Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
I'm going to attempt to be as unbiased as I can and rate the various MonsterVerse movies while pretending to be an ordinary moviegoer instead of a huge Godzilla nerd:
1. Kong: Skull Island - It incorporated the human characters the best, and ideally these movies should have human characters that aren't just vehicles to get to kaiju fight scenes.
2. Godzilla vs Kong - It introduced a lot of fun ideas, especially the Hollow Earth. The final battle was fantastic, and the human characters didn't get in the way of the action, though they also mostly weren't particularly interesting save for Jia and her relationship with Kong (although I also get the suspicion that a good bit of planned material for the human characters was cut away in reaction to KotM's unfortunately disappointing performance and hope that the novelization reveals more insight to Madison and Ren in particular).
3. Godzilla: King of the Monsters - A lot of moviegoers aren't going to know who the hell all my favorite Toho classics are, so they probably aren't going to get the same rush seeing a gloriously realized King Ghidorah or Burning Godzilla as I did. Emma's actions likely make the last minute attempt to redeem her fall short (which is why I wish there had been a twist that Ghidorah had psychically manipulated her into releasing him). People don't know Ghidorah is supposed to be some apocalyptic threat, so the attempts to add a menacing atmosphere with darkness, snow, smoke, etc are dismissed as obscuring the action. Also, radiation heals nature??? Wha???
4. Godzilla 2014 - Bryan Cranston was fun until he got offed at the end of the first act, and Godzilla's "kiss of death" to finish off the female MUTO was cool. Godzilla was impressive when he finally got to appear on screen without the movie cutting away to a different scene. It was a good attempt to make a serious movie out of franchise often derided in the West as being inherently bad.
It was hard for me to rank my personal favorite, KotM, in third place, but I attempted to be as objective as I could. I still think it suffered from multiple things outside of its control (competition from other high profile movies, an inability to bring back Bryan Cranston since he'd already been killed off, critics being disappointed that it was such a large departure from the first movie, audiences perhaps being turned away by both bad critical reviews and remembering how boring the second act of Godzilla 2014 was, overestimating how much of a draw Ghidorah, Rodan, and Mothra would be to Western audiences, etc). I'm at least happy it exists and I got to enjoy it (and, judging from an audience score on Rotten Tomatoes a good bit higher than Godzilla 2014's, those who did see it largely liked it).
If we do get another movie, I really want them to try and make people invested in the human characters. They've set-up a mystery of some kind of prehistoric civilization that worshipped the Titans, and surely given the beneficial nature of the Titans there would be groups of modern humans who view the Titans as worthy of reverence, so a cult of some kind investigating the ancient ruins could fill the role of an antagonistic force. They've also established that monsters closer to human-scale exist that could serve as threats.
Hexmage-PA on
+1
Options
PiptheFairFrequently not in boats.Registered Userregular
watched Made You Look, a documentary on Netflix about art forgery, the coolest and best crime
it ruled, just ninety minutes of laughing at rich people getting conned
oh, like the Fyrefest docs
yeah it was very similar
there were a few people here and there where you could be like "yo they got fucked over and they didn't deserve it" and the people making it seemed to largely be aware of that but yeah, it was otherwise just a big parade of credulous assholes who got scammed for no other reason than because they wanted to get rich or own a painting they could brag about
So I decided to continue watching Miyazaki movies.
I actually skipped over Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind when I watched Castle In The Sky, so I decided to watch it tonight.
Hey folks? I'm thirty minutes into Nausicaä of the Valley of the Windand and ya know what?
It fucking rules
I get that Akira feeling from watching Nausicaa in that it's a very interesting movie animated very well... that's not even a cliff notes summary of the full plot. In that vein, I feel like Akira ends up being the much better experience.
0
Options
Zonugal(He/Him) The Holiday ArmadilloI'm Santa's representative for all the southern states. And Mexico!Registered Userregular
edited April 2021
Released in 1984, Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind has it all. An animated movie with sci-fi and fantasy trappings. A strong heroine who has compassion for bugs. A vibrant, dystopic, post-apocalyptic world. Patrick Stewart as the world's greatest grandpa-sword-master. Masks worn correctly. Bug magic. An antiwar and pro-environmental message. Uma Thurman with a golden cyborg arm. A misread prophecy. Prince Humperdinck. Bugs.
