Oh No, They Say He's Got To Go.

[theweaselking]

Let's just start by stating the obvious: This movie sucks. The bad actors get most of the screen time, the good actors have nothing to work with, and Ken Watanabe and Arthur Spiderwick in particular are left expositing nonsense directly into the camera on a regular basis. This is a movie that has absolutely zero clear notion of how radioactivity, biology, nuclear weapons, military policy, electricity, evacuations, EMP, internal combustion engines, airplanes, or THEIR OWN MONSTERS works. It aggressively, actively, constantly contradicts itself in ways Pacific Rim looked at and say "no way, man, we can't do that. That wouldn't make any SENSE."

I'll say that again: this movie makes way less sense than Pacific Rim. Not just a little less sense, but MUCH less sense.

(And, really, you could cut the main character and his entire family ENTIRELY, and all their subplots, and everything they do at every point, and the movie would be about half the length AND much better. If you just keep Bryan Cranston, even better than that!)

That being said: GIANT MONSTER. CRUSHING CITIES. MAN IN A RUBBER SUIT SMASHING A CARDBOARD TOKYO. As long as you accept that things are happening because the script says so, and Godzilla and everyone else involved HAS READ the script and knows that's why they do whatever they do next, and just pretend that all the exposition is in unsubtitled Japanese or Urdu or any other language you don't speak so you can pretend that whatever explanation they give, it must have made at least some sense? This is a spectacularly pretty movie. With GIANT MONSTER FIGHT SCENES. CRUSHING CITIES.

And if that's what you're in for and how you're going to watch it, you won't be disappointed.

"Godzilla: It sucks, but you might not care. And if you don't care that it sucks, it's fun to watch."

Comments

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

this movie makes way less sense than Pacific Rim

Wow. My own take on Pacific Rim is... well documented... and I'm now sort of curious to see this flick purely so I can marvel at its insanity.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, it's not nearly as much FUN as Pacific Rim. Pacific Rim is nonsense, but revels in the nonsense and at least mostly sticks to it's premises.

Godzilla..... well, let's explain by example. Due to an EMP weapon/field/thingy, no electronics of any sort are usable within a 5 mile radius of the monster. This also kills engines and things and FOR SOME REASON causes airplanes to fall straight down instead of gliding, but we'll ignore that. This explains the HALO jump from the trailer: They jump out of an airplane that's *6* miles up, and parachute in, to get to the center of the 5-mile-radius sphere ASAP. That's fine.

When they land, it's dark. So they turn on their flashlights and pull out their bleepy GPS thing to find the coordinates of their target.

[unnamed525.livejournal.com]

haha Brilliant!

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

The monster is attracted to radiation sources and nuclear power sources. It eats a power plant! Then it goes straight for another strong atomic energy source, a Russian ballistic missile submarine!

It does so, bypassing US Navy Admiral Arthur Spiderwick's carrier battle group entirely.

Spiderwick's flagship is the USS Saratoga, given hull number CVN-88. Now, if you're a naval warfare nerd, you'll know that's wrong, the most recent Saratoga is CV-60 - decommissioned in 1994, 20 years before the movie was set. But the Saratoga wasn't a nuclear-powered carrier, even though it carried a fuckton of nuclear weapons, so MAYBE that's slightly okay, assuming the lead Admiral of the main Pacific fleet tasked with defending the United States from monsters really does drive an obsolete long-since-decommissioned carrier that doesn't have any nukes aboard. MAYBE. Or maybe it only wants live reactors and not nuclear weapons? Oh wait we're going to contradict THAT one in a moment, too, b ut until we do, a non-nuclear carrier would get bypassed!

But by labelling it CVN-88, they've got one major problems and two minor one: The newest US carrier is the Ford, CVN-*78*. Nuclear-powered, launched 2013 and not yet in commission according to Wikipedia, and also with a hull number TEN LOWER. For comparison, CVN-*68*, the Nimitz, was commissioned in 1975, and new carriers have been slowing down, not speeding up. So not only will CVN-88 not be built until 2050ish, but by definition "CVN" means NUCLEAR.

The major problem:
it's definitely a nuclear carrier - the monster should have gone straight for it.

The two minor problems:
1) won't be built until 2050-ish
2) appears to have been numbered solely as an excuse to stick a giant white 88 in the background of a number of scenes. Seriously, guys, check your set designers for creepy, please.


This movie can't remember from minute to minute what the rules of its own monster are.

[skiriki.livejournal.com]

"Seriously, guys, check your set designers for creepy, please."

Wait, was this confirmed as a case of stealth-Nazi slipping in the creepy, or was it "nobody caught it before release and it was an unfortunate coincidence"?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

No idea! Most likely, it's just another unfortunate case of "didn't do the math" and "didn't think this through" and "didn't consider the logical outcome", the way everything else in the movie is.

[skiriki.livejournal.com]

Yeah, or someone went "hey I was born in 1988, I totes wanna slip that as ID number there". And somehow be blissfully unaware of its meaning. Seen weirder things happen, after all.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Very possible, but that (and the carrier name, and the hull number in the first place, and also "they're using flashlights and GPS in the middle of the no-electronics-at-all zone AGAIN, and this time it's even civilian GPS") is the kind of thing your continuity dudes are supposed to *catch*.

[skiriki.livejournal.com]

Indeed, like you said, "the way everything else in the movie is". :D

[serizawa3000.livejournal.com]

It's not Godzilla emitting the EMPS, it's the Mutos.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I'm aware. That's a spoiler, however, which is why I didn't say that. My point remains, even without that spoiler.

I've screened your comment for now. I'll unscreen it in a couple of days, so commenters here have a chance to see the movie with fewer spoilers.

[frith]

Movies that don't make sense in their own context is a deal breaker for me. So Godzilla -- not interested.

I saw Transcendence a few weeks ago. Johnny Depp, Morgan Freeman. It was playing in English in a local theatre, a rare occurrence. So many flaws. 9_9 Like dioxin as a deadly poison for people. Yeah right, maybe if dying from embarrassment from really bad acne (chloracne) is a thing. And the crappy storytelling. You'd think they'd explore the whole 'how can you tell between something aping consciousness and the real thing' deal? Transcendence -- avoid.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]