Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (Spoilers and Discussion)

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Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (Spoilers and Discussion)

Postby lhb412 » Thu Mar 28, 2024 9:19 pm

Just saw it aaaaand... yeah, it's fine. Lightweight, goofy and about the same quality of its immediate predecessor. Lacks the immediate appeal of the Godzilla vs. Kong showdown, but also keeps the Whedonesque patter and needless plot convulutions to a minimum (still there, though), so win-some, loose-some. It's got basically about as much human plot intrigue as a 70 minute theatrical special for a toku hero show.

Ironically, my favorite thing about the movie was the thing I was least enthusiastic about going into it: the Skar King. What's a big deal about a big orangutan? But in practice this preening, Mick Jagger-like ape who enjoys needless cruelty is... well, he's a lot of fun. He should be in the movie more!

The monsters lack scale and weight. Godzilla's role in the plot is the heavy artillery who's brought in when things get real, but he doesn't really shine much aside from a few scenes of him napping (he is just a big cat after all!). Mothra's a McGuffin who nonetheless comes off better than in KOTM (at least you can see her this time). The highlights of the movie are all the likeable character bits from Kong as he interacts with various potential friends and enemies and the aforementioned dasterdlyness of the Skar King.

In short; Shin Ultraman? Godzilla Minus One? Those are four-course meals. Godzilla x Kong? It's an ice cream cone. Go into it with that expectation and you should have a good time.
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Re: Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (Spoilers and Discussion

Postby Dai » Fri Mar 29, 2024 12:12 pm

I thought this after the first trailer, but the full movie all but confirmed my suspicions: this probably started as the Son of Kong concept that Wingard was talking about after GvK came out, and had Godzilla retrofitted into it during a later script draft. Kong has easily triple the screentime of Godzilla and is at the centre of the ongoing plot throughout. The main human characters are conspicuously never anywhere near Godzilla, except one scene near the end when Kong is there too. Godzilla spends almost the entire movie off doing a Rocky training montage, isolated from the plot's other moving parts. Consequently, we end up with three plotlines running in parallel (Kong/humans/Godzilla) and with surprisingly little interaction between them in places, which made the middle of the movie sag. Despite all that, the theatrical cut of GxK ironically feels smoother than its predecessor. There's none of the, "Wait, so is that guy Serizawa's son or what?" factor that pointed to swathes of GvK hitting the cutting room floor.

The movie was worth seeing for the action though. I enjoyed the unpredictability the Hollow Earth portals leant, allowing kaiju to pop up anywhere on the surface at a moment's notice. Godzilla and Kong trashing the pyramids was a memorable moment. I was glad that we got a decent amount of city destruction. The zero-G fight has to join the ranks of most insane Godzilla scenes. Skar King had more personality than I expected, though he ultimately wasn't much of a fighter once he lost his whip and pet icezilla. As for Shino, it was pretty much a one-trick pony, acting as an almost stationary ice cannon much of the time.

As a Godzilla movie, it's mid-table. As a Kong movie, it's one of the better ones.
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Re: Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (Spoilers and Discussion

Postby Kailem » Fri Mar 29, 2024 1:03 pm

Just got back from it, and yeah I really enjoyed it! It's a fun, silly time that very much evokes those late Showa-era vibes with its colourful goofiness and "just go with it" mentality (though sometimes maybe a bit *too* much of the latter).

I think I'd rank it below Godzilla vs Kong, mostly due to this one feeling very back-loaded, with most of the main action feeling like it came towards the end of the movie. Thankfully we still get some cool bite-sized scenes of monster action throughout, with Godzilla dispatching various Monsterverse beasts and some lengthier scenes with Kong. For sure one of my favourite things about it are the times when it just gives us straight-up monster (mostly Kong) scenes with zero humans or dialogue of any kind for quite a while, relying purely on the action and characters to tell the story. It's something I've seen people complaining about wanting for years, not just with these movies but others like Transformers as well where you also have big SFX "creatures" sharing the screen with their often less interesting human counterparts, and it was cool that GxK actually delivered that, and did it well, too. The scenes where Kong first gets ambushed by the apes and then when what's-his-face (Shoko or something?) leads him to the lake to get ambushed were both great, especially with the latter having a direct nod to the original 1933 Kong with the serpent creature wrapping itself around Kong's neck.

And given that the trailer basically confirmed we were getting a "Son of Kong"-type situation with him, I did like how he started out as a total dick and Kong had to win him over. That was different to how I expected that relationship to play out, and I think it was for the better.

Indeed one of the reasons I enjoyed those scenes so much was because the human characters were once again....as you'd expect. It's long been a pet peeve of mine when these big blockbustery crowd-pleasers have their comic relief characters just *always* acting over-the-top, so even though it wasn't unexpected, it was still....eh. I was also reminded of that one bit from Ben Affleck's commentary track for Armageddon when it came to Jia being the only one who could awaken Mothra. :lol:

"We need Jia to awaken Mothra!"
"Why do you need Jia?"
"Because she's the best!"
"Why is she the best?"
"I don't know, she just is!"

