Or is it 2015? Anyway, needed some COME WITH ME after that skydiving sequence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjKO10hKtYw

wow (again)

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cant wait

http://board.okayplayer.com/okp.php?az=show_topic&forum=6&topic_id=663140&mesg_id=663140&listing_type=search

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTWllJqN9Bg

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIu85WQTPRc

I predict big numbers and high praise.

Then I'd be more confident.

Instead, I remain cautiously optimistic.

Savages sucked but he carried the weight for TK quite well

He's got talent but we'll see if it's the right role for him

Gotta good supporting cast regardless & Godzilla is still the main attraction

It wasn't what I expected, but that final scene when you see the things, it was both tense and beautiful at the same time.

This new Godzilla though will ride high, it has a very good trailer, good hype, tie-ins to the original, and a strong cast. ATJ will be OK as the lead, as long as Cranston is right there helping along the way. Plus, ATJ isn't going anywhere but up, thanks to this and Avengers 2.

I've tried to avoid all reviews so far even though i think I know a major spoiler in the plot.

One down side to the headlines i've seen is the characters are rather thin.

This is the summer movie i'm most looking forward to.

All I want is 90 to 120 minutes of Godzilla fucking up one or multiple cities. That's it. MONSTER SMASH. Maybe throw in a decent story and a few good actors for bonus points. Essentially, Cloverfield without the dumb shit (yes I know there was a lot of dumb shit, but I was satisfied with the MONSTER SMASH content).

Reviews seem to suggest that Godzilla is actually the "hero" here, protecting the Earth from other monsters. I don't know how I feel about that.

I'm probably still going to go see it, but I'm having doubts now...

Godzilla Vs Mothra, Godzilla vs King Ghidora, that's sort of how he rolls.

This looks so kick ass (no pun intended)

My main beef is things were convenient for the sake of the plot. Like Cranston and Taylor-Johnson in Japan just happened to be there when the shit pops off. Taylor-Johnson goes to Hawaii and so do the monsters. He goes to San Francisco and so do the monsters. See what I'm saying.

Plus after Pacific Rim, I expected the other two monsters to be awesome. And they were okay. Nothing to write home about. The fights again could've been cooler (Pacific Rim really spoiled me)
Aaron Taylor-Johnson was fucking awful in this. A
And that's a bad thing when you are carrying the film.
Most people didn't like it but my boy loved it, so I'm going to give another shot Friday morning for $6.

Just come back from it and while I had really high hopes for this film as the best blockbuster of the summer I came away disappointed.

The first 20 minutes in Japan piqued my interest but then I was upset at a certain plot development (you'll know when you watch it).

The design of the MUTUs is just so wrong. Quite freaky and just a composite of many other animals.

Aaron Johnson Taylor did not convince me he can become a major star and I loved him in the first KickAss.

In fact most of the actors are given nothing to do (not hugely surprising given its a movie about Monsters) and I feel sorry for Elizabeth Olsen who has nothing written for her character in the movie. Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins too. A waste of really good acting talent too.

The pacing of the film seemed off to me. It drags during the middle two quarters only to accelerate again towards the end of the film. I haven't seen Gareth Edwards previous film but I'm guessing some of it is rehashed in this.

I was one of the people who thought the Amazing Spiderman 2 was an abomination. Fortunately Godzilla isn't on the level of that awful summer film but its also nowhere near the level of The Winter Soldier which is the high water mark for 2014's action films. I'll have to hope Days of Future Past and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes are of similar quality to Cap otherwise I have no films to look forward to until the fall award bait releases.

I'll check back in here after more people have seen it to discuss the film without giving out spoilers here.

.

Run don't walk to see this

At the end the entire theater erupted into claps and cheers.

For one, Aaron Taylor Johnson is awful. Everyone can agree on this. Kitsch is a boatload of charm and personality in comparison. In one scene, a charming fellow soldier named Morales appears, and immediately shows more life and spark in five seconds and two lines than ATJ ever does.

However, the thing that people aren't going to like is Edwards' predilection for cutting away right as the monsters begin to fight. The only real fighting that we get to watch comes at the end. And my audience cheered that fight... but they audibly complained when we were denied spectacle at other points. Groans and "come on!!"s at one particular cutaway.

People will also be mad that human characters make dumb plans and bad decisions to try and stop the creatures... but that's kind of the point of the movie, as Watanabe blatantly spells out at one point. So I can't hold that against this either-- it's thematically relevant.