Godzilla vs. Kong was pretty fine! Certainly more entertaining than KotM. I still like the tone of 2014 a whole lot and Skull Island is just generally a better film in every way. My favorite part was that there were not a hundred poorly timed and written quips and also Brian Tyree Henry is great. Honestly that's about all I've got to say about it. It was big and dumb and decently fun.
I just watched a bunch of people on Twitter adamantly insist that a movie with a big monster in it can't have themes or really mean anything and that Kong Skull Island in particular couldn't be about Vietnam so I don't really think we deserve to continue the monsterverse. Indeed we are the monsterverse.
Godzilla represents Japan's nuclear fears, how is this difficult to comprehend? The giant monster genre is heavily steeped in fears of nuclear power, weapons and waste.
Godzilla represents Japan's nuclear fears, how is this difficult to comprehend? The giant monster genre is heavily steeped in fears of nuclear power, weapons and waste.
The general feeling with these people was that genre fiction inherently cannot be meaningful. Who cares if it has themes it's just a stupid fucking monster movie watch the big dudes hit each other and then go read a book you nerd.
I did not enjoy Skull Island and I don't think it's Vietnam theme is good. It's just kinda, there.
I wouldn't say it has no theme, it certainly tries, but I think it loses nothing if it dropped it.
The sad irony I think is that while theme and meaning are important they only really matter if the movie is otherwise compelling. I think Thor 2 actually does it's theme close to best out of all the MCU movies but that get burrows by the fact the movie just isn't interesting.
+1
Options
Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
Themes are for 8th grade book reports, nightmarenny
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but dies in the process.
Godzilla represents Japan's nuclear fears, how is this difficult to comprehend? The giant monster genre is heavily steeped in fears of nuclear power, weapons and waste.
Well, the thing is that Godzilla only represents nuclear fears in the minority of his movies.
In the 1953 original film, which is most explicit about likening Godzilla to a living nuclear weapon, he also partially represents the destruction that the American military inflicted upon Japan in aggregate, including other non-nuclear attacks such as fire bombings (as argued by Japanologist William Tsutsui in his book "Godzilla on My Mind"). This is further reinforced by references to World War II throughout the movie, such as Dr. Serizawa missing an eye due to an injury sustained while in the military, searchlights searching the skies (one old American review mocked this, saying "do they expect Godzilla can fly?", missing the World War II symbolism the searchlights represent), a scene in which some characters complain about the idea of having to return to old bomb shelters, and a scene in which a mother tells her two children "we'll be with your father soon" as Godzilla advances upon them.
In stark contrast to this, the Godzilla in GMK (Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack) is explicitly a supernatural embodiment of the spirits of Japan's WW2-era victims seeking revenge against the country. One character makes this explicit:
“Because the Japanese people want to forget what happened... They have deemed it preferable to forget the pain and agony they inflicted on all those people!”
Even those monsters who fight Godzilla in GMK are explicitly protectors of the land, not the Japanese people. Mothra rather uncharacteristically makes her debut in the movie by catching a group of juvenile delinquents who planned to drown a dog in a lake, wrapping them in webbing, and drowning them herself (though it must be noted that director Shusuke Kaneko originally intended to use two other classic monsters for the film only for Toho to insist he replace them with the much more popular King Ghidorah and Mothra; this resulted in King Ghidorah's only non-villanous role, reimagined as an immature form of the eight-headed Orochi from Japanese mythology).
Aside from Shin Godzilla, which once again points out and makes Godzilla's radioactive nature an obstacle for the characters, most Godzilla movies don't acknowledge this aspect of the character. It was most thoroughly ignored in the late 60's and early 70's movies, where Godzilla had morphed (due to the Japanese film industry in general suffering financially from the rise of TV's popularity) into a heroic figure meant to star in movies primarily aimed at children.
It was during this time period that Yoshimitsu Banno created his own entry to the Godzilla franchise: Godzilla vs Hedorah. Perhaps the strangest entry in the franchise, here Godzilla was emphatically not an embodiment of nuclear destruction, but an guardian of nature fighting against threats to the environment embodied in the pollution monster Hedorah.