Definitely one of those "just roll with it, I guess!" moments, for sure.

I also thought Skar King could have done with more screen time, because he was a really cool monster in what we did get of him. Perhaps if he'd been introduced a bit earlier and positioned as the main antagonist from the get-go rather than the halfway mark it might have been better, but either way I liked what we go. Shimo was unexpected in that I didn't think she'd turn out to be basically an unwilling combatant under the Skar King's control. I guess even though marketing images kept leaking all over the internet from every damn toy, beverage and promotional tie-in the movie has, at least *that* aspect of her I didn't manage to have spoiled ahead of time (though I did see a thumbnail of her in chains on Youtube the other week; thanks, JoBlo!).

I did find it funny how it felt like 90% of Godzilla's side of the story was basically just an excuse for Adam Wingard to slim down the design, which he's been very vocal about in the past as not totally loving. It was very much a Kong story, as was GvK, with Godzilla only really showing up in a meaningful way towards the end. Which again, I kinda would have liked it if their team-up had happened earlier, and we'd gotten to see a bit more of this supposed "Lethal Weapon"-style partnership that had been mentioned by Wingard beforehand actually play out, with them not entirely loving that they had to work together to overcome a common threat. I did like their first meeting at the pyramids, with Godzilla just laying into a reluctant Kong who then had to try knocking some sense into him before Godzilla turned the tables. But then once Deus Ex Mothra showed up they were just fully cool with each other, which I feel was maybe a bit of missed potential.

I did love the "Rampage: World Tour" feel of the movie though, with Godzilla showing up in various countries and trashing some global landmarks. That's something I'll always love seeing in these kinds of films. And yeah, the presence of all those giant crystals in the Hollow Earth certainly lends credence to the word that apparently Space Godzilla was planned to be included at an early stage before being changed to the new monster Shimo. But hey, apparently Adam Wingard said recently that he'd got ideas for a sequel if this does well at the box office, which it seems like it's currently on course to. So maybe those crystals will play a bigger role in that one after all!

So yeah, some pacing issues, an unmemorable score (though I think the musical choices grated with me more this time than they did in GvK), the same level of human characters that we've come to expect from these films and some awesome monster action ultimately meant I had an enjoyable time!

[quote="Dai"]I thought this after the first trailer, but the full movie all but confirmed my suspicions: this probably started as the Son of Kong concept that Wingard was talking about after GvK came out, and had Godzilla retrofitted into it during a later script draft. Kong has easily triple the screentime of Godzilla and is at the centre of the ongoing plot throughout. The main human characters are conspicuously never anywhere near Godzilla, except one scene near the end when Kong is there too. Godzilla spends almost the entire movie off doing a Rocky training montage, isolated from the plot's other moving parts. Consequently, we end up with three plotlines running in parallel (Kong/humans/Godzilla) and with surprisingly little interaction between them in places, which made the middle of the movie sag. Despite all that, the theatrical cut of GxK ironically feels smoother than its predecessor. There's none of the, "Wait, so is that guy Serizawa's son or what?" factor that pointed to swathes of GvK hitting the cutting room floor.[/quote]

I could definitely see that being the case. I think Son of Kong would have been the obvious way to continue the Monsterverse if Toho hadn't re-upped their contract with Legendary after GvK, even if only for a little while if they'd decided to take their time making up their minds about it. You could pretty easily cut Godzilla and Shimmy-Shimmy Ya out of the movie and not a whole lot would have changed, except for maybe the reasoning for why they needed to send out the signal to get Jia down there.

Though frankly even in the finished movie that reason pretty much just amounts to "....because!"
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Re: Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (Spoilers and Discussion

Postby Dai » Fri Mar 29, 2024 6:47 pm

Yeah, I feel they missed a trick with why Jia was Mothra's alarm clock. When the Iwi leader appears and we don't see her face for a long time, I was convinced she would look identical to Jia. Sure, needing identical twins to wake Mothra would still amount to "because", but at least it would have resonated with old-school lore.
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Re: Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (Spoilers and Discussion

Postby Kailem » Sat Mar 30, 2024 11:44 am

Yeah same. I figured the whole point of initially keeping her in silhouette and doing a reveal was that she was going to look like a slightly older Jia, but it was just like "oh, she's just.....someone." It felt like maybe that was the idea they were going for initially but scrapped it because regular audiences who were unfamiliar with Godzilla's history might have been confused. Not that they couldn't have *explained* it in the movie and it at least would have given them more justification for why they needed Jia specifically to awaken Mothra, but still.

