Schlock? Trash? I’m not sure. It certainly looks like it cost a lot of money and the effects were amazing. But…
Did they just go to the center of the Earth? Did Godzilla then shoot his ray to the center of the Earth? And kind of look down the hole at them?
Did we really need all of this in one movie? The opening, the water scene, the journey to the center of the earth, and the fight in Hong Kong. And the fight with Mecha-godzilla?
This felt like a three hour movie cut down to 1 hour and 40 minutes. I say all this negative stuff, but it was actually almost impressive how jam packed it was and how much stuff they threw up on the screen.
It’s better than both Godzilla movies that came our recently, but much worse than Skull Island.
Kongan the Apebarian is somehow a thing. Also, I really tried to figure out a pun between King Kong and King Kull, but I couldn’t get there. On the other hand, Kong is now the Ape-Axe Predator. And I can’t believe no character in the movie used that. It’s right there people!
I’m pretty sure that King Kong and Godzilla’s mothers were both named Martha.
I am disappointed the upper management of Apex turned out to be just randomly assholish corporate executives and not Xiliens.
I apologize for the incoherence of this post, but I just watched the movie, and I think it may have caused traumatic brain injuries.
I was very disappointed by the recent Godzilla movies (but I liked Skull Island) but this one was a lot of fun. The “people” stuff was a little tedious but I really enjoyed the Monster action.
Not kind of. He totally looked down the hole at them. And yelled at them. Then Kong looked up the hole at Godzilla and yelled at him. From the Center of the Earth. Then climbed up with his Ape-Ax. From the Center of the Earth. These are things that happened.
Did we really need Beethoven’s Ode to Joy? Did we really need The Iliad and The Odyssey? Did we really need any of humanity’s greatest artistic achievements? You may as well ask what use is a newborn baby.
Absolutely agreed. Unfortunately, I think when they jammed all of that stuff in, they kind of squeezed out plot, and character, and coherence. Like, just, every single bit of those.
I kind of want to have liked this movie more. It’s actually admirable in just how sheerly nuts it is. I am dead serious about that. But…it just seemed to take itself so seriously. I thought Pacific Rim covered this terrain much better, mainly by approaching it with an infectious sense of fun.
I loved Skull Island and would go ahead and tell you that no Godzilla movie is required for this one. This was less good than Skull Island, but much better than the Godzilla movies you wisely skipped.
I think they’re supposed to be. There are characters and plot points, especially from the second one, that appear or are referenced. But I’ve seen all of them, and I still found the movie incoherent. I think all you really need to know is:
Millie Bobbie Brown plays a character that was central to the plot of the second Godzilla movie. Her father is the director of Monarch, a super-science/military organization that deals with giant monsters. The prevailing in-universe theory is that all those giant monsters come from a lost world inside the Hollow Earth and that they are a sort of homeostatic planetary defense mechanism. Godzilla killed an extraterrestrial giant monster in the last movie and humans seemed to accept that he was unpredictable but necessary to defend Earth against other even worse giant monsters.
This was my favorite of the four. It was bat shit crazy, but was internally quite coherent even though I’ve forgotten most of the plot points from the previous films. I’m a big Monster Zero fan, so to have him come back (in a way) as the big bad provided a bit of a nerdgasm. BTW, where’s that third skull?
Some fun, some trash. If you are easily mesmerized by blinking lights then you’ll enjoy this movie. There’s too much wrong with it but then I enjoyed it anyway. Just like a real Godzilla movie.
Riggs self-resets a dislocated shoulder by ramming it into a solid surface while yelling in a manly fashion. King Kong does the same during the throwdown in Hong Kong.
I’m not clear on where they were in that big fight, I think maybe it was Hong Kong. I gotta say, they have an incredible electric system there, all the lights stayed on while two monsters engaged in grudge match destroying half the city. They clearly are not using National Grid, a slight breeze will take our power out.
They did include plenty of the changes in proportion required in any giant monkey movie.
My favorite part is where the entire US Navy is subordinate to a primatologist and a hollow earth truther. In that regard, it’s quite faithful to the world created in the early Toho films.
Is that the axe Kong stuffs in Godzilla’s mouth? That’s a callback to the original where Kong tries the same thing with a tree. Kong tries to pull his jaw apart like he did to a T. Rex way back in the original, I don’t remember he tried that in the first movie.