Edwards and Seamus McCarvey make some beeeeeeeautiful images though. And the music is sensational. And Cranston does fine work, as does Olsen in her totally thankless role. So it's definitely worth a watch. And there are for sure some cheer-worthy monster fight moments at the end.

Because mine did and I thought that was ignorant.

**SPOILER**



































Man when Godzilla's fins started glowing and he spit that fireball I screamed YAAAAAASSS LOL

To be fair, he's given zero character to play. He essentially plays Old Japanese Man.

He died too soon. I wanted more.

Watanabe played a one-note Scared Japanese Guy Archetype. The real wasted actors were the women-- Olsen had little to do but cry, and Sally Hawkins, an Academy Award nominee, literally has nothing to do, and she is totally forgotten about by film's end.

The
>real wasted actors were the women-- Olsen had little to do but
>cry, and Sally Hawkins, an Academy Award nominee, literally
>has nothing to do, and she is totally forgotten about by
>film's end.



Dude, Juliette Binoche died in the first 5 minutes. I don't even understand what was the point in her getting cast.

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Shit doesn't get popping off until like the third act.

Not enough Bryan Cranston.

Too much Kick-Ass dude, who is a total lame and now just looks like a shrunken head on a beefcake body.

The Godzilla beast itself looked awesome though, especially on IMAX. That mouth-hadouken shit (or whatever it is) was rad.

Ppl were clapping at the IMAX "countdown" intro that ended w the Gozilla growl, first time seeing Motu, Gozilla, and other parts.

Thought the dad & his son's wife were solid. Special FX: A++ better than Pacfic Rim.

screaming for him to duff that little one
ngh wouldnt stay down.

Very Spielberg.

I was actually bummed we saw the little girl and her family go inside but then cut away. What happened? Those doors were glass!! AND WHAT HAPPENED TO THE DOG?!

Tiny ass kept coming back

I saw a Vulture headline (but didn't read the article) on the slow build before the movie came out so I knew what to expect.

The build and teases kinda made Godzilla seem almost mythical, so the payoff feels earned when we see him fully and he finally commences to kicking ass as a babyface. The movie has a clear reverence for him and treats him with serious respect, as opposed to some ironic, kitschy trash "homage" to the old movies.

If you were hoping for two hours of straight destruction and mayhem, sorry.

Taylor-Johnson was about as bland as a "hero" gets, and that's a problem, since we have to follow him for roughly 2/3 of the movie. Cranston was great and I hated to see him go. I thought both Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins got lost in the shuffle, and I'm really not sure what more Elizabeth Olson could be called on to do.

I liked it.

___________________________________________________________________________________________
Only losers and herbs believe that OKP = Fun with Words + People's Emotions

*spoilers*



















*spoilers*














And that was ridiculous how early Cranston died. What is the point of casting an actor of that caliber, by FAR the best actor in the film, if you're going to kill him off so soon? He could have made this a lot better.

___________________________________________________________________________________________
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When it's good, it's phenomenal. Too much of the plot feels like a by-the-numbers monster flick but the production/design/action sequences are top-notch.

Way too slow and not enough fighting scenes and the human hero elements was not developed.

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this is how the best Godzilla films are, I'm not sure what people expected
the payoff was HUGE and well worth the wait, having them in it too much takes away from the fact that it was a story about how human beings perceived themselves as well as the monsters

"the pacing was off"

not the best movie, I've ever seen, but considering this movie is about a gigantic lizard that goes around punching shit, pray tell, what is the perfect pacing?

it delivers

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>"the pacing was off"
>
>not the best movie, I've ever seen, but considering this movie
>is about a gigantic lizard that goes around punching shit,
>pray tell, what is the perfect pacing?
>
>it delivers


The pacing was off because it dragged during the 2+3 quarters of the film. There is an exciting start in Japan and (spoliler) with Cranston taking off his gas mask when he realises there is no radiation. Then you have to wait an hour or so for the mutts and Godzilla to fight which is when the film accelerated into full on monster epic battle. It dragged during that hour between Japan and the final battle. Too much family bullshit exposition.

