by kiryugoji04 » Wed Mar 22, 2017 2:44 pm
Been wanting this for a couple of years ever since getting to flip through a friend's copy and finally managed to get one reasonably cheap when my girlfriend and I were at his house last week and discovered he accidentally purchased two copies somehow! It's not perfect but it's an erudite, well-articulated take on the material. Even when I don't 100% agree with some of Kalat's criticism, I love reading books that take a more scholarly (and net-positive!) approach to the genre. I really enjoy the deep dives into the minutia of the films' productions, even if sometimes I wish those dives were deeper still. The old criticisms of the book being completely devoid of photos make sense if you really wanted this to be a single, end-all Godzilla book, I guess(?), and while that was one of the main aspects that made me avoid many of these excellent books as a child/teenager, as an adult(?), I now see that as unrealistic to me given the expense of licensing stills from Toho. It's also, to me, unnecessary. As a deep-dive, scholarly addition to a much more comprehensive library, it's fantastic.
Artisanal Practical Effects & Kaiju Content