Another thing I found out yesterday after finally being able to look stuff up about the movie without fear of spoilers lends even more credence to your theory that this was initially developed as a Son of Kong-style movie that would have been largely the same as what we got if Toho hadn't allowed them to use Godzilla and Mothra for it, Dai. Apparently during production they were going to have Mothra's role be played by a new, winged monster called "Fosphera" that looks (from images of it that leaked at some point) and sure as hell *sounds* like a blatant Mothra stand-in. You can even see the "Fosphera" version of the mural that was changed to Mothra's in the film in one of Brian Tyree Henry's publicity interviews.

So yeah, I'm definitely convinced they developed this as a Kong movie primarily in such a way that they could either add or remove Godzilla and Mothra depending on whether or not Toho re-upped their contract with Legendary.

In which case if they *hadn't* we would have gotten "why does Fosphera need an Iwi from Skull Island to wake her up? Because!" :lol:
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Re: Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (Spoilers and Discussion

Postby Benjamin Haines » Sat Mar 30, 2024 12:17 pm

I haven't seen this yet but I haven't bothered to avoid spoilers at all. I'm glad that Suko, Skar King and Shimo all seem to be making a good impression.

My first thought when I read the leaked plot synopsis last May was that it was essentially the premise of X-Men: Apocalypse with giant monsters. (Spoiler warning for anyone who hasn't seen that flick.) An ancient villain who was sealed away long ago reawakens (Apocalypse/Skar King), commands a team of brutes (the four horsemen/giant ape army) and uses his most powerful recruit (Magneto/Shimo) to wreak mayhem on the planet trying to take it over, facing off with a team of heroes (the X-Men/Godzilla & Kong) until the villain's most powerful recruit turns on him and joins the heroes to defeat him.
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Re: Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (Spoilers and Discussion

Postby lhb412 » Tue Apr 02, 2024 7:49 pm

You know, I would say that Godzilla drastically overprepared for this battle since he spends most of the plot powering up - but in his defense; he thought he'd be taking on an entire ape army plus Shimo by himself, and didn't forsee he'd be teaming up with Kong with Mothra running interference!
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Re: Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (Spoilers and Discussion

Postby Benjamin Haines » Thu Apr 18, 2024 11:19 pm

I finally saw Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire last week and I really liked it! It continues every trend of the MonsterVerse movies for better and for worse but I think the good outweighs the bad.

Whereas each prior MonsterVerse entry had its own distinct tone and style, this movie is very much cut from the same cloth as Godzilla vs. Kong but the writing and the overall story structure are an improvement over that flick. GvsK seemed like a streamlined hatchet job, whittled down to the bone from a more expansive premise, while GxK feels more deliberate in its relative simplicity. It still has some plot holes and deus ex machina contrivances but they seem to be baked into the premise rather than resulting from reshoots and reedits.

A key difference between the two films is that GvsK had a larger cast of characters and nearly the entire story played out from their various perspectives, with only a few short scenes of monsters alone. It arranged most of its core players into two groups with parallel plot threads but it still shifted its focus to other side characters, such as Walter Simmons and Ren Serizawa at Apex Cybernetics and Mark Russell at Monarch. I know that it's common parlance to refer to the two core groups in that movie as Team Kong and Team Godzilla but Bernie, Madison and Josh were really Team Mechagodzilla, because that's what their plot thread revolved around, while Godzilla himself got involved in both plot threads at different points.

From the beginning of GxK, it establishes three parallel plot threads led by Kong, the human characters and Godzilla. The main protagonists of the movie are really Kong, Dr. Ilene Andrews and Jia, with Godzilla, Bernie, Trapper and Suko as the main supporting characters. Kong carries most of his scenes without any human characters present and his plot thread is terrific, some of the best monster scenes of the MonsterVerse, with clearly defined visual storytelling that never loses its focus. Contrary to the critical consensus that this movie completely lacks substance, I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of genuine heart in Kong's ongoing quest to make Hollow Earth his home and find others of his kind, in Jia's struggle to belong as a teenager who lost her home, and in Dr. Andrews coming to terms with the realization that the best thing for her adopted daughter might be to let her go.

Although the plot threads of Kong and the main cast intersect at multiple points, Godzilla's role in the story is disconnected from both Kong and the main cast for about the first two thirds of the movie. I think that works well for the overall atmosphere, reinforcing the notion that Kong and Godzilla are both big enough characters to carry their own stories separately like they did in the original King Kong vs. Godzilla, in which they only crossed paths by chance one time and the human characters had to bring Kong to Godzilla for the final showdown. GvsK leaned into the new MonsterVerse status quo that Godzilla is a monster who tracks down any other giant monster that appears anywhere in the world at any time, as Godzilla went out of his way to attack Kong on two occasions. GxK is still bound to that status quo but it takes a creative turn with Kong emerging from Hollow Earth among the pyramids in Cairo and calling Godzilla to him for help.