Until I saw this movie
He handled those 2 Motus like a champ, and don't get me started on what he did to the female

Whether you like the film's choices or not (both are plenty valid), it's pretty clear that Edwards was doing this.

http://thedissolve.com/features/exposition/566-godzilla-the-first-post-human-blockbuster/

Godzilla: The first post-human blockbuster
by David Ehrlich

This article is intended for people who have seen Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla.

“Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” —God

“RYYYYEHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!” —Godzilla

When Godzilla finally shows up in Gareth Edwards’ blockbuster reimagining of the kaiju king, the first person to see the giant radioactive lizard make landfall on the shores of Honolulu isn’t a person at all. It’s a dog, a cute one, leashed to a palm tree and barking his head off at the prehistoric colossus emerging from the sea. We know what the animal is looking at, but don’t see what it’s seeing. When the ocean water begins to recede in anticipation of a massive tsunami, the dog sprints inland, snapping its leash and bounding out of frame. It returns in the next shot, with the camera following as it sprints to safety (presumably) through an anonymous throng of panicking people. That’s one of the film’s most telling choices, given how the tidal wave sweeps through the streets, bloodlessly erasing an untold number of human lives. The dog might escape the carnage, but it’s too late for us. Godzilla is the first post-human blockbuster.

In Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla, point of view is everything. Here is a $160 million studio tentpole in which perspective stomps over plot, and characters are defined not by their actions, but by their insignificance. Here is a confidently paced monster movie that eschews the “four action setpieces strung together with exposition and iced with a tease” template of contemporary blockbuster cinema. Edwards devotes the film’s first hour to the deepening tragedy of a single family, and builds to an unspeakably spectacular climax that’s less dependent on what we’re seeing than on how we’re seeing it.

During the first hour of the film, all the plot (and all the action) is experienced from a human POV. Aside from the opening scene in the Philippines, viewers are privy only to what Joe and Ford Brody (Bryan Cranston and Aaron-Taylor Johnson) suspect, discover, and experience for themselves. Mythology, distant incidents, and even their own images are presented, respectively, through archival footage, news reports, and surveillance feeds. As the film progresses, however, the perspective through which this story unfolds undergoes a slow tectonic shift toward the omniscient.

The original Godzilla was born from the Lucky Dragon 5 incident—a 1954 disaster that saw a fishing boat wandering into a nuclear test, poisoning the crew—and it reflects Japan’s post-war concern with nuclear warfare. But Ishirô Honda’s 1954 film is, at its essence, concerned with the monster’s transition from folkloric threat to apocalyptic reality. Edwards (and screenwriter Max Borenstein) learned a number of valuable lessons from that film, paying careful attention to how Honda skillfully uses a small domestic drama to springboard his screed and align the audience’s perspective with that of an entire country, and how—once the monster is introduced—his film stops dead in its tracks whenever it pauses to advance the woefully undercooked love plot that’s used to anchor the human story.

What Edwards presumably saw in Honda’s enduring masterpiece is that it’s counterintuitive to anchor a cautionary tale about human humility with a narrative that balances a single person’s conflicts with the fate of our planet. The creative team of this new Godzilla understood that scale is more than another word for height, and that the cinema’s most palpably enormous digital creature wouldn’t be enough in and of itself to fully express the relative smallness of the film’s characters.

Edwards’ Godzilla is the result of a creative team attempting to reconcile the essence of Honda’s original with the narrative demands of a blockbuster. This film may not need viewers to care about its characters, but it still needs to have some. It’s a tall order, but in returning to the transitional trajectory of the movie that started it all, this new Godzilla finds an extremely elegant solution. Brody’s attempts to reunite with his wife and child are little more than scaffolding for a story that is explicitly about the transition from anthropocentrism to ecocentrism. It’s a theme that Edwards’ film promotes to a plot, the movie gradually reorienting this presumptuously human story until we’re reduced to mere observers, trying desperately to save ourselves as monsters battle above us, oblivious to our plight.

In Godzilla, almost all human action is futile and/or fatal, and the small victories belong almost exclusively to supporting characters (a young boy reuniting with his parents, a scientist finally getting a good look at the majesty of the monster she’s studied all her life). Godzilla is both humanity’s reckoning and its salvation, a response to our unchecked parasitic relationship with the planet and a reminder of our ultimately supporting role as stewards rather than beneficiaries. Steven Spielberg exerts an undeniable influence on the way the film moves, but Hayao Miyazaki’s work best anticipates where it goes. If Jurassic Park is about the perils of playing God, Godzilla responds that just being ourselves is bad enough.

