Wait! Let me make my case.
I am referring of course to the 2014 Godzilla, which I finally got around to watching.
Barring the fact that approximately 1 hour 35 minutes of the two hour run time was taken up by humans, instead of the monsters I sat down to see, approximately 35 minutes of that time was taken up by children:
The wife and young son of the protagonist
some random Asian kid who takes up seven minutes of screentime
a bus full of kids
I guess incorporating the little rugrats is supposed to add more fear, or depth, to the movie. But all it does is waste time when you never feel the movie is going to go the distance! I never felt the kids were actually in danger, and indeed, they never were - I don’t even think they got a scratch. If MOTU had picked up the schoolbus and scarfed its contents down like popcorn, I might have had more respect for the movie! It’s a monster movie, monsters do that shit.
I especially don’t care about the protagonist’s wife and son. They didn’t even need to be in danger, the movie literally brought the danger to them, cause…why? There was no reason for the MOTUs to go to San Francisco.
Also, Godzilla cannot sneak up on anyone. That was ridiculous.
I have no idea how this movie got a 74% on rotten. Are we so desperate for large monsters that we’ll take anything?
Unfortunately, you look audience sympathy when you eat kids. a pity, really. I think the world would’ve been a better place if Godzilla or Gamera had eaten some of those kids they “befriended”.
Children – part of this complete breakfast.
Are the Pea-nuts still alive? The sequel could have Godzilla eat them. You wouldn’t lose the audience by harming actual kids but you would be “darker” by harming innocents. You also get mythos cred.
Movies don’t often kill off cute kids. The remake of The Blob did though, at least one kid you had seen. You saw him trying to get out of the Blob, all slimed over, with his skin peeling off, before being pulled back in.
Not a monster movie, but a suprising kid death from a 50’s movie, was Westward the Women. A wagon train of women is traveling to a town in California where they will be brides for the male settlers. One is a widow with a boy who looks about ten. He’s killed in a shooting accident, and the mother goes mad temporarily. They killed off a lot of the brides too, like the organizer os the wagon train said would likely happen. The women that got there had happy endings, but it was harrowing along the way, not prettied up at all for the screen,
Hollywood has an unwritten rule that children never die, unless they have a terminal illness or a potentially life-threatening allergy – in which case they’re guaranteed toast, so there’s no real suspense there either.
So you need to look outside Hollywood to fulfill your dead-children needs. Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone is an excellent place to start.
The same rule applies to dogs, by the way. That’s what made Snakes on a Plane such a great movie because THEY ACTUALLY KILLED A DOG!!! HOORAY!!!
It may be considered an unwritten rule, but it’s not invariably true. The little girl possessed by the Martians in William Cameron Menzies’ 1953 film Invaders from Mars. It happens off-camera, though, and isn’t referred to much, so it’s easy to miss.
They weren’t as shy about killing children in movies back in the '50s. A little girl gets killed in Robot Monster. And, in a much better British film, X the Unknown, a little boy dies after being exposed to a radioactive sludge monster.
This was explained in the movie. The MUTOS (not MOTUs) feed on radiation. The male and female MUTO are heading towards one another from Hawaii and Nevada respectively. Thus, the military puts a bunch of nukes on a train and drives it towards 'Frisco so the female will follow it and the male will meet it there, where they can hopefully destroy them both at once (with Godzilla’s help).
I find it very difficult to watch a movie when the kid dies, and all but impossible when the death is shown graphically. Which is my own issue, I know, but I’m not the only person in the world who feels that way.
Skald, would it be a problem for you if the death is off-screen, and the children in question are ones we haven’t met in detail?
I agree, though, that graphic death of children is just totally unnecessary. For that matter, graphic deaths of adults probably isn’t really needed, either.
I recall one version of Frankenstein where the Monster throws a little girl in a lake. We don’t see her die, but we see her father later carrying her presumably dead body.
I think one reason is the dearth of r rated mainstream film. Also that working with kids is expensive and cumbersome. Probably more so with horror movies.
The kid dying in the remake of the Blob (mentioned earlier) is one that really surprised me. It was pretty graphic and the kid was portrayed pretty sympathetically, if I recall correctly. I wonder if they’d had the guts to kill the character in that way if it had been a girl.
In Tom Hank’s movie Turner and Hooch, the dog Hooch dies, which surprised me. But Hooch had got it on with the vet’s collie before he was killed, so he left pups.
I don’t want to see graphic deaths of children either. I don’t even really need to see graphic deaths of adults. I’m asking for one of two things:
don’t waste my time with the kids if you’re not going to put them in real danger. It just takes my attention away from the real plot and basically wastes my time
if you are going to put the kids in danger, folw through! I don’t need graphic brutal deaths, but even if the school bus was just swept off the bridge I’d feel as though you werent wasting my time.
But mostly I prefer the former. Why do we even need to focus on them? Sure show them in danger, like all of the other people, but don’t waste time on them.
Dogs are another issue! In Godzilla there was a dog tied to a tree when the tsunami came. Somehow the dog got himself loose and we were treated to a shot of the dog running down the street, outrunning the tsunami!
Really! I am here to watch three monsters beat the shit out of each other. If we have to see humans, I just want to see them screaming and running away from the screen.
I think it was the second Jurassic Park movie, when the T-Rex got to the mainland. A dog leashed up outside his doghouse barked at the monster. After the kid in the house lets his parents know there’s a dino outside they look, and see the doghouse dangling by a chain from the jaws of the T-Rex. Poor doggie.