingly sad on camera,
and one of them is an allegedly injured woman with no visible injuries who's been directed to sit perfectly still in bed instead of embracing her family which we've just implied will finally be reunited, married, and free of Godzilla.

The intended emotion just isn't there.

And it sucks because I thought Godzilla looked pretty cool in this too. They used his classic theme to good effect, and his classic roar, and an otherwise minimalistic score does a good job of evoking tension and sadness... It's just hard to appreciate the sad moments, and Godzilla kinda blows his load too early.

The plan to kill Godzilla comes down to a scheme to saddle him with freon gas canisters to sink him to a crushing ocean depth, which sounds plausible enough, but the "Plan B" is to use rapid inflatables to bring him back to surface and kill him with the bends, which doesn't make any ****ing sense to me.

If a sudden 1800 meter depth worth of pressure isn't enough to kill something, why would rapidly decompressing it do anything? Aren't you just applying the same amount of force in two different directions? The describe the effect this has on Godzilla as "damage" which kinda communicates how little thought actually went into this idea.

Great idea to bring your certain death back to the surface where it can kill you. At least it produced a kinda sick-looking visual when it results in a zombie-like Godzilla 'bout to fire muh lazer.

This movie ends by of course teasing that Godzilla's not actually dead before dropping title on us: "G: Minus One", which is such a dumb name for this movie especially once you've seen it and realize literally nothing in the movie explains the reason for the name.

I think it's poorly explained in a marketing blurb I've seen about how postwar Japan had been "reduced to zero" and therefor adding Godzilla makes it "MINUS ONE", which just so cheesy it sounds like something a child would think up.

Obviously it'd be much more forgivable if the movie was actually really good, but it ended up as just a capstone on what felt like 80% of the way to an actually solid movie.

At least the CG was way better than that Furiosa trailer.


Final Verdict:

[Okay]

Attachments

   

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Been meaning to watch it for a long time. All I know about it is the hyper-exaggerated Minnesota accents and woodchipper memes.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

I have it on good authority that NOBODY speaks like the Minnesotan characters do in this movie, but I've met one or two people who casually dip into the "yeah, you betcha" stereotype a bit. I do find it amusing and it's kind of an adorable manner of speaking, but it's not an accurate portrayal of reality whatsoever and that's one of many things in the movie that undercuts the "THIS IS A TRUE STORY" blurb that it, like many other movies, cannot help but insist on at the beginning of blatant fiction.

I mean, the Coen Brothers themselves were both born in Minnesota, and neither of them speak that way, so that's kind of a ****in' shitty.

The movie kept me engaged, it seemed paced okay, but at the end of it all I simply didn't see a point to the movie. That seems to be my issue with each of the Coen Brothers movies I see. The Big Lebowski is such a purposeless movie and I get the same feeling here.

It'd be one thing if it was actually entertaining, let alone funny, throughout, but the majority of """comedy""" in this movie comes from the exaggerated, but not over-the-top accents. Like, it's mild quickiness at best. That just doesn't make me laugh.

It also doesn't do itself any favors by apparently presenting the Pregnant Cop as the protagonist, when she doesn't even show up in the movie for the first 30 minutes. You couldn't establish the conflict by then? We needed the long drawn out scenes of the bad guys staring daggers at each other?

The dude who kicks off the movie by organizing to have his wife kidnapped is rationalized as having money problems, but it's never established what those money problems even are. Why is he in debt? Who is he in debt to? Why does the movie consider this unimportant information?

Eventually his wife is killed, his dad is killed, and nothing at all comes of it. What was added to the story by killing them, other than to contrive some additional blood splatter into the scenes? What is lost by these characters surviving? These hardly feel like characters than they do disposable plot devices.

Yet somehow this movie gets some of the most ungodly ****ing praise, just like The Big Lebowski, and I'm just here have spent over 2 hours on something I'd have had a better time spending on literally anything else on my movie shelf.


It's bizarre to me, because I have to imagine the sort of person that loves this movie, but I can't imagine the person unless they have unrealistic cackling fits anytime a character opens their mouth, or some inexplicable headcanon that gives the story an actual ****in' point.

When I think of story progression and what they accomplish I judge what the difference in the characters is from start to finish, or what the difference in the world is from start to finish.

Pregnant Cop treats this movie like any other day. That's her character, she's entirely personally ambivalent towards the perpetrators and victims in this case up until she gives the killer a patronizing lecture about how "there's more to life" at the end.

There's no character development from the Husband character, just about everyone else dies, and the characters that died didn't have any character arc either.

So what's different about the world post-movie? There's a suitcase full of cash buried in the snow in rural nowhere now. Whoop-dee-****in'-doo.