There was a message in the original GODZILLA. I didn’t want to have him battle something like a giant lobster, but rather the most notorious thing in current society. At that time the rapid elevation of the nation’s economic strength created a huge pollution problem. So I asked Tanaka, "What about a pollution monster?" He agreed.
This new monster effectively took over Godzilla's former role as a spreader of environmental devastation with some of the most gruesome imagery in the entire franchise: people fall over dead as Hedorah flies above them, and at one point a person presumably jumps from a building to commit suicide rather than die to the monster only for his body to hit the ground already thoroughly dissolved by acid emitted by Hedorah.
Looking back it seems kind of cruel and heavy-handed. I was trying to show the serious threat of pollution with scenes of Godzilla’s eyes being burned and people dying. I guess I became uncomfortable with it— that’s why we added the comical scenes… We made Godzilla fly in that movie. That was outrageous; we probably shouldn’t have done that.
Banno felt very strongly about the threat caused by pollution, and following the completion of Godzilla vs Hedorah was planning a sequel in which Godzilla fought another pollution monster, this time one that appeared in Africa to ravage the ecosystem. Executive producer Tomoyuki Tanaka was hospitalized during the production of Godzilla vs Hedorah, but upon seeing the final movie was outraged with Banno and told him he'd never work on the Godzilla franchise again. Instead, Banno's next movie would be Starving Sahara, a documentary about a severe drought in Africa.
Many years later in the late 2000's Yoshimitsu Banno approached various American companies to try and create a spiritual successor to Godzilla vs Hedorah, which he envisioned as an IMAX 3D short film. Though Godzilla had long since been brought back to a primarily antagonistic (or at least antiheroic) role by Toho, Banno wanted a movie where a heroic Godzilla stood as the guardian of nature against a new monster called Deathla. He planned to film all over the world, showcasing the Earth's natural beauty (rainforests, coral reefs, etc), and then depict swarms of smaller monsters spawned by Deathla ruining all those wonderful places and reducing them to polluted wastelands.
Though nothing came of this particular vision, Banno's efforts did attract the attention of Legendary Pictures and sparked their interest in creating their own Godzilla movies, earning him the role of Executive Producer for Godzilla 2014 (he's still credited as an Executive Producer on Godzilla: King of the Monsters, as well as Godzilla vs Kong, despite his death in 2017).
The reason I'm focusing on Banno in this post is because the MonsterVerse has decided to go along with Banno's vision. Whereas Banno only ever intended for Godzilla to be a protector of the natural world, the end credits of KotM reveal that the other Titans released during the movie are beneficial to the natural world by their mere presence. For example, the Titan Behemoth is noted as restoring portions of the Amazon rainforest by causing rapid regrowth. Emma Russel and the human villains of KotM believed that the monsters would prevent ecological catastrophe by reducing the Earth's human population, but instead they do so by largely keeping to themselves and using some sort of supernatural ability to revitalize nature.
Now, admittedly, this approach comes with its own set of problems. First, Godzilla 2014 established that Godzilla and the MUTOs are sustained by nuclear energy. Godzilla: King of the Monsters inherits this and further reinforces it by establishing that Godzilla's lair is so dangerously radioactive that entering it is certain death. However, the movie also establishes that somehow the radiation emitted by Godzilla and the other Titans is capable of greatly increasing plant growth, which is not at all what radiation does in real life.
In Godzilla vs Kong
Godzilla and the other Titans' radioactive nature seems to be effectively retconned into being due to some kind of unknown energy source that can be beneficial to life but is also capable of being weaponized (most prominently by Godzilla's own beam). Whereas Godzilla's lair in KotM is deadly to Dr. Serizawa, the human characters of Godzilla vs Kong are fine in the ancient Kong stronghold despite it being a place where this strange energy is present. I also don't recall any references to radioactivity in this movie, unlike the previous two.