The downside to Godzilla doing his own thing apart from the main cast is that the movie still needs human characters to deliver exposition about what he's doing, and unfortunately the flattest performances in the film are all of the nameless Monarch characters who track Godzilla's actions and describe things out loud. It's like Adam Wingard and the writers wanted to avoid the "Team Godzilla characters suck" criticisms lobbed at GvsK but instead of trying to achieve that by putting more effort into Godzilla's plot thread in GxK, they just opted to avoid any semblance of a "Team Godzilla" in the cast by filling the speaking roles in Godzilla's scenes with non-characters who have no bearing on the story and quickly disappear, while reserving all of the main cast for Kong's plot thread. I've got no problem with Godzilla being a supporting character in the film but I wish his plot thread was done better. At least we get to see plenty of cool Godzilla moments throughout the movie, like when he eats the radiation from French nuclear reactors (just like Gamera eating fire in the Showa era!) or when he uses the Roman Colosseum as a bed, although the entire sequence of Godzilla attacking and slaughtering Tiamat is just awful. Godzilla vs. the giant condor, Godzilla's static first faceoff with Kiryu, Godzilla vs. Ebirah & Hedorah in Final Wars, and Godzilla vs. the male MUTO in Honolulu on a muted TV are all more memorable monster battles than Godzilla vs. Tiamat.

The rest of the monster action scenes in the movie are quite good and they are plentiful. Skar King and Shimo are great new additions to the rogues galleries of both Kong and Godzilla. It's true that the monsters lack a sense of giant scale a lot of the time but I'm pretty forgiving of that kind of thing. I have no problem feeling immersed when I watch any suitmation monsters no matter how cheap the production values, so I really don't find it any harder to suspend my disbelief when these CGI monsters look tiny in the Hollow Earth or when they're floating around the screen in zero gravity. Sure, it's a shame that the visual scale of G'14, Kong: Skull Island and Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is mostly gone here, and it's surreal to see this Hollywood Godzilla film series follow the same pattern as the Showa and Heisei series in terms of worrying less about visual scale as time goes on, but it is what it is. Every MonsterVerse movie to date has been dumber than the one before it and GxK follows suit. That's evident in everything about Kong's BEAST Glove, from the complete deus ex machina circumstances of its origin to the delightfully nutty scene when it attaches itself onto Kong's arm to the tune of "I Was Made For Lovin' You" by Kiss. Unfortunately, while the story does have more substance than the critical consensus suggests, some of it is less than half-baked, especially Mothra's role and her connection to Jia. I think the most glaring missed opportunity for a character arc was Bernie. The previous flick established him as an avid podcaster, then GxK showcases how invested he is in his online following and sends him on an incredible journey into the Hollow Earth. He encounters an undiscovered civilization of Iwi people down there and he has that great scene where he's documenting them with his camera and Trapper talks to him about the risk of revealing their existence to the world. The only thing missing for Bernie's potential character growth is a scene at the end in which he chooses not to expose the Iwi to the rest of the world, realizing that some things are more important than gaining subscribers or being believed, but the movie never follows through on his arc like that.

Seeing Godzilla join forces with Kong against Skar King and Shimo evokes the tag-team monster battles of Godzilla vs. Gigan and Godzilla vs. Megalon but the Toho flick that GxK reminds me of the most is the original Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla. It's a generic sci-fi/fantasy story with a cast of fun and simple characters, and there are plot holes and contrivances if you're looking for things to pick apart but they don't detract from the viewing experience, because the movie has style and action in spades and it just works really well with a clear sense of what it's doing.
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Re: Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (Spoilers and Discussion

Postby Kailem » Thu Apr 25, 2024 12:40 pm

That's a good point about the missed potential to give Bernie a bit of a character arc. I must have just been too distracted by all the cool monster fisticuffs at the end to realise that would have been a good little moment to give him some character growth, but chances are they were just like "whoa, slow down there buddy! We can't go giving the human characters *too much* development now, can we?!" :lol:
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Re: Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (Spoilers and Discussion

Postby lhb412 » Sat Apr 27, 2024 11:36 pm

Saw it a second time today and, while I enjoyed it with caveats on first viewing, I was more forgiving and enjoyed it quite a bit more the second time with expectations attuned to what Japanese fans are (apparently) calling the MonsterVerse Champion Matsuri film!

Honestly, I was going to go into a more thorough breakdown this time, but I just read Benjamin's and you hit almost everything I would've mentioned in practically the same way! I am very simpatico with your review! Legendary Godzilla always seemed to take from Heisei Gamera, but in this movie he becomes the fire-eating Showa Gamera!

