Right. Doesn’t matter AS MUCH. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter AT ALL. There are all sorts of technical/procedural innovations that have happened since the lumiere brothers which make movies better. None of them are enough to make a bad movie good. But I prefer films in color, with sound, made by filmmakers with access to awesome modern cameras that let them shoot in very low light conditions, and drone shots, and crane shots, and the ability to use CGI to stitch together individual shots into lengthy sequences that would otherwise be impossible, and CGI (and modern practical special effects, and the mixture between the two) when appropriate. That allows good moviemakers to make the best movies they can. It also allows bad moviemakers to throw zillions of dollars at the screen and make pretty shit. But that’s not the technology’s fault, and that doesn’t detract from the genuinely good movies that these technological advancements allow.
I’ve seen many 1 hour 40 minute movies bloated to 3 hours, so this is a plus.
Is Hong Kong recognizable? My daughter lived there for a while, and I’ve been so that would be a reason to watch on Netflix at some point.
The only way to watch this movies is to treat them like porn. Skip all the set up, plot and talking parts and get right to the pounding.
Yuck!
I did watch that back when it debuted. They did a pretty good job. I think Jay makes a good point that it looked like it was written by a child “in all good and bad ways.”
We watched it last night with our 10 year old son. He enjoyed it, naturally, although he was getting bored during the “plot” bits. But then we were also getting bored during the “plot” bits because the plot bits weren’t well done. They could have cut out either the A team or the B team and concentrated on one story and maybe done a bit better? The kid with Millie Bobby Brown was completely useless to the story. I get that the point of these movies if big monster fights but the story is what glues the monster fights together and, all else being equal, would rather have entertaining glue then “yeah, yeah, get on with it” reactions.
The changing scale from scene to scene was distracting. My wife and I spent a good amount of time saying “Wait, wtf? How are they now THAT size?”. We’re not looking for realism in a “Well, the cube root law states…” but picking a monster size and sticking with it would have been nice.
I did like the idea that Mecha-Godzilla was powered by Gidorah’s brains and that’s what was upsetting Godzilla or altering him to its existence. I was happy with the fight conclusion – Godzilla kicked Kong’s ass but they both get their own neighborhoods to be boss of now.
I laughed at the flying snake things in Hollow Earth. Not at the monsters but at the reactions of the characters. Who could have guessed that Giant Monster World would have giant monsters??
Not a good movie but was fun for a watch with the kid. I didn’t go away angry but I wouldn’t jump to watch it again.
I think that’s a good distinction. There are some sfx-laden blockbusters which are so frustratingly stupid that my feeling afterwards is just frustration and anger… I usually try to avoid such movies, but ones I have seen recently include a really awful Transformers sequel (edge of extinction?) and several of the recent DC superhero movies.
Then there’s another category of blockbuster which still isn’t an actively good movie, but which is a competent and fun movie in which charismatic movie stars quip and having fun little adventures, and there are basically comprehensible storytelling beats, and it’s a perfectly fine time at the movies. Good examples of that recently are the Jurassic World movies.
And then occasionally you get a movie that at least partly transcends the sfx blockbuster experience into being a genuinely good, well crafted, well written, well acted movie which happens to have a big SFX budget. Some of the better Marvel movies make it into this category (imho), along with the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Mad Max: Fury Road, etc.
I’d put Godzilla vs. Kong squarely into the middle category.
A Brief History of King Kong vs. Godzilla
Giant monsters are sort of a natural for animation, especially stop-motion animation and, more recently, CGI. These methods can bring the impossibility of a giant monster to life. But once you do that, what do you do with them? Basically, there are three things that have classically been done
a.) You can have them chase people (or destroy a city0
b.) you can show a mother and baby monsters (this satisfies our need to go “Awww! Isn’t that Cute!”, even if it’s the baby/mommy form of a monster. This idea goes at least as far back as the 1925 The Lost World)
c.) You can have the monster fight another monster.
There are theoretically other actions you could show – monsters having sex, monsters very bloodily masticating something, especially people – but those have been sorta frowned on, so they don’t get shown (although we’ve come close to the eating stuff plenty of times). So we’re limited to the three above. And having monsters fight is both satisfying and relatively easy. The old stop-motion movies are fll of it – The Lost World(1925) and King Kong (1933) are basically one fight after another. I recall watching Son of Kong in a college Student Union building when someone unfamiliar with the film caught sight of one of the fights (this film is full of fights, too) between the titular Son of Kong and a goofy-looking lizardlike thing, and asked if it was King Kong vs. Godzilla. By the end of the 1930s we’d already had King Kong fighting a T. rex and various other dinosaurs, and his son fighting a lizardy thing. The trope had already been created.
In the late 1950s Kong animator Willis O’Brien was looking for another film to make. He was bursting with creative ideas to be filmed, but unable to find studio backing for most of them (unlike his protege, ray Harryhausen, who came out with film after film in the 1950s). As a result, he took on lots of jobs doing effects for films he wasn’t really all that interested in (The Giant Behemoth) or going to small studios (The Black Scorpion )
One of the ideas that he thought might get some support was King Kong vs. Prometheus, in which Kong fights a Frankenstein-like creation in a city. Forrest J. Ackerman’s Famous Monsters magazine published the conceptual sketches after O’Brien’s death. It looked like an interesting idea. I don’t recall exactly how Kong was brought back (presumably another giant ape found on another island) or who created the giant artificial human (“Prometheus”), but those are details. The real point was to have two monsters duke it out.
This time there WAS interest, but not in a time- and money-intensive stop-motion film. The producer O’Brien gave the concept to went to Toho with it, without telling O’Brien. Toho had long wanted to do a Kong film, and here was their way to do it. They bought the rights, and in 1962 King Kong vs. Godzilla came out. It was the first Godzilla movie I saw in a theater, and the first one in color. Kong went on to be featured in other Toho films.
They had to change things, of course, Kong was not all that huge. Despite studio publicity shots that show him towering over the New York Skyline, the truth is that Kong was overshadowed by the skyscrapers, even after they surreptitiously increased Kong’s size for the New York scenes. Godzilla, on the other hand, really did tower over Tokyo in his first film. It helped that postwar Tokyo was mostly relatively low buildings. But the original Godzilla was a LOT taller than the original Kong.
But it didn’t stop there. Three years later Toho collaborated with Harry G. Saperstein to make another film based on O’Brien’s idea. This time they kept the Frankenstein part, but got rid of King Kong, replacing him with another kaiju, the bargain-basement Godzilla substitute Baragon (not to be confused with Barugon, a foe of Gamera, the Godzilla-creature from Daiei). the result was Frankenstein Conquers the World, with no stop motion at all and a very Japanese-looking giant Frankenstein. I saw this one in the theater, too. FCtW itself spawned a sequel, released in the US as War of the Gargantuas, featuring two “Frankensteins”. Also a slumming Russ Tamblyn (“Rif” from the movie West Side Story)
Nothing much happened, despite frequent suggestions that the series be revived, until now. In the new Godzilla Vs. Kong both Kong and Godzilla are MUCH bigger than they were in the 1962 film, and much much bigger than in their original releases. The square-cube law doesn’t hold, but that’s the least of the scientific objections in this mindless romp. Which, however, looks excellent. A gigantic gorilla punching a gigantic kaiju has never looked so real and convincing.