My personal guess is that Gareth Edwards wasn't quite as onboard with the idea of making Godzilla a champion of nature as Michael Dougherty and Adam Wingard later were. He was more directly inspired by the original Godzilla movie, which clearly depicts Godzilla as dangerously radioactive, and also wanted to make a grounded film. Dougherty inherited this for his movie, but also wanted to further emphasize Godzilla and the other monsters as protectors of the natural world with supernatural abilities. Mothra herself is very clearly supernatural in nature, and I imagine that the term M.U.T.O. (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism) was originally intended as the catch-all term for giant monsters in the MonsterVerse until Godzilla: King of the Monsters changed it to the less scientific and more mythological term Titan. This resulted in an admittedly awkward attempt to acknowledge what was established in Godzilla 2014 while also shifting Godzilla from merely a nuclear-powered protector of the balance to the Titans as a whole being effectively supernatural nature gods. Godzilla vs Kong decides to instead just omit any references to Godzilla being radioactive or powered by radiation by introducing some unknown, presumably non-harmful energy that might as well be ki, or mana. Had this been the approach from the very beginning it would have worked better, but as it actually played out the MonsterVerse has effectively repeated the original Godzilla series' transition from the character being powered by radiation to a largely unspecified energy source.
With that said, let me address the "nature god" Titans. While Banno wanted to convey an ecological message by having Godzilla represent nature fighting against an embodiment of environmental degradation, the end credits of King of the Monsters pretty much just establish at the last minute that the Titans have solved most of the world's ecological concerns without humans even having to do anything or take responsibility. This could be followed up with the Titans, having fixed the existing ecological problems, going on to attack and prevent further human operations that caused these problems in the first place. We don't explicitly get this in Godzilla vs Kong, however,
the human villain of the movie, Walter Simmons, is greatly perturbed that the human race is no longer the undisputed dominant species. His goal is to use MechaGodzilla to kill Godzilla, the monster in charge of the other Titans, implying that MechaGodzilla was likely intended to be deployed to destroy the other Titans after Godzilla was slain. We are told during the film that the Titans have been keeping a low-profile for years, so why this urgency to kill Godzilla and the Titans? Are they actually causing more problems for human industry than what is depicted, the truth of this being covered up to maintain the illusion that the human race isn't subject to Godzilla and his subordinates? Even if this wasn't intended for Godzilla vs Kong, it could still be fertile ground for a follow-up movie if people around the world find out this is the case.
Years ago, Quentin Tarantino of all people said this during an interview:
I have an idea for a Godzilla movie that I've always wanted to do. The whole idea of Godzilla's role in Tokyo, where he's always battling these other monsters, saving humanity time and again - wouldn't Godzilla become God? It would be called 'Living Under the Rule of Godzilla.'
The MonsterVerse has already set the stage for a hypothetical follow-up where something like this could happen. In this continuity the Titans are effectively nature gods that surely some people would consider worthy of worship, with Godzilla himself being their master and the slayer of King Ghidorah, the monster who attempted to destroy the world by directing the other Titans to do so. If Millie Bobby Brown stays in these movies I could easily imagine a scenario where she learns about a cult that worships the Titans and regards her dead mother as the one responsible for saving the world by releasing the Titans to subjugate humanity. This wasn't covered in Godzilla vs Kong, but I have to imagine that her character surely can't be widely known as the daughter of the lady who unleashed giant monsters on the world, right?
Anyway, I spent way more time on this post than I expected, but I hope at least someone finds it interesting.
A Soviet television adaptation of The Lord of the Rings thought to have been lost to time was rediscovered and posted on YouTube last week, delighting Russian-language fans of JRR Tolkien.
The 1991 made-for-TV film, Khraniteli, based on Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, is the only adaptation of his Lord of the Rings trilogy believed to have been made in the Soviet Union.
Aired 10 years before the release of the first instalment of Peter Jackson’s movie trilogy, the low-budget film appears ripped from another age: the costumes and sets are rudimentary, the special effects are ludicrous, and many of the scenes look more like a theatre production than a feature-length film.
The score, composed by Andrei Romanov of the rock band Akvarium, also lends a distinctly Soviet ambience to the production, which was reportedly aired just once on television before disappearing into the archives of Leningrad Television.
It appears to be an official upload by Russian television channel 5TV so it's legal to watch. And yes, it's everything you would immediately imagine it would be.
Donnicton on
+22
Options
MaddocI'm Bobbin Threadbare, are you my mother?Registered Userregular
Is that Tom Bombadil and Goldberry I see?