In fact, here’s the sum total of what humans accomplish in the film: As a result of our lust for uranium, we reintroduce giant insectoid monsters back into the population, and as a result of our myopic thirst for nuclear energy, we then provide those creatures with all the radioactivity they need to grow stronger and reproduce. These failures are so extraordinary that our only successes are in our efforts to mitigate them, as Brody sets fire to the next generation of MUTOs, and obliterates the ecosystem by detonating a powerful bomb off the coast of San Francisco. (After all its intended targets have already been neutralized. Whoops.) If humans do anything positive in the film, it’s lowering the rent prices on Telegraph Hill. Godzilla isn’t an action movie, it’s a spectacle of humility.

Unsurprisingly, one of the most common criticisms the film has engendered is that the people in it are bland and don’t do anything. Devin Faraci put it best in his otherwise-positive review, observing that “Nobody’s going to walk out of Godzilla wanting to buy toys of the human characters.” He’s wrong, of course, because the world desperately needs a Juliette Binoche action figure, and Hasbro is still slacking on the Dan In Real Life merchandise, but his point is well-taken.

In fact, one major sequence even begins with Brody fiddling with an action figure that resembles himself, and a little boy’s interest in the toy lands him squarely in the middle of a MUTO attack that the military is powerless to stop. It’s a cute story beat, but also one that bluntly reinforces our insignificance in the face of the film’s crisis—ultimately, the only thing the humans do well in Godzilla is provide scale for the monsters. The people only there for us to see how insignificant they are.

Judging from reviews and social media, many viewers feel betrayed by the film’s dwindling interest in the family that dominates its first half, as the Brody clan’s multi-generational tragedy is a distant memory by the time we get to the climactic kaiju battle. The eponymous radioactive monster, who has all the emotional complexity of a natural disaster, easily emerges as the most nuanced character in the film, and also—despite his prolonged absences from the picture—its one true lead.

This is the rare live-action summer blockbuster in which, by design, not a single one of the human characters in the movie has anything resembling a complete emotional arc. And while it’s difficult to argue that Brody wouldn’t have benefited from some memorable dialogue and a more charismatic performance, the lack of a compelling homosapien protagonist helps clarify the film’s true trajectory. This is a story about exposing the myopia of the human perspective and then humiliating our inherently egocentric POV. We’re just another part of the equation Godzilla has come back to balance, an urgent reorientation that Edwards turns into a story by gradually disempowering his human characters, conflating us with the bad guys until Godzilla can emerge as an aspirational figure.

From the beginning, the Brody family is matched with the MUTOs. A cut from the busted Philippine mine to the Janjira power plant where Brody’s parents work establishes a link between the film’s two parasitic forces. Both feed on the earth’s nuclear energy at the expense of the planet’s fundamental health, and both are blindly concerned with cultivating future generations of their species.

Godzilla is obsessed with the value of reproductive family units. The dynamic of parents concerned with the well-being of their child recur throughout the film like a chorus. The first triangle is between Brody and his parents. (His mother’s dying words are for Joe to take care of their son.) Next are the angry Japanese parents collecting their goth teen from a Tokyo police station, and the little girl on the beach in Honolulu, whose parents whisk her to safety when Godzilla arrives. There’s the young Japanese boy whose brief arc is entirely defined by his separation from, and return to, his worried parents. Finally, there’s Brody’s wife and son, whose struggle for survival is rhymed with that of the MUTOs and their spawn during the siege on San Francisco. The MUTOs are bound by a destructive lust, their goal being simply to reunite and have uninterrupted sex, a desire to which Brody and his wife can certainly relate. By the time the female MUTO pulverizes downtown Las Vegas, the giant insect monster has done more to earn our affection than anyone else in the film.

The one thing Brody manages to accomplish in the movie is aborting the next generation of MUTOs, setting fire to the larvae that have been strung from our nuclear bomb like pearls. By encouraging us to root for the MUTOs, who are more charismatic than the human cast, Edwards twists the ostensible triumph of Brody’s genocide into something of a teachable moment: Viewers have been distanced from the human characters, so their actions stoke critical thought where most movies of this sort are only eager to satisfy bloodlust.