Some random thoughts in bullet form:

- Dan Stevens should be a big star. He's got "it," you know? This is a rather goofy character playing background to monsters and necessary exposition but he's so charming. He's a guy in need of the right project to utilize him.
- Pretty sorry that Godzilla grows a stegasaurian tail club and never gets to utilize it in a cool way.
- I think, because apes are so humanoid and this is basically a kid's movie, that we were prevented from ape gore in the way we saw other monsters eviscerated into piles of goo. I was dissapointed we didn't get to actually see frozen Skar King get bashed into pieces.
- Weird that Kong and Godzilla have two unrelated sea serpent fights that occur at almost the same time mid-film.
- Did Mothra display this 'pulse that nullifies energy blasts' ability in KOTM?
- Several Toho Easter eggs in Bernie's first scene.
- I enjoy the glee to which this film demolishes some of mankind's most precious classical landmarks, though it seems Godzilla is intentionally preserving the Colluseum as a kitty bed.
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Re: Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (Spoilers and Discussion

Postby Dai » Tue Apr 30, 2024 4:24 pm

^Funnily enough, pretty much the first thing I thought after watching GxK was that the human scenes would have a hard time holding my interest on subsequent viewings and it would be a good candidate for a 70-minute Champion Festival edit.
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Re: Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (Spoilers and Discussion

Postby Kailem » Thu May 02, 2024 2:50 pm

Oh yeah, pretty much as soon as we started hearing Adam Wingard say the late Showa movies are his favourites and then when the first trailer came out I was totally expecting this to be an extremely Champion Festival-kinda movie. So yeah, really all they need todo to make it official is include an edited-down version on the Blu-ray and give it a new title like "Godzilla, Kong, Mothra: Big Hollow Earth Battle"! :lol:
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Re: Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (Spoilers and Discussion

Postby lhb412 » Wed Dec 04, 2024 5:50 pm

Informal gauge of Godzilla's current popularity in the US: went to my local Hallmark store to see the GxK: The New Empire Christmas ornaments. All the Godzillas are sold out and there are still plenty of Kongs.

... I mean, the fact that the Godzilla is a much more impressive sculpt might've contributed here. I saw the display model and the online pics and package art don't do it justice!
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Re: Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (Spoilers and Discussion

Postby Benjamin Haines » Fri Dec 06, 2024 12:00 am

^ Godzilla merch does seem to outsell Kong merch in the US. I think American kids by and large will always favor dinosaurs over apes.
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Re: Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (Spoilers and Discussion

Postby Benjamin Haines » Sat Jan 18, 2025 11:23 pm

After watching GxK again, it hit me that Godzilla's redesigned appearance in this movie is the quintessential American Godzilla design.

The American public has always viewed Godzilla as green, since long before he was ever green in a movie and even before he appeared in a color feature at all. The iconic theatrical posters for the original film's 1956 US release showed him with green skin, as did the US posters for several of the movies that followed. Marvel's 1977-1979 Godzilla comic book was the very first licensed American take on the character and it depicted him vividly green. Hanna-Barbera's 1978-1979 animated series soon followed and it also featured a green Godzilla. American merchandise normally depicted Godzilla as green, from Aurora's 1964 model kit to Mattel's 1977 Shogun Warriors action figure, to the 1985 products from Imperial like their Godzilla action figure (which frequently appeared in the background on the sitcom Roseanne) and their big inflatable Godzilla (which turned up on an episode of Full House), and then the Trendmasters toy line in the 1990s. By then it was also typical for American home video releases from companies like Paramount, Simitar, GoodTimes and Anchor Bay to present a green Godzilla on the cover. He was also green in his unlicensed cameos on American animated shows like Animaniacs, KaBlam and The Simpsons, as were the thinly-veiled derivations of Godzilla on shows like Rugrats, Pinky & The Brain, Doug, Extreme Dinosaurs and Invader Zim. Of course, fans in the 20th century knew that Godzilla had never been green in the movies but most Americans never watched the movies, and the Godzilla that they saw on store shelves and in pop culture was usually green.

Still, it's not like it was solely an American decision to market Godzilla as a green-skinned beast, as Toho themselves did it as far back as 1955, when some of the Godzilla Raids Again posters presented him as green and so did the 1st-edition cover of Shigeru Kayama's Japanese novelization of the original film. He continued to have green skin on some of Toho's movie posters and theater programs as the Showa Series progressed, and they really leaned into it for the Champion Festival releases in the 1970s, with some of those posters eventually becoming American home video covers. The truth is that the Godzilla franchise and Toho's broader sci-fi/fantasy output have always facilitated an exchange of ideas between Japan and the United States. Toho gave the edited US version of the original Godzilla film a Japanese theatrical release in 1957 and they even sent newly-crafted Godzilla and Anguirus suits to America for the first would-be localization of GRA. When producer Henry Saperstein got involved with Toho in the 1960s, it led to things like Toho shooting the frontier missile sequence in Mothra vs. Godzilla for American audiences as well as Hollywood actors like Nick Adams and Russ Tamblyn starring in the films.