The movie closes on Pregnant Cop's husband in bed remarking on how he got himself on a stamp or something? Who cares? Why should the audience care? This guy's had almost no screentime.

I genuinely just can't figure out what value there is in this movie, let alone the apparent incomparable value that landed it on a 100 Greatest Movies list and in the Library of Congress.

It got people to parrot "you betcha" memes for a few years, that's all it takes? ****ing Predator is more referenced, even to this day, and that movie's not in the Library of ****in' Congress. I hate this pretentious shit.

This is one of those movies I want to rate very very low because it is FAR below the expectations it's popularity has set for it, but it was just a "meh" movie to me.


Final Verdict:

[Meh...]

Attachments

   

I have added REWATCH UPDATES to both Underworld: Rise of the Lycans and The Dark Knight!

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
The last movie I saw in theaters was a Toho Godzilla movie, and now there's a Legendary Godzilla in theaters.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

First, I want to comment on the theater experience. This was a smaller screening than Minus One and it didn't have the faux ultra-widescreen or fancy seats that movie had. There were maybe a dozen or more people in the theater this time around, so people actually turned out to see this one.

At first I had some audience members sitting pretty close to me who were already loudly commenting during the trailers which I thought might disrupt the movie a bit, but I quickly realized that my biggest issue was that the surround sound speakers on the left side of the theater were out of sync by a full second, so every single bass boom I would hear first from the main screen, and then again to my left.

It was so immediately irritating I actually walked out of the theater. I certainly didn't want to waste my $16 ticket and $6 ****ing bottled water, but I managed to find an employee who followed me back to listen to the speaker and gave me permission to change my seat (it was reserved seating).

I ended up sitting much closer to the screen which caused a lot of the action to blur together uncomfortably, but also revealed some of this movie's lackluster CG, but at least I didn't have to listen to that horrendous speaker desync.

The CG of this movie is of course in every possible scene, but the stuff that stuck out to me was when both Kong and Godzilla at the start of the movie felt the need to soak themselves in viscera. The "wet" texture that covers them, particularly on Kong, looked very weak and it was the most glaringly bad CG I saw throughout the whole movie.

I don't know why Kong is even shown to eat other monsters anyway. Not that gorillas wouldn't eat other animals if they had to, but gorillas are well known to be frugivores, they eat fruit, plants, and sometimes bugs.

It's particularly glaring to me because not only is Kong the least fantastical of the monsters in these movies, but by contrast, Godzilla is never shown eating anything, and he's a giant lizard that exists to kill everything. Sure he bites and will rip monsters apart, but only Kong, and the other giant apes in this movie, all originally frugivores, ever eat other monsters, so I just don't ****in' get it.

I've never seen Skull Island, so I don't know if his diet is established, but it thrills the pocket nerve of this vegan.

Not having seen Skull Island, I seemed to be missing a lot of backstory too cause this movie seems to want to present Skull Island as a surface-level colony of the human civilization that exists in Hollow Earth, which is only established in King of the Monsters.

So, even moreso than Godzilla vs. Kong, this movie really wants to unite the world lore of the Godzilla and Kong-exclusive movies.

The whole problem with that is:
1.) I don't give a shit, I'm here to see a kaiju movie.
2.) The story is beyond insignificant.

The story is really in two or three layers here.

The most important part is that Godzilla has either become aware of the human "Iwi" civilization in Hollow Earth, which is only established in the Kong movies, because they're suddenly sending out a distress signal now for no adequately explained reason. OR, he's become aware of "Scar King", which is another giant ape (who cares), which is controlling a kaiju called "Shimo" (who?), which is supposedly responsible for the first ice age.

I've never heard of either of these monsters and both of them seem entirely original to this movie. Scar, or "Skar", looks like a MonsterVerse Lanky Kong with whip, and Shimo just looks like an ice turtle with an ice beam that ices things.

I genuinely don't give a shit about these monsters. I at least recognized the baddies in King of the Monsters and Godzila vs. Kong, Gidorah and Mecha-Godzilla are iconic even if I've never seen their respective movies, but who the **** are these guys?

Their design also just presents them as an Inferior Kong and Inferior Godzilla. It's a monkey with a whip instead of an axe! It's a lizard with ice breath instead of atomic breath!


Who cares. The whole movie feels so much less important when these throwaway fanfiction kaiju are the baddies. OH NO! Scar is trying to get to Earth's surface! Only to get defeated by Godzilla anyway!

I don't even know how or why they threw Mothra back in here, I don't remember what happened to her in the previous movies, but her only meaningful role is to "convince" Godzilla to cooperate with Kong, and it really is as low-effort as it sounds.

There's another kaiju named Tiamat, which only exists for Godzilla to kill and it also appears to be a totally original kaiju.

