There is a wide spectrum involved here. Different fans have different things that attracts them to the franchise, so the thing they want to emphasize may not be the thing that other fans want to see. And while some fans given the reins may want to be slavishly faithful, others want to leave their own mark. Emmerich is obviously a disaster film buff so he probably wanted to emphasize the disaster elements.
Studio execs are actually hesitant to give control of these franchises to obviously crazy fans because they tend to obsess over "faithfulness" rather than being open to suggestions, changes and making hard decisions. JJ Abrams actually downplayed his love of Star Trek in order to make those movies, always claiming he was really trying to make a Star Wars movie (given Star Wars box office this was what execs wanted).
Comics are just words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures.The problem with that movie is that went all the way to the opposite of the "fanboy" problem, pretty much creating a shallow self-awareness lacking movie that failed to even uphold the presence and feel of Godzilla.
All in all, change the title to something like The Giant Behemoth, The Giant Gila Monster or The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and you got a more faithful remake of either of those three films than a Godzilla movie series entry
The series worked because the creators of it embraced the Godzilla mythos feel while creating new Kaiju solely for their show, allowing them to go crazy with their monsters and battles instead of attaching the name "Godzilla" to an In Name Only thing
Edited by VengefulBale on Feb 3rd 2021 at 11:12:21 AM
Prettiest Meta Knight Gijinka, nglYeah, the show was fuckin' rad.
Blows all the other animated properties based on Godzilla out of the water, honestly.
You are not alone.I think the movie did alright with Godzilla as a concept, they just got sloppy with the tone. I think in general it makes sense to attempt a back-to-basics approach if you are going for a full American remake. The 2014 film did the "Godzilla vs" route because of the response to the '98 film, but the current Monsterverse is very insistent on Godzilla as a hero rather than Godzilla as indifferent.
The series was pretty cool, I would even argue Zilla Jr. is one of the smartest incarnations of the character as it often had to be clever and fast to beat its opponents rather than use raw power. The human characters were also rather tolerable because they were scientists intelligently trying to figure out the Monster of the Week, downplaying any relationship drama or more strained human-involvement.
Comics are just words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures.I still don't get why Godzilla KOTM performed so badly at the box office. Sure, maybe the acting wasn't great and Millie "Eleven" Brown was a tad underwhelming in her first major movie role... but people don't go see a Godzilla film for the humans, they go for the giant monsters and the scenes of chaos and destruction, and I think it more than delivered on that front!
The same year another awaited sequel, Lego Movie 2, performed badly too, but at least in that case the reasons were clear (too many years passed since the first movie, franchise fatigue, the surprise at the end of the first movie can't really be repeated, maybe poor marketing too). In the case of Godzilla though it was supposed to have a bigger audience, maybe the series in general doesn't have that broad appeal now that superhero films are almost the only blockbusters guaranteed to be a hit? Let's see what it happens with G vs K though the context is radically different.
"Effective Altruism" is just another bunch of horsesh*t.I think some people were turned off by the first movie?
When the first movie came out many analysts at the time were surprised by how big it's second week fall was. It had a strong opening, but as the weeks pass it had very slow numbers. It has the odd record of being the lowest earning in American box-office for a movie with a 90 million+ opening.
On the bright side, since the release of the Gv K trailer, I noticed that both Godzilla and Skull Island have remained in the weekly top 10 most seen movies in Netflix Mexico. People are catching up, the hype is real!
In spite of the constant claim that people are only watching Godzilla films for monster action, you still need a decent plot to carry that action because otherwise it's empty spectacle. Godzilla fans would obviously be excited by the well-known monsters of the franchise, but why would general audiences be? Justice League, a movie with many characters famous in pop culture was a flop, much less a movie with a comparably uninteresting plot and narrower audience.
I like King of the Monsters but in all honesty it's a kind of flick that only really hangs together by the giant monster spectacle, a recurring problem with Godzilla films in fact. The human side of the plot is realy, really weak (aside from the bit with Doctor Serizawa, which are actually pretty good, and the scene of his sacrifice is probably the best non-monster one). Weaker than 2014 Godzilla even, and it drags the whole film down along with it.
Fans often like to strawman critics as snobs who don't understand "too much monster action" is what they're here for, but this is what the critics actually mean. The film is a ramshackle mess of monster fights barely held together by some pretty dumb human plotlines. A fantastic score by Bear Mcreary and some top-notch cinematography for the monsters is what makes it work.
There's also the fact Kong: Skull Island was overall the much more warmly received film across the board than Godzilla (which, while successful, is still rather divisive). I figure the success of this trailer is partially attributed to that.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."I consider Kong: Skull Island to be the best Monsterverse film so far by a pretty wide margin. It strikes a good balance between the human side of the story and the giant monster fights, has an all-around solid cast (with some standout performances from John C. Reilly, Samuel L. Jackson, and John Goodman), well-staged action scenes, and, most importantly, doesn't take itself too seriously. Godzilla 2014 tried way too hard to be a dark and serious disaster movie like the original 1954 film and just turned out incredibly dull, and King of the Monsters is a tonally inconsistent mess that suffers from trying to tell two completely different stories at once without succeeding at either of them, but I really enjoyed Skull Island because it doesn't attempt to be anything more than an entertaining B-movie on a grand scale. It's pure pulp without pretensions, and all the better for it.
Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses.KOTM absolutely trailed at the box office because people saw Godzilla 2014 and walked away disappointed. Soldier boy absolutely killed that movie.
Kong Skull Island definitely has an amazing human cast, one that doesn't detract from the movie.
By contrast, the human leads in KOTM and especially Godzilla 2014 where downright painful to watch. Soldier boy and angry dad had zero charisma amid a sea (well okay, more of a lake.) of secondary characters that where more interesting and the plot kept having to bend over to make them relevant.
Kong Skull Island's ensemble at least have a few memorable lines and don't get in Kong's way. Hell, one of the complaints I've heard is that Jing Tian's character wasn't given enough scenes since as a biologist she could be shown geeking out over the incredible megafauna.
KOTM still is the best one overall though. Never thought I'd ship a giant lizard and a giant bug because of their touching, voiceless chemistry but here we are.
Edited by ShirowShirow on Feb 5th 2021 at 5:36:01 PM
You are not alone.I wonder if this is because the humans in Kong movies are vital to the plot in ways Godzilla's humans have never been. After all, the plot of Kong media requires humans discovering "The Eighth Wonder of the World" whereas Godzilla often just appears without humans needing to look for him. The humans in Kong movies have to be interesting because the plot necessitates their existence.
Kong: The Animated Series even gave the main human protagonist the ability to Fusion Dance with Kong, giving him a level of agency in Kong's battles that humans in Godzilla media have never received.
Edited by windleopard on Feb 5th 2021 at 9:53:10 AM
It is rooted in the fact that Godzila was not born as a typical killable giant monster, he was made first and foremost as a force of nature that made man insignificant
Prettiest Meta Knight Gijinka, nglSkull Island definitely benefits from taking place in an isolated location and having much lower stakes than the Godzilla films. It's essentially a survival horror in the vein of Jurassic Park where the characters' main objective is to escape from an island full of dangerous predators rather than preventing a world-ending disaster, which makes the humans seem much less intrusive and distracting.
Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses.Maybe? But humans in a Godzilla movie can be interesting. They'll never be quite as compelling as the monsters but that doesn't mean they have to actively detract from the film.
Shin Godzilla's overwhelmingly beleaguered bureaucrats where interesting. Godzilla Vs Battra said "fuck it" and gave us Japanese Indiana Jones because why not. The longest-recurring human character in the big G's movies was a girl with Psychic Powers because there's A LOT you can do with that concept in a monster movie.
Godzilla 2014 and KOTM just failed on the human front because they failed.
You are not alone.Right. Also the first movie put a lot on emphasis on the suffering of the nameless masses showing just how horrific a giant monster attack truly would be.
Prettiest Meta Knight Gijinka, nglYou also have to realize that King of the Monsters came out the same month as Pokémon Detective Pikachu, Aladdin (2019), John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, Brightburn and Rocketman (2019). There was a lot going on that year.
Edited by chasemaddigan on Feb 5th 2021 at 4:49:47 AM
The 2014 Godzilla film didn't have very good human characters, but in this circumstance I prefer bland over loud and obnoxious. Brody was uninteresting but he served as the viewpoint of doing anything possible in order to survive each monster attack, and while unlucky he wasn't stupid. The human protagonists of Kong Skull Island were kind of similar, but in this case the obnoxious ones are killed off by the halfway point and the tolerable-to-good characters end up taking us through the climax.
King of the Monsters was trying to go for a Skull Island approach, but there was no real protagonist that was able to drive us through the story, Ken Watanabe was about the only character who was uniformly likeable (which is sad, as Kyle Chandler usually excels at those guys). I started to realize too that all the cool apocalyptic imagery from the trailers like the flag changing direction, Rodan's flight alone decimating the city and Ghidorah's outline in the hurricane was about the extent of that imagery, but we got a lot of "trying to dock with the flying wing while Rodan is attacking" sequences that are manufactured problems ON TOP of the apocalyptic monster that is hard to process because it diminishes the action.
Comics are just words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures.![]()
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I actually liked Shin Godzilla a lot, despite having stopped caring about Anno and Evangelion a long ago. I really enjoyed the satire of bureaucracy confronted with the threat of a giant monster, that I think hasn't been done before, also I liked how they pointed out the fact that as a radioactive creature, Godzilla is a deformed mutant in constant pain; that was quite interesting too.
As for KOTM, those are all valid points but still, I never expected the human characters to be much more than cardboard cutouts or comedic figures (there was even the drunken scientist based on Rick Sanchez), given that the first movie totally wasted actors like Juliette Binoche and Bryan Cranston (not that Cranston has ever done anything good on the big screen, though) and still had all the same cliches as the old films. So I went in with low expectations and still enjoyed it for what it was. I think the director of Godzilla 2014 was too worried to be perceived as an "author" instead of the honest faceless worker Godzilla film directors usually are. So probably people were thinking KOTM was being "snobbish" as well?
"Effective Altruism" is just another bunch of horsesh*t.Anyone want to talk about the Singular Point Godzilla design?
https://twitter.com/NXOnNetflix/status/1360061067846701064?s=20
Final Wars wins again.
Godzilla Vs Biollante had some of that, with the opening scene being a tongue-in-cheek Mêlée à Trois between a few factions vying for G-cells.
You are not alone.

Theres like 3 aeperste quotes in the video that basically are like "Thats not how we do it in Hollywood! Lets get rid of all that made Godzilla Godzilla and put this new FRESH stuff in!"