The 1954 Godzilla ends with a scientist killing the titular beast, but by the closing credits of Edwards’ edition, Godzilla hardly even knows we exist. The King of Monsters was born into global culture as a reckoning, but in the ongoing aftermath of the Fukushima disaster, the worst fears of Honda’s film have been confirmed, and Godzilla is less of a mythological threat than he is a daily part of our ecosystem. We’ve become a far more destructive species over the course of the last 60 years, but Godzilla’s invincibility in the face of our growing power confirms that our stewardship is a temporary charge, and not a birthright. If Honda’s film was a desperate plea for reason, Edwards’ is a plea for perspective. We used to be the villains in this story, but now we’re just in the way.

It’s exceptionally brave for a studio tentpole to so fearlessly and damningly embrace that perspective. Some audiences may refuse to see the forest for the trees, but Edwards understands that it helps to be 300 feet tall. It’s telling that the film climaxes by finally aligning the human POV with that of the titular monster; Edwards’ most instructive cut creates a parallel action between Brody and Godzilla, as both combatants keel over after the final battle. It may have cost us several major cities and an untold number of lives, but humans are finally seeing eye to eye with nature’s wrath. The film’s evocative closing shot serves as a resonant reminder that just because we’re the planet’s predominant storytellers doesn’t mean that the story is necessarily about us.

His presence would have made this very good movie into a great one.

It was certainly better than Peter Jackson's King Kong, and I liked it more than Pacific Rim, even though I enjoy that movie more after seeing it a second time, and after having a comic book shop like discussion about helicopter and steel cable capacity.

>

I've been wanting to check it and some of the others out...

Nostalgia might be talking on this for many...

If you think Kung Fu movies
Essence of monster movies
Sure

Cinematic excellence they aren't...
~~~~
When you are born, you cry, and the world rejoices. Live so that when you die, you rejoice, and the world cries.
~~~~
You cannot hate people for their own good.

About as close as it's going to get to old school
Rooting for Godzilla
Without doing it hand puppet style
Fun
~~~~
When you are born, you cry, and the world rejoices. Live so that when you die, you rejoice, and the world cries.
~~~~
You cannot hate people for their own good.

Everything that involved human (notable exception being Bryan Cranston) fucking sucked.

As said above, it was a little disappointing they didn't give Wantanabe anything to do. Or Stratharin.

On the other hand, Godzilla breathed atomic fire down a giant insect bitch's throat. Advantage: Godzilla.

Oh, and I'm going to be a Bay Area geography nerd here: there's no way you'd take the Golden Gate Bridge to flee San Francisco if you're trying to escape to Oakland. That's what the Bay Bridge is far. But Godzilla destroying the Bay Bridge isn't as iconic or visually impressive, so I definitely get it.

You could still watch the ocean-side carnage from the north side of the GGB... At least, that'd be my rationale.

>there's no way you'd take the Golden Gate Bridge to flee San
>Francisco if you're trying to escape to Oakland.

I'm just a big fan of the human/mech vs monster conflict that I'm sure I wont like the answer.

i did not enjoy this at all. Imo it was a bad move to take Joe/Cranston out so early in the film. There was not anyone around to really explain any of the dumb ass science. Ok i think i heard something about some spores,lol, radiation and Godzilla being an emp? Lord have mercy.
Overall this movie is just very boring.
Yes i am flunking this film.
Grade F

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this movie was wretched

I can appreciate a take like David Ehrlich's but man does it feel like he brought a lot to that movie. Reminds me in some ways of the original style of Pitchfork or CokeMachineGlow album reviews where the story a writer was able to tell about the art was more interesting than the art itself. For me, the most authentically Godzilla bit of this movie was how bad anything without monsters involved was. At least it's full of gorgeous sights and sounds, even six years later. The jets falling out of the sky, the skydive and the train attack are legit fucking rad.


But then I gotta wish the movie had a less serious tone of they're going to give me all that crap, nothing dialogue for an hour and preface Godzilla facefucking the not-Mothra with Aaron Johnson pointing a pistol in its face. Why'd the movie wait two hours to have a sense of humor?!


---

2/5

This shit owns. And since my brother got that BIG Criterion boxset of the Showa Era movies, this is the best the human characters have been written. Ever.

Just wish Aaron Taylor-Johnson could emote.

I think it used to be on Hulu? I shoulda watched it.

Still mad at this movie, though.

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that this movie came out when people still thought Aaron Taylor-Johnson was going to be a thing

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