So it's better than the Jackson version
+6
Options
StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
Edit: this was in response to the big godzilla post
SirToasty on
+4
Options
DepressperadoI just wanted to see you laughingin the pizza rainRegistered Userregular
I remember how excited I was to see Tom Bombadil the first time I saw Peter Jackson's Fellowship, I love that... guy? entity? inscrutable force from before time?
he really let me down.
also okay so I've never been clear on this. Is Middle-Earth a Hyborian Age style pre-history Earth, or a different place entirely?
Like, when the Elves and everybody leaves and it's time for the Fourth Age, aka The Age of Man, is that the transition between Middle-Earth to regular Earth?
I remember how excited I was to see Tom Bombadil the first time I saw Peter Jackson's Fellowship, I love that... guy? entity? inscrutable force from before time?
he really let me down.
also okay so I've never been clear on this. Is Middle-Earth a Hyborian Age style pre-history Earth, or a different place entirely?
Like, when the Elves and everybody leaves and it's time for the Fourth Age, aka The Age of Man, is that the transition between Middle-Earth to regular Earth?
Hyborian Age sort of thing, it's Europe smushed together and rearranged. Middle-Earth is a translation of Midgard, even.
+10
Options
Olivawgood name, isn't it?the foot of mt fujiRegistered Userregular
So I decided to continue watching Miyazaki movies.
I actually skipped over Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind when I watched Castle In The Sky, so I decided to watch it tonight.
Hey folks? I'm thirty minutes into Nausicaä of the Valley of the Windand and ya know what?
It fucking rules
I get that Akira feeling from watching Nausicaa in that it's a very interesting movie animated very well... that's not even a cliff notes summary of the full plot. In that vein, I feel like Akira ends up being the much better experience.
See I completely and totally disagree! Mostly because Nausicaa is completely coherent and full as a narrative, and Akira is... uh, Akira. I think the big difference is that Miyazaki always intended for Nausicaa to be a movie, but the only way he could get funding for it was if it were based on a manga, so he did a manga so he could make the movie he’d already written the screenplay for
Bonus fact: Nausicaa came out four years before Akira! Which I did not know until like last week. With the incredibly Akira-esque monster at the end, I always thought it was the other way around somehow
I remember how excited I was to see Tom Bombadil the first time I saw Peter Jackson's Fellowship, I love that... guy? entity? inscrutable force from before time?
he really let me down.
also okay so I've never been clear on this. Is Middle-Earth a Hyborian Age style pre-history Earth, or a different place entirely?
Like, when the Elves and everybody leaves and it's time for the Fourth Age, aka The Age of Man, is that the transition between Middle-Earth to regular Earth?
The beginning to The Hobbit claims that Hobbits actually still exist to the present day when the book was written, it's just that humans are too preoccupied to notice. So the former idea.
The earliest versions of what would become the Silmarillion also feature a sailor ending up in Tol Eressëa where he's told the history of the elves and all that jazz.
He called his collection of nascent stories The Book of Lost Tales.[T 3] This became the name for the first two volumes of The History of Middle-earth, which include these early texts. The stories employ the narrative device of a mariner named Eriol (in later versions, an Anglo-Saxon named Ælfwine) who finds the island of Tol Eressëa, where the Elves live; and the Elves tell him their history.[T 11] However, Tolkien never completed The Book of Lost Tales; he left it to compose the poems "The Lay of Leithian" and "The Lay of the Children of Húrin".[T 3]
Posts
oh, like the Fyrefest docs
Sure.
I mean for a millennial like Lebron it might.
Come Overwatch with meeeee
Tumblr | Twitter PSN: misterdapper Av by Satellite_09
1. Kong: Skull Island - It incorporated the human characters the best, and ideally these movies should have human characters that aren't just vehicles to get to kaiju fight scenes.
2. Godzilla vs Kong - It introduced a lot of fun ideas, especially the Hollow Earth. The final battle was fantastic, and the human characters didn't get in the way of the action, though they also mostly weren't particularly interesting save for Jia and her relationship with Kong (although I also get the suspicion that a good bit of planned material for the human characters was cut away in reaction to KotM's unfortunately disappointing performance and hope that the novelization reveals more insight to Madison and Ren in particular).
