Godzilla vs. Kong

[Leo656]

Originally Posted by Powder

The complaints most of you have lead me to believe none of you like or probably bothered watching the majority of Toho's Godzilla movies. Some of the criticism is valid, sure, & I'm not saying you shouldn't expect "better", either, but just about everything was par the course for this property. This & KOTM both were like love letters to the Heisei/Showa era Godzilla films. Same patterns, pacing, acceleration of absurdity/humor, various plots, expendable characters, exposition dumps, etc. Yeah, the American development teams could have used this opportunity to "right some wrongs" if you wanna look at it that way, but I'm glad that they just put the western spin on tradition rather than taking things too seriously or making us over-invest in the human casts.

I haven't seen all or even most, but I know for a fact I've seen ones where the plot actually made sense and the human characters weren't all a complete waste of time.

If they made this movie based on "Only people who liked the Japanese kaiju movies are going to 'get it'," then that's probably a mistake. Maybe it explains some of why the script was so bad or the characters so loathsome. It does NOT excuse it.

It's like "Terminator: Genisys" trying super-hard to mimic scenes from T1 and T2 and be a "love letter" to those films. Okay, nice, thanks for the effort, but every other thing in that movie was absolutely terrible so the effort was wasted.

Again, I liked the other three movies in this series more than most people did, based on what I generally see and hear. Based on Those Movies, I had certain expectations for this one; specifically, that the non-kaiju parts of the movie might be "lesser", but not explicitly terrible. But they ARE terrible. The ONLY parts of the movie worth re-watching are the monster fights, and that's a failure. The other movies didn't "go there", and it's silly to imply that they didn't have to make a good movie Just Because, for This or That reason. They already made three good movies, in my opinion. If they suddenly up and decided, Just For Fun, "What if we tried making a piece of crap, instead?", well... I can't help it, that bothers me.

I'm kind of looking forward to the Blu-ray, because a LOT of people are pointing out that there almost certainly was at least a half hour of Plot & Character stuff that was left on the cutting room floor in order to get to the action scenes quicker, and that almost certainly has to be true. There was a much better movie to be built somewhere on the bones of This One.

I'm glad some people got some sincere and heartfelt enjoyment out of it. I really, REALLY wanted to; I was all-in after the previous three and this was one of the very few movies I was looking forward to watching this year, because most of what's coming out looks lousy. But I had high hopes for this. And I keep having to tell myself that I didn't hate it. And that's bad.

And it just seems kind of silly to insist that "It's great if you Just Don't Care about it being any good in an objective sense," or "It's great if you know a bunch of old Japanese monster movies backwards and forwards." Like I have no doubt whatsoever that that does help, and on some level that's good; except the previous three films didn't have that specific limitation/"demand" and they were all still enjoyable. Warts and all, I would still argue that KOTM is a "good movie" on its own terms. I can't in good faith argue that with this one.

My problem isn't that they "went Japanese" with it. My problem is that objectively, this movie has one of the worst scripts and worst acting I've seen in a movie in a very long time. And the fact that it may have been "bad on purpose" doesn't make it sit any better with me at all, after three previous films that were NOT "bad on purpose". That argument feels like a cop-out, quite frankly.

After three other good movies, I was sincerely hoping that this franchise would end with more of a Bang and less of a Whimper.

I cannot stress enough that I really, really, REALLY wanted to like this movie.