TALKBACK#18: Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah

[Jorzilla]

I would rather have more Godzilla and less Godzillasaurus. I guess Toho thought they were equivalents when making the film.

[Pkmatrix]

[jellydonut25]

The second act is really truly awful. The first act is slow and full of silliness, the second act is where the movie falls to pieces....

Emmy leaves behind the Dorats, then acts indignant when King Ghidorah appears.
There's no reason to take anybody back to the past.
The scenes in the past are pretty awful.
All the stuff with M11 is brutal.

I could get on board with this movie more if the first 15-20 minutes weren't so dull and the middle 30 weren't absolutely IDIOTIC.

[Jorzilla]

I think it's one of the movies that is loved because of Godzilla's execution, sound design and the fights (short as they are) alone. This movie doesn't have much of anything else going for it.

...that being said it's still one of the better Heisei movies.

[MekaGojira3k]

I think the Terasawa investigating Godzilla's origins is interesting, but I can care less about the Futurians.

[Rody]

Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah is definitely a film with great ideas and potential, but shoddy execution. The more I think about Emi, the more I feel that her character doesn't make sense at all. Why is she here? What was she expecting? She seems to be badly naive about the workings of the plan.

Dr. Kain also mentioned the book paradox. This is an aspect which I believe could have been easily fixed with re-writing. Instead of presenting the finished book to Terisawa, the Futurians return to 1992 because they don't have the information on Godzilla's origin; perhaps in the 23rd century, that has become confidential information which the Futurians can't get ahold of (Emi did say hardly anyone knew about Terisawa's book).

[Hybrid Gojira]

[ILL GREEN]

As a whole, I do like the movie. But I can't help the echo in the back of my mind yelling "RUSHED!".

I didn't like the suit of Godzilla, seemed too bulky and the shoulders. Why does King Ghidorah has showa Rodan's roar? There's three heads. Also how did Toho obtain Gamera's roar in the 1954 scene for the Godzilla dinosaur? A lot of issues for me.

I do like the movie though, I guess they tried to fit in all the ideas in a short amount of time.

[eabaker]

While the first act is slow, I don't find that slowness at all problematic. To me, the first act feels like a well paced build up; the problem is that the second act isn't worth the wait.

[Gman2887]

[Legion]

[king_ghidorah]

[Dr Kain]

[Legion]

I hope you're not rolling your eyes at me, Kain.

And yes, the Heisei series had absolutely NO idea how to take great ideas and flesh them out. That's one of the series' biggest flaws. Movies like Biollante, King Ghidorah and Desotryah are full of fantastic concepts, but no one was able to take these concepts are really run with them. And when they couldn't think of new ideas, they'd just copy what worked in the older movies.

I mean, wtf was up with Emi? She voluntarily goes along with this plan and at the beginning it's made clear that she's one of the bad guys, down to her expressions and body language. Then, after Ghidorah finally appears, her character changes completely, she does a complete 180 and decides to help the good guys. Why? You mean she had no idea what her partners were really up to? I have a hard time believing she was that stupid. Honestly, it really does seem to me that they were using Miss Namikawa in MZ as inspiration. She's a popular, cult "human" character in a Honda film who starts out evil and then is motivated to switch sides and help the good guys win. Isn't that exactly what what Emi does? But while Namikawa's actions are believable, nothing Emi does makes any sense. When they announce that King Ghidorah has appeared and Emi suddenly looks shocked, my reaction is, "Well, what the hell did you think was going to happen, you dumbass?"

[Dr Kain]

[jellydonut25]

I agree with Kain. Heisei series doesn't make it bad.
90s is what makes it bad. The 90s films are the suck.

[Legion]

[Pkmatrix]

[Dr Kain]

[Legion]

I thought the editing was actually terrible in Biollante. It feel like scenes jump back and forth to different locations and times of day without a real feeling of cohesion, and a lot of that has to do with scenes that were removed as well as a general laziness to the scene transitions. I feel like fade outs/ins and creative scene transitions are rare in the Heisei films. Instead, they just cut from one scene to another, sometimes abruptly, and there's no feeling like one scene naturally leads into another. The problem with Biollante also extends to the score, which is just a dozen suites chopped apart and inserted wherever there's room, in addition to the Ostinato Ifukube tracks.

One great example is the beginning of the Lake Ashinoko battle. Godzilla's entrance is completely deleted, so they go from a military mobilization right the battle, with Godzilla just showing up and already in the lake. They cover for this with a terrible, fuzzy wipe, while the music that plays during the military mobilization simply stops dead.

[jellydonut25]

[Gman2887]

[jellydonut25]

I was more referring to when he lands among all the other monsters.

[Gman2887]

Some of this nitpicking is just silly at this point. On-the-nose lighting? What about Godzilla's entrance in Terror of MechaGodzilla? Badass as it is, I suppose it should be taken down a few notches because of a giant headlamp that shines on his face after lightening strikes. Oh, different era? All is forgiven.

And this goofy nitpicking at edits in Godzilla vs. Biollante is as pretentious as it gets. Though I suppose we can forgive the fact that Ghidorah: The Three Headed Monster magically goes from night, to day, to night again when the Princess is about to be murdered in the hotel/Godzilla rises to the always sunny in Korbe Gorge scene. The editing in that film is amongst the worst in the series, but it's still one hell of a wiz-bang, jackhammer of a film. Biollante is a fun one as well.

[Legion]