3. Godzilla: King of the Monsters - A lot of moviegoers aren't going to know who the hell all my favorite Toho classics are, so they probably aren't going to get the same rush seeing a gloriously realized King Ghidorah or Burning Godzilla as I did. Emma's actions likely make the last minute attempt to redeem her fall short (which is why I wish there had been a twist that Ghidorah had psychically manipulated her into releasing him). People don't know Ghidorah is supposed to be some apocalyptic threat, so the attempts to add a menacing atmosphere with darkness, snow, smoke, etc are dismissed as obscuring the action. Also, radiation heals nature??? Wha???
4. Godzilla 2014 - Bryan Cranston was fun until he got offed at the end of the first act, and Godzilla's "kiss of death" to finish off the female MUTO was cool. Godzilla was impressive when he finally got to appear on screen without the movie cutting away to a different scene. It was a good attempt to make a serious movie out of franchise often derided in the West as being inherently bad.
It was hard for me to rank my personal favorite, KotM, in third place, but I attempted to be as objective as I could. I still think it suffered from multiple things outside of its control (competition from other high profile movies, an inability to bring back Bryan Cranston since he'd already been killed off, critics being disappointed that it was such a large departure from the first movie, audiences perhaps being turned away by both bad critical reviews and remembering how boring the second act of Godzilla 2014 was, overestimating how much of a draw Ghidorah, Rodan, and Mothra would be to Western audiences, etc). I'm at least happy it exists and I got to enjoy it (and, judging from an audience score on Rotten Tomatoes a good bit higher than Godzilla 2014's, those who did see it largely liked it).
If we do get another movie, I really want them to try and make people invested in the human characters. They've set-up a mystery of some kind of prehistoric civilization that worshipped the Titans, and surely given the beneficial nature of the Titans there would be groups of modern humans who view the Titans as worthy of reverence, so a cult of some kind investigating the ancient ruins could fill the role of an antagonistic force. They've also established that monsters closer to human-scale exist that could serve as threats.
the monkey is very large
Why what do they have there?
Apes. But they aren’t so big.
I actually skipped over Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind when I watched Castle In The Sky, so I decided to watch it tonight.
Hey folks? I'm thirty minutes into Nausicaä of the Valley of the Windand and ya know what?
It fucking rules
yeah it was very similar
there were a few people here and there where you could be like "yo they got fucked over and they didn't deserve it" and the people making it seemed to largely be aware of that but yeah, it was otherwise just a big parade of credulous assholes who got scammed for no other reason than because they wanted to get rich or own a painting they could brag about
I get that Akira feeling from watching Nausicaa in that it's a very interesting movie animated very well... that's not even a cliff notes summary of the full plot. In that vein, I feel like Akira ends up being the much better experience.
Released in 1984, Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind has it all. An animated movie with sci-fi and fantasy trappings. A strong heroine who has compassion for bugs. A vibrant, dystopic, post-apocalyptic world. Patrick Stewart as the world's greatest grandpa-sword-master. Masks worn correctly. Bug magic. An antiwar and pro-environmental message. Uma Thurman with a golden cyborg arm. A misread prophecy. Prince Humperdinck. Bugs.
Tumblr | Twitter PSN: misterdapper Av by Satellite_09
I just watched a bunch of people on Twitter adamantly insist that a movie with a big monster in it can't have themes or really mean anything and that Kong Skull Island in particular couldn't be about Vietnam so I don't really think we deserve to continue the monsterverse. Indeed we are the monsterverse.
I wouldn't say it has no theme, it certainly tries, but I think it loses nothing if it dropped it.
The general feeling with these people was that genre fiction inherently cannot be meaningful. Who cares if it has themes it's just a stupid fucking monster movie watch the big dudes hit each other and then go read a book you nerd.
It was downright bizzare.
The sad irony I think is that while theme and meaning are important they only really matter if the movie is otherwise compelling. I think Thor 2 actually does it's theme close to best out of all the MCU movies but that get burrows by the fact the movie just isn't interesting.
Well, the thing is that Godzilla only represents nuclear fears in the minority of his movies.
In the 1953 original film, which is most explicit about likening Godzilla to a living nuclear weapon, he also partially represents the destruction that the American military inflicted upon Japan in aggregate, including other non-nuclear attacks such as fire bombings (as argued by Japanologist William Tsutsui in his book "Godzilla on My Mind"). This is further reinforced by references to World War II throughout the movie, such as Dr. Serizawa missing an eye due to an injury sustained while in the military, searchlights searching the skies (one old American review mocked this, saying "do they expect Godzilla can fly?", missing the World War II symbolism the searchlights represent), a scene in which some characters complain about the idea of having to return to old bomb shelters, and a scene in which a mother tells her two children "we'll be with your father soon" as Godzilla advances upon them.