Saperstein spent years trying to make a Hollywood Godzilla production happen and that ultimately led to the 1998 Sony/TriStar film, which unfortunately reflected the predominant American disregard for Godzilla movies more than anything else. The filmmakers behind G'98 were more interested in imitating the recent success of Jurassic Park, as Godzilla's design in that film is essentially an amalgamation of a T. rex and a Velociraptor as they appear in Jurassic Park, combined with the general extreme/edgy aesthetic that was popular in the late '90s and early 2000s. That extreme/edgy aesthetic is an American export that made its way to Toho with their immediate follow-up to Hollywood's take, Godzilla 2000, when he sported a radical new design with spiky scales, jagged dorsal fins, irregular teeth and a fierce-looking face. I don't think it's a coincidence that G2K was also the first time that Toho actually made Godzilla green in a movie. After G'98, Toho's new Godzilla films were being judged in comparison to Hollywood's output — by fans, by critics and by Japanese moviegoers — and that inevitably brought more American influence to the Millennium Series. Monster suit maker Shinichi Wakasa was openly influenced by American creature designs and he preferred to have his kaiju referred to as creatures. I think making Godzilla green was part of that American influence.

By the time another Hollywood studio took a crack at Godzilla, generational changes had brought about a shift in American pop culture. Being more faithful to the source material became a somewhat more important issue for media adaptations in the vaguely nerd-centric internet age of entertainment, and the Sony/TriStar flick had earned an infamous reputation within Hollywood as a high-profile failure. Whereas G'98 was helmed by a pair of boomers who held disdain for the source material, the Legendary/WB Godzilla producers, directors and writers have been gen-Xers and elder millennials who actually appreciated one or more of the Japanese Godzilla films. That informed how they redesigned Godzilla for the 2014 reboot, which resulted in a new look that was quite true to the classic silhouette, with an upright posture and a rounded head with a distinct brow ridge, while still being unmistakably modern and American. The 2014 design even maintained some traits in common with the 1998 design, such as the gills on the neck, an almost rectangular snout shape and separated nostrils. The 2019 sequel applied a few tweaks to the design including dorsal fins inspired by those of the classic Toho films, swinging the pendulum more toward Japanese influence.

That all led to his new evolved design in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, which swings the pendulum back over toward American stylistic liberty. After 70 years, he's finally green in a Hollywood-produced movie and it's the third rendition of Legendary's Godzilla design, leaning into the extreme/edgy aesthetic with lots of new spikes all over his body and even a thagomizer at the end of his tail. The slimmer waist brings his overall physique closer to the 1998 design, and the movie shows that off when he briefly runs in a horizontal stance as he charges through Cairo toward Kong. His dorsal fins resemble those in the Toho films less than ever, now curved and pointed backward like a shark or a dolphin. I think that making the skin green and the dorsal fins pink was probably based directly on the Miregoji/Giragoji suits from Godzilla 2000 and Godzilla vs. Megaguirus, the same suits that brought a newfound American influence to Toho's designs at the turn of the millennium, marking the latest volley of ideas between Japan and the United States. Godzilla's evolved design in GxK is the ultimate realization of America's perception of the character, the finish line on a course that began with the earliest American movie posters and spanned through Marvel's comic book, Hanna-Barbera's animated series, iconic merchandise, home video covers, Dark Horse's comic book, numerous homages & parodies, and finally the Hollywood film adaptations that went from complete detour to course correction to direct homage to this, the quintessential American Godzilla design.
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Re: Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (Spoilers and Discussion

Postby lhb412 » Sun Jan 19, 2025 12:13 am

I also think that, besides the obvious huge G2K influence on Legendary Goji's new appearance, there's also the influence of Shin Godzilla: the idea that Godzilla should change or transform and that means some surprising visual element. The pink energy is certainly inspired by Shin's purple glow. Godzilla '98 made people wary of changing Godzilla. Shin Godzilla encouraged it and expanded what audiences would accept.

I was also thinking just yesterday about how Godzilla licensing has gone bananas and is now big business. Making the Legendary and Toho Godzillas (now represented by the classical Minus One look) so visually distinct means two different Godzillas you can buy or license.

... oh, and thirdly: I feel filmmakers, if they're investing in this sort I thing at all, want to put their own stamp on Godzilla. The Legendary directors have been somewhat restrained by continuity to keep some things consistent, but in Japan all the real significant Godzilla movies of the 21st century (GMK, Shin, and Minus One) feel like the filmmakers really laboring to get across their idealized notion of how they interpret the character, and the designs reflects that.
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Re: Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (Spoilers and Discussion

Postby Benjamin Haines » Sat Feb 01, 2025 12:34 am

^ Absolutely. Shin Godzilla opened the floodgates on Godzilla's bioluminescence. It's crazy how that has always been one of Godzilla's traits but it was relatively subdued for most of the Showa Series, when he just had dorsal fins that glowed when he used his atomic breath. That was it as far as his bioluminescence went for the first 20 years. There was no other part of his body that glowed until Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla in 1974, when he gained a brand new power-up ability in the middle of the movie that made him shine blue all over, first when he absorbed the lightning power and again when he summoned that power later.