The stakes have just never been so low as they were in this movie, and yet you can tell they tried. They rationalized giving Kong a Mecha-Godzilla-based robo fist which... really doesn't do anything except prevent that same arm from getting frostbite a second time.

Godzilla is "powering up" by absorbing other monsters for part of the movie until he turns neon pink which... never amounts to literally anything. The devastation he can cause never reaches the level of Minus One, but also the pink glow only ever serves to imply that his next atomic breath will be stronger. And then he more or less never hits anyone or anything of consequence with it.

Some Hollow Earth anti-gravity fight scenes really don't push the action to anywhere near the level of the previous movies either. None of it was terribly memorable.

I like the idea that Godzilla takes naps in Colosseum in Rome...
I like that Kong can set up traps to ambush enemies... but that's it.

The rest of the story surrounds the discovery of the Iwi people in Hollow Earth, who were apparently significant in Skull Island... but again I never saw that movie. They can read peoples' minds for literally no reason...

The one Mom character who I don't remember from the previous movies that can read Iwi is able to look at these large font hieroglyphics and just starts dumptrucking exposition about Scar this and Shimo that... and I seriously just tune out until the visual storytelling returns, which this movie actually does quite a bit of.

Perhaps too much of. I strongly believe the human stories in these movies are just huge slogs breaking up the action scenes you actually care about, but there was SO MUCH monster grunting, bellowing, and screaming in this movie. Extended scenes of Kong grunting and getting grunted at, it got a bit silly.

The worst part of the whole movie BY FAR is just the subplot involving the Mom character and the Daughter who's "the last of the Iwi tribe".

The Daughter is getting visions from the telepathic distress call the Hollow Earth Iwis are sending out and she feels like she doesn't fit in at school. There is exactly one substantive scene at the beginning of the movie establishing this, that she is the last of her kind, and she doesn't belong.

WELL GUESS WHAT, SHE'S NOT ALONE and they find the Iwi tribe in Hollow Earth and she suddenly fits in and can communicate with everyone with her find and she plays with the other kids and the Mom has a bunch of moments where she panics about having to leave her behind with what is essentially an uncontacted tribe on the most dangerous part of the whole planet... and guess how it ends?

"Whaaaa, you thought I wanted to stay here? Where you go, I go, just like we said at the start the movie!"

It was SO ****ing predictable, just a complete non-dilemma from start to finish, wholly unnecessary and insubstantial human drama getting in the way of my kaiju movie.

I recognized all of one 1 human character in this whole movie, and it was the Conspiracy Radio Jockey, because he's feels like an appropriate character in the universe, he's the only one with any funny lines, and he best represents the audience's perspective as just wanting to be present for the spectacle of things.

Everyone else I either completely forgot about or have never seen before because they were only in movies I hadn't seen.

The movie wasn't outright bad in any way, but there were no surprises, no stakes, and no new kaiju to get hyped for. I'd say this wasn't as boring as Godzilla (2014), but I also cared a lot less.


Final Verdict:

[Meh...]

Attachments

   

REWATCH UPDATE on Godzilla vs. Kong.

I also skimmed back through Godzilla: King of the Monsters, but I couldn't be bothered to add to it. It takes 40 minutes to get to the first fight, then 20 minutes, then another 40 minutes, and family/eco-terrorist subplots just suck up too much time.

Godzilla vs. Kong is definitely the best of the Legendary movies I've seen.

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Considering how many Godzilla movies I've been watching, I figured I'd see the original.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

Fish.

Having never seen the original Godzilla, I was very curious to see what elements have stuck over the years and what has been discarded. Obviously the practical effects and man-in-a-suit aspects remained intact for a very long time, but so many people praise this movie specifically and act as though this movie did some part of the concept so right that other movies could never replicate.

One of the things I see mentioned a lot is that the practical effects are somewhat hidden by the fact that Godzilla is often in shadow, given that he attacks at night and it's a black and white movie. This would lend some credibility to why later entries in the series would be a bit harder to take seriously given you can see all the flaws of the practical effects in broad daylight, but this idea that "Godzilla should return to it's horror roots" completely flies out the door when we literally get a face-shot of Godzilla in broad daylight it all of it's horrible prosthetic glory at the very start of the movie.

I seriously thought this was going to be the sort of movie that actually hid Godzilla for much of it, that sort of horror principle that was actually honored in the TriStar Godzilla movie that everyone hates, but no, we pretty much immediately get derpy awful practical effects right out of the gate and it doesn't get any better as the movie goes on.

We get 3 Godzilla encounters, at the 20, 40, and 55 minute mark, with the third encounter being a whole 15-minute rampage sequence.

