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The King of Monsters is Back...

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LeeC:
Well, hello again Godzilla.  What's this? you brought some friends?

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVDtmouV9kM

TheEvilDog:
There's a rumour going around at SDCC that there are going to be more kaiju in the film, its just they've concentrated on Rodan, Mothra and King Ghidorah due to them being more recognisable/popular.

I'm taking that a pinch of salt, but I'd love to see Anguirus.

Neko_Ali:
sigh..... Nope. This looks like the same problem as the first US Godzilla film. Or the Beyformers franchise. Take these larger than life characters the original franchises are based on... Then push them to the background as secondary characters and make the movies all about the human characters and military fetishism. Godzilla/kaiju or the Transformers were the stars of their movies/shows. The human characters were supporting only. Most of the screen time and character advancement and nearly all the plot was focused on and around the literally larger than life characters.

Pacific Rim, or Ultraman or every sentai show ever works with a human focus story and character facing off against giant monsters because that is what they are, what they are designed to be. The focus is on the pilots, or the heroes and the giant monsters are secondary at best and more often just there as an obstacle for the heroes to defeat. We don't spend 80% of the time focused on the monster of the week. The kaiju in Pacific Rim were not the stars, they barely even had names.

The Toho Kaiju though, Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan etc... They are the stars. They get the big story arcs, the entire point of the movie existing is to feature them. The humans and military in them were for the sake of exposition and to be either support or minor obstacles. Trying to focus the plot line on the human characters in these movies is missing the entire point of it.

I watched the first Legendary Godzilla movie when it released, entirely regretted it. This one looks to be following entirely in it's footsteps despite the poor performance of the first one. Unless I see something that tells me what I saw in this trailer is not what the movie is going to be like, pass. I'll go watch guys in rubber suits fake beat each other up again.

TheEvilDog:
Thing is, its rather difficult to characterise what is essentially an animal, albeit one that leaves a footprint larger than most houses.

Actually at this stage now, they're not even animals anymore, they're forces of nature. Even in the Toho films, Godzilla isn't really treated as a hero in the traditional sense, but more as something dealing with invaders in its territory. And in the Toho films, no matter how much Humanity tries to combat Godzilla or other Kaiju, its all for nought, much like our attempts to combat the hurricane or the storm.

Something you never see in the Japanese films is the aftermath. You don't see memorial walls, or the walls covered in pictures of missing loved ones. You don't see the reconstruction, the rebuilding of cities and lives. You see the devastation, but you don't see the cost. Its just "BAM!", Godzilla just killed a cyborg chicken from space, but by the time the next film rolls around, every city is intact waiting for the next round.

I actually enjoy the fact that the Legendary films show the human cost. People are terrified, scared of potential kaiju attacks. The films revolve around Godzilla and the other kaiju, much like disaster films revolve around the disaster in question.

Neko_Ali:
Toho managed to give characterization and emotional range to their kaiju with considerably less technology for decades. Just guys in rubber suits and exposition humans.

The fact that there was never shown the aftermath and very little of the human cost of the kaiju fights is a fair one. But that's not why people watched Toho's kaiju movies. People watched them to see bad acting and over the top fight scenes with monsters. The Legendary Godzilla film and what this one looks like is not that.  And that's why I didn't enjoy it, and doubt I will enjoy that one. Same reason I didn't bother to see Cloverfield, or watch disaster films. I don't enjoy that sort of movie. Life sucks enough worrying about that sort of thing for real, I don't need it in my escapist science fiction thank you.

Which in the end is the thing. This movie was not meant for people like me. Not meant for people who want to spend a few hours having fun watching giant monsters fight, then moving on. But if they didn't want to make a movie like that... If they didn't want to make a movie that follows along with Godzilla and his monster frenimies... Why are they using the name and image of Godzilla? Rhetorical question of course, they are using it to push box office sales with a recognizable name. That's why this is 'Godzilla 2' and not 'Cloverfield 2'.

And that's a thing that annoys the heck out of me. Studios using a name just to rake in the nostalgia money, even though the movie itself has little to do with the tone of the original property. Some of them were quite clearly not originally designed with a famous property in mind and were re-written later on to turn someone generic Sci Fi into a movie about a property the studio holds the movie rights to.

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