That one deviation in the penultimate Showa film portended Godzilla's new displays of bioluminescence in the Heisei Series: his dorsal fins glowing when he absorbs radiation, his flashy nuclear pulse attacks, his eyes lighting up or crackling with electricity when he wakes up, the glittery supercharging he receives from Rodan, the various supercharged forms of his atomic breath, and finally his burning appearance in Godzilla vs. Destroyer.

It's interesting how G'98 eschewed any form of bioluminescence for Godzilla along with abandoning his atomic breath, and then the Millennium Series for the most part took a more old-fashioned, Showa-style approach to how he lit up, ignoring the Desugoji suit's glowing orange skin as a plot-specific aberration rather than a new direction forward. Godzilla doesn't have any flashy power-ups in most of the Millennium films, aside from the end of Final Wars when he receives Ozaki's Keizer power and then uses a nuclear pulse and supercharged atomic breath. The biggest bioluminescent deviations in the Millennium Series are just the creative new ways in which Godzilla charges up his atomic breath. Amid all of that, however, the animated Godzilla: The Series introduced new forms of bioluminescence along with restoring his atomic breath. In that cartoon series, the glow of his dorsal fins travels up from his tail to his head, finally lighting up his neck gills and his eyes before the flames burst from his mouth. None of that had ever happened in the movies before then.

With the 2014 reboot, Legendary & WB needed to prove that Hollywood could get Godzilla right at all, so just making his dorsal fins glow blue before he uses his atomic breath is one of the most triumphant moments in the movie. Notably, G'14 also brought to the big screen one of the bioluminescent traits that the late-'90s animated series had introduced: the way the glow of his dorsal fins starts at his tail and travels up his back to his head. After that, yes, Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi seemed to revel in disregarding audience expectations and instead just getting weird with how Godzilla looks, especially how his body lights up. His skin burns red from within all the time, not because of some impending meltdown but because that's just how his skin looks, and there are so many cracks in his skin that it really shows. His glow shifts from red to purple when he uses his atomic breath, presumably because the traditional blue Cherenkov light when he charges up is blending with his regular red glow to create purple. If he could discharge his atomic energy from his body in bursts of light, why couldn't he also discharge it as multiple concentrated beams from the open skin between his dorsal fins? And hey, if he's grown a vestigial second head in the tip of his tail, why couldn't he blast his atomic breath from that second mouth too?

After Shin Godzilla, all bets are off in terms of how his body can light up. King of the Monsters took even more cues from the late-'90s cartoon by having Godzilla's eyes and neck gills light up when he uses his atomic breath. It also just made him light up his dorsal fins and other parts of his body pretty often, even when he doesn't use his atomic breath, making his body glow more like a Pacific Rim kaiju than like any prior Godzilla incarnation. It also did a new take on his 1995 burning appearance, although the way it's spread all over his body makes him look less like the uniquely iconic Desugoji suit and much closer to other flame-covered CGI movie characters (Balrog in Lord of the Rings, the Human Torch in Fantastic 4, Surtur in Thor: Ragnarok, etc). Now we've got GxK, with Godzilla gaining a glowing blue tiger-stripe pattern as a power-up when he absorbs radiation from a nuclear reactor, and later shining pink all over with another tiger-stripe pattern when he goes Super-Saiyan during the Rio battle.
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Re: Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (Spoilers and Discussion

Postby Kailem » Tue Feb 11, 2025 4:57 pm

I'd never really thought about it that way before, but GxK really does give us the "ultimate American Godzilla design" when you look at it like that. Green skin, spikier spines and a slimmer profile are all things we've seen before in various other American incarnations of Godzilla over the years, and now they're finally all combined here in a way that really works (for the most part; I do think his stomach looks a bit *too* skinny and chest still too large from certain angles).

To be honest I think the "Evolved" design is my favourite version of Godzilla out of all the Monsterverse films so far. I've never been a *huge* fan of his look in the others, for various reasons, and GxK fixed a lot of that for me while also just adding some cool new stuff that reminds me a lot of Espinas from the Monster Hunter games, which is another "green monster with pinkish spikes all over it" from the Monster Hunter games, so that was awesome.

I think a part of of it is definitely Adam Wingard being vocally unhappy with some of the design elements of the previous films (or mostly just G'14 since that's where it originated) and wanting to change it up. He likely didn't have the opportunity or clout while he was making GvsK to make it happen, but he obviously made sure the new makeover was a big part of the story in the next one so he could get his way. And similar to how I think a big part of why Shin Godzilla was able to mix things up so successfully was that it came after more than 60 years of previous Godzilla films, so GxK came after a trilogy of (mostly) successful American Godzilla films that gave people a new design, then gave them enough time to get used to it to be potentially willing to accept a change like this. And I'm sure all the execs were more than happy to oblige him at that point and create an opportunity to a bunch more toys! :lol:

I also always thought it was funny back when I watched the Millennium films for the first time how much certain elements of them were very clearly influenced by (or outright pilfered from) G'98 in a lot of ways, after years of hearing that nobody in either the east or west liked it. Then to see scenes of CG Godzilla swimming underwater, spikier spines or Godzilla creating a rising mound in the water while moving through it made me realise that the folks at Toho obviously liked *some* of it! :lol:
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Re: Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (Spoilers and Discussion

Postby Benjamin Haines » Sun Feb 16, 2025 8:06 pm

^ Oh yeah, there are a lot of things in the Millennium Series (especially G2K) that seem like Toho's way of saying "Hey, we can do that with Godzilla too!" Along with what you mentioned, there are scenes of Godzilla chasing a car, looking directly at people up close, getting battered by missiles from fighter jets, and swimming with his dorsal fins protruding from the water. Even the scene of Shinoda inspecting Godzilla's footprints on the beach seems more like a direct response to G'98 than a callback to the original film's Odo Island scenes.

There have always been people who liked G'98. I was one of many American kids who liked it enough to seek out the Japanese flicks. G'98's reception was multifaceted and its failure as a big-budget Hollywood adaptation was about more than just being hated, although yes, it was largely hated by Godzilla fans who were already fans before its release. Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin had no love for Godzilla movies, only disdain, which they repeatedly made clear in contemporary interviews. They weren't interested in making a Godzilla movie but in doing their own big-budget take on the very concept of a giant monster movie, and taking the reins of Sony/TriStar's Godzilla production as their follow-up to Independence Day was simply their means to that end. Even though their take on Godzilla was devoid of respect for the source material, their aesthetic approaches to giant monster action weren't entirely without merit. Things like a giant monster's claws tearing through the hull of a fishing trawler right between the crewmen, seeing a monster surface next to a bridge from the perspective of civilian drivers, or a man surviving a monster's footfall by sheer luck between the monster's toes are all objectively good ideas for giant monster movie scenes. Likewise, the concepts of a giant monster leaning down to look directly at a person in a dramatic moment, using CGI to depict a monster swimming underwater, or a monster causing a giant mound of water on the ocean before surfacing are all objectively good ideas that hadn't been done before in any Godzilla movies, so it makes sense that Toho took inspiration from things like that despite how G'98 was received.

In this Japanese TV news segment from 1999 covering the making of G2K (https://archive.org/details/g2kbts), VFX supervisor Tetsuo Ohya explains how he tried to differentiate Godzilla from the US design in the all-CGI scene of Godzilla swimming underwater. The segment ends with the anchor calling the movie "an endorsement for the only Godzilla in the world" with the camera focused on a replica of Yuji Sakai's G2K maquette. BURN!

Regarding Legendary's Godzilla designs, they're not among my favorites but I do like all three of them. I think the 2014 design still has the best appearance and the most balanced proportions overall, with the stubby toes being the only element that looks off. The 2019 design improved his feet but the added bulk and the smaller head made his silhouette look more rotund and amorphous. I can see why they changed the 2024 design's proportions and I think they pulled it off. His chest is about the same size as before but his streamlined waist accentuates the musculature of his torso rather than building out a more barrel-like form. It's weird how the opening credits of GxK feature the 2019-design Godzilla charging forward and leaping up through the air to pounce on Scylla, not only because it looks ridiculous but because it really undercuts the implied boost in speed and agility of his later evolved design. They should have waited until after he slimmed down to have him start pouncing through the air!

As for the dorsal fins, I think the 2014 design did them best too. I like the more classic shape of the 2019 dorsal fins but I don't think the texture suits them. I really like how the 2024 design adopted the Toho tradition of making his dorsal fins a much brighter color than his skin, and yet, their shape and backward curvature make them my least favorite dorsal fins of Legendary's designs. The one big deviation from Toho's approach in all three of Legendary's designs is how the base of each dorsal fin is the widest part, so each fin is like a mountain on Godzilla's back, unlike Toho's designs which always had protrusions jutting out wider than the base of each fin, making them look more like sprouting flowers.

In an interview with ScreenRant last year, Adam Wingard explained why he didn't change Godzilla's design for GvsK: https://screenrant.com/godzilla-x-kong-the-new-empire-adam-wingard-interview/

"When I did Godzilla vs. Kong, it was really important to keep Godzilla consistent with how he looked in the prior MonsterVerse entry. And the reason is kind of almost because of the original King Kong versus Godzilla. Because it was a new King Kong that was introduced in that movie, and he's kind of never really looked, aside from King Kong escapes, the same. He wasn't stop motion. And so I always felt like the versus battle wasn't as satisfying because it was also introducing a new version of the character, which I love the original, the Toho Kong, but that was my issue with it. So I didn't want to repeat that in the last Godzilla vs. Kong. But that meant that because I was trying to keep Godzilla looking consistent, that meant that I didn't get to put my own stamp on him. And as a fan, I always enjoy all the different eras of Godzilla as he