It's somewhat impressive that stretched the "action" out for so long, but as you can imagine, considering it's just a guy slowly walking through a bunch of props, it's not that exciting.

The movie isn't even scary either. Obviously.

While I'm on the topic of visuals, allow me to come right out and say, this movie looks like shit. Now I'm not a huge CGI fan, and I really do appreciate the practical effects such as in movies like Star Wars and Mad Max: Fury Road, but the practical effects and editing in this movie really aren't done tastefully.

As I said, the Godzilla suit is ugly and very obviously just some rubber shell around the actor. Godzilla's atomic breath has never looked so weak as it does here, where you really only get a visible breath effect then we cut to some melting or set on fire... the cuts in general are weird in this movie, there's an actual shot of one of the human characters standing up to leave the room and there's this super glaring cut between her standing up and having stood up that seems entirely unnecessary. Could they not just do a second take of that?

There are boatloads of miniatures, as you might imagine, include miniature boats. One scene of a speeding train that crashes into Godzilla was handled decently well because when I first saw it I was questioning whether it was a real train or not... which is good, because causing me to question whether an effect is real is the best a movie like this can expect, but then later there's a car crash that VERY OBVIOUSLY involves miniature cars and I was instantly reminded of Gumby.

The bad practical effects unfortunately also affects the action in this movie too, gatling guns and cannons both seem to either never produce an impact effect, or only result in only a flash in the air, indicating they never even collided with Godzilla.

It was surprising to see all of one scene in which two tanks stare down Godzilla and blast him repeatedly, which actually produced visible impacts on the suit and coated him in smoke. But that's literally the only scene in which the Japanese ever seem to hit Godzilla with anything.

Following this scene there's a stand-down order and Godzilla returns to the sea, only for a bunch of fighter jets to turn up last minute and the Japanese all go crazy, rooting for the jets. Then what proceeds is a hilariously drawn out sequence of every single jet repeatedly firing missiles at this barely moving monster and missing every single possible shot.

And yet the human characters and even Godzilla are reacting as though he's being hit, and they're very clearly just flying past him. Awful awful awful awful scene. Genuinely one of the worst practical effects I've ever seen taken seriously in any movie.

And people seem to take this movie seriously? Why?


I did find some things interesting about how Godzilla is presented in this movie. Just like Minus One, Godzilla is pre-established as a known myth local to a small island before attacking Tokyo. He's rather explicitly described as an ancient dinosaur that was "awoken" by the H-Bomb tests, rather than a lizard mutated by them.

A somewhat decent excuse is given for not requesting foreign aid to deal with Godzilla because of the postwar political climate and Godzilla's supposed origins.

It was also a pleasant surprise to see the old guy from Seven Samurai as the obligatory Godzilla-sympathizer.

Of course, as always, my biggest problem with these movies is that the human drama cannot simply help itself and genuinely **** off the screen and this movie is no exception. There's a subplot, albeit brief, involving two character trying to get their relatives' permission to marry. I don't know either of their names, I don't ****ing care, they waste enough of the movie onscreen actually talking about Godzilla.

Another thing this movie shares with Minus One, which I'm beginning to think is why Minus One was so well received, is that they develop a similar technology to kill Godzilla in the end. In this movie, some mad scientist character develops an "oxygen destroyer" which they dump on him in the ocean and laughably dissolves him into nothing.

It's not only humorous in the moment, but amusing to think about because virtually every single Wikipedia entry for just about every single Toho Godzilla movie you could search mentions that it "breaks continuity except for the '54 movie".

But in the '54 movie Godzilla is more dead than he's ever been! We literally see his skeleton and his skeleton even disappears! I haven't seen a single Godzilla movie that deserves a sequel less, and yet this one has the most of them! What the ****!?

I guess this movie must have found some unexpected success and they decided to turn a standalone film into a franchise, but all of these "sequel" movies I've seen make virtually no reference to this one, other than acknowledging the existence of Godzilla, so what is the point of insisting on a continuity where none exists?

How come nobody goes, "Hey whoa, didn't we reduce that guy to literally nothing?"

I had a feeling the "oxygen destroyer" in Minus One was a callback because it's such a strangely specific solution to killing Godzilla. At least in this movie more thought is contributed to the realism of such a weapon in postwar Japan, although when they talk about it being misused in this movie I can't help but think... bro, you live in Japan, you are one of the most marine-dependent countries on the planet, you're talking about the Japanese people weaponizing something than would best used against themselves.

Unquestionably, if we're treating Minus One as an actual franchise reboot, and not just a relapsed continuity, then it's certainly a better movie... but I really can't say the acting has improved much. A lot of dry cheeks in this one, even on the king of the monsters himself.


Final Verdict:

[Weak]

Attachments