In stark contrast to this, the Godzilla in GMK (Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack) is explicitly a supernatural embodiment of the spirits of Japan's WW2-era victims seeking revenge against the country. One character makes this explicit:
Even those monsters who fight Godzilla in GMK are explicitly protectors of the land, not the Japanese people. Mothra rather uncharacteristically makes her debut in the movie by catching a group of juvenile delinquents who planned to drown a dog in a lake, wrapping them in webbing, and drowning them herself (though it must be noted that director Shusuke Kaneko originally intended to use two other classic monsters for the film only for Toho to insist he replace them with the much more popular King Ghidorah and Mothra; this resulted in King Ghidorah's only non-villanous role, reimagined as an immature form of the eight-headed Orochi from Japanese mythology).
Aside from Shin Godzilla, which once again points out and makes Godzilla's radioactive nature an obstacle for the characters, most Godzilla movies don't acknowledge this aspect of the character. It was most thoroughly ignored in the late 60's and early 70's movies, where Godzilla had morphed (due to the Japanese film industry in general suffering financially from the rise of TV's popularity) into a heroic figure meant to star in movies primarily aimed at children.
It was during this time period that Yoshimitsu Banno created his own entry to the Godzilla franchise: Godzilla vs Hedorah. Perhaps the strangest entry in the franchise, here Godzilla was emphatically not an embodiment of nuclear destruction, but an guardian of nature fighting against threats to the environment embodied in the pollution monster Hedorah.
This new monster effectively took over Godzilla's former role as a spreader of environmental devastation with some of the most gruesome imagery in the entire franchise: people fall over dead as Hedorah flies above them, and at one point a person presumably jumps from a building to commit suicide rather than die to the monster only for his body to hit the ground already thoroughly dissolved by acid emitted by Hedorah.
Banno felt very strongly about the threat caused by pollution, and following the completion of Godzilla vs Hedorah was planning a sequel in which Godzilla fought another pollution monster, this time one that appeared in Africa to ravage the ecosystem. Executive producer Tomoyuki Tanaka was hospitalized during the production of Godzilla vs Hedorah, but upon seeing the final movie was outraged with Banno and told him he'd never work on the Godzilla franchise again. Instead, Banno's next movie would be Starving Sahara, a documentary about a severe drought in Africa.
Many years later in the late 2000's Yoshimitsu Banno approached various American companies to try and create a spiritual successor to Godzilla vs Hedorah, which he envisioned as an IMAX 3D short film. Though Godzilla had long since been brought back to a primarily antagonistic (or at least antiheroic) role by Toho, Banno wanted a movie where a heroic Godzilla stood as the guardian of nature against a new monster called Deathla. He planned to film all over the world, showcasing the Earth's natural beauty (rainforests, coral reefs, etc), and then depict swarms of smaller monsters spawned by Deathla ruining all those wonderful places and reducing them to polluted wastelands.
Though nothing came of this particular vision, Banno's efforts did attract the attention of Legendary Pictures and sparked their interest in creating their own Godzilla movies, earning him the role of Executive Producer for Godzilla 2014 (he's still credited as an Executive Producer on Godzilla: King of the Monsters, as well as Godzilla vs Kong, despite his death in 2017).
The reason I'm focusing on Banno in this post is because the MonsterVerse has decided to go along with Banno's vision. Whereas Banno only ever intended for Godzilla to be a protector of the natural world, the end credits of KotM reveal that the other Titans released during the movie are beneficial to the natural world by their mere presence. For example, the Titan Behemoth is noted as restoring portions of the Amazon rainforest by causing rapid regrowth. Emma Russel and the human villains of KotM believed that the monsters would prevent ecological catastrophe by reducing the Earth's human population, but instead they do so by largely keeping to themselves and using some sort of supernatural ability to revitalize nature.
