I Binge-Watched All 33 ‘Godzilla’ Movies
Posted: Tue Dec 18, 2018 5:15 pmMods - I hope it's cool to post a link to something I wrote offsite.
After being a Godzilla fan most of my life -- I used to be a big poster on here in the early 2000s -- I finally sat down and watched all the movies in order, for the first time, rather than just cherry-picking whatever I had a whim to watch. I essentially gave myself a course syllabus. I'd read the respective chapter of David Kalat's totally indispensable "A Critical History and Filmography of Toho's Godzilla Series" and then I'd sit down to watch whichever movie I'd just read about. Doing so gave me a socio-cultural perspective on each movie that I don't think I'd otherwise have, as us Western fans are watching these "cold" so to speak. I highly recommend that book to any fan who hasn't given it a read. But anyway, here were my thoughts after going through the series, just figured I'd share it.
Kaiju movies resist easy categorization. They’re usually broad, fun popcorn movies billed as entertainment, yet they’re pathologically fixated on the ills of society. They’re about monsters, but they rarely act as horror movies. They employ the language of science fiction, yet most of the time it’s of a kind so absurd that they’re not to be taken as sincere speculation. The best term to describe them might be “modern urban fairy tales”: stories rooted in allegorical, emotive narrative that on the surface seems naïve, but which uses that simple sense of wonder or horror to dig at something deeper.
In anticipation of Godzilla’s 35th* big screen appearance headlining Legendary Pictures’ Godzilla: King of the Monsters in 2019, I watched every installment of the Toho series — and its Hollywood spin-offs — to date. Here are my rankings, and what I learned along the way:
https://medium.com/@garyiacobucci/i-bin ... b24e7aa1d0
After being a Godzilla fan most of my life -- I used to be a big poster on here in the early 2000s -- I finally sat down and watched all the movies in order, for the first time, rather than just cherry-picking whatever I had a whim to watch. I essentially gave myself a course syllabus. I'd read the respective chapter of David Kalat's totally indispensable "A Critical History and Filmography of Toho's Godzilla Series" and then I'd sit down to watch whichever movie I'd just read about. Doing so gave me a socio-cultural perspective on each movie that I don't think I'd otherwise have, as us Western fans are watching these "cold" so to speak. I highly recommend that book to any fan who hasn't given it a read. But anyway, here were my thoughts after going through the series, just figured I'd share it.
Kaiju movies resist easy categorization. They’re usually broad, fun popcorn movies billed as entertainment, yet they’re pathologically fixated on the ills of society. They’re about monsters, but they rarely act as horror movies. They employ the language of science fiction, yet most of the time it’s of a kind so absurd that they’re not to be taken as sincere speculation. The best term to describe them might be “modern urban fairy tales”: stories rooted in allegorical, emotive narrative that on the surface seems naïve, but which uses that simple sense of wonder or horror to dig at something deeper.
In anticipation of Godzilla’s 35th* big screen appearance headlining Legendary Pictures’ Godzilla: King of the Monsters in 2019, I watched every installment of the Toho series — and its Hollywood spin-offs — to date. Here are my rankings, and what I learned along the way:
https://medium.com/@garyiacobucci/i-bin ... b24e7aa1d0