Now, admittedly, this approach comes with its own set of problems. First, Godzilla 2014 established that Godzilla and the MUTOs are sustained by nuclear energy. Godzilla: King of the Monsters inherits this and further reinforces it by establishing that Godzilla's lair is so dangerously radioactive that entering it is certain death. However, the movie also establishes that somehow the radiation emitted by Godzilla and the other Titans is capable of greatly increasing plant growth, which is not at all what radiation does in real life.
In Godzilla vs Kong
My personal guess is that Gareth Edwards wasn't quite as onboard with the idea of making Godzilla a champion of nature as Michael Dougherty and Adam Wingard later were. He was more directly inspired by the original Godzilla movie, which clearly depicts Godzilla as dangerously radioactive, and also wanted to make a grounded film. Dougherty inherited this for his movie, but also wanted to further emphasize Godzilla and the other monsters as protectors of the natural world with supernatural abilities. Mothra herself is very clearly supernatural in nature, and I imagine that the term M.U.T.O. (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism) was originally intended as the catch-all term for giant monsters in the MonsterVerse until Godzilla: King of the Monsters changed it to the less scientific and more mythological term Titan. This resulted in an admittedly awkward attempt to acknowledge what was established in Godzilla 2014 while also shifting Godzilla from merely a nuclear-powered protector of the balance to the Titans as a whole being effectively supernatural nature gods. Godzilla vs Kong decides to instead just omit any references to Godzilla being radioactive or powered by radiation by introducing some unknown, presumably non-harmful energy that might as well be ki, or mana. Had this been the approach from the very beginning it would have worked better, but as it actually played out the MonsterVerse has effectively repeated the original Godzilla series' transition from the character being powered by radiation to a largely unspecified energy source.
With that said, let me address the "nature god" Titans. While Banno wanted to convey an ecological message by having Godzilla represent nature fighting against an embodiment of environmental degradation, the end credits of King of the Monsters pretty much just establish at the last minute that the Titans have solved most of the world's ecological concerns without humans even having to do anything or take responsibility. This could be followed up with the Titans, having fixed the existing ecological problems, going on to attack and prevent further human operations that caused these problems in the first place. We don't explicitly get this in Godzilla vs Kong, however,
Years ago, Quentin Tarantino of all people said this during an interview:
The MonsterVerse has already set the stage for a hypothetical follow-up where something like this could happen. In this continuity the Titans are effectively nature gods that surely some people would consider worthy of worship, with Godzilla himself being their master and the slayer of King Ghidorah, the monster who attempted to destroy the world by directing the other Titans to do so. If Millie Bobby Brown stays in these movies I could easily imagine a scenario where she learns about a cult that worships the Titans and regards her dead mother as the one responsible for saving the world by releasing the Titans to subjugate humanity. This wasn't covered in Godzilla vs Kong, but I have to imagine that her character surely can't be widely known as the daughter of the lady who unleashed giant monsters on the world, right?
Anyway, I spent way more time on this post than I expected, but I hope at least someone finds it interesting.
It appears to be an official upload by Russian television channel 5TV so it's legal to watch. And yes, it's everything you would immediately imagine it would be.
So it's better than the Jackson version
Edit: this was in response to the big godzilla post
he really let me down.
also okay so I've never been clear on this. Is Middle-Earth a Hyborian Age style pre-history Earth, or a different place entirely?
Like, when the Elves and everybody leaves and it's time for the Fourth Age, aka The Age of Man, is that the transition between Middle-Earth to regular Earth?
Hyborian Age sort of thing, it's Europe smushed together and rearranged. Middle-Earth is a translation of Midgard, even.
See I completely and totally disagree! Mostly because Nausicaa is completely coherent and full as a narrative, and Akira is... uh, Akira. I think the big difference is that Miyazaki always intended for Nausicaa to be a movie, but the only way he could get funding for it was if it were based on a manga, so he did a manga so he could make the movie he’d already written the screenplay for
Bonus fact: Nausicaa came out four years before Akira! Which I did not know until like last week. With the incredibly Akira-esque monster at the end, I always thought it was the other way around somehow
PSN ID : DetectiveOlivaw | TWITTER | STEAM ID | NEVER FORGET
The beginning to The Hobbit claims that Hobbits actually still exist to the present day when the book was written, it's just that humans are too preoccupied to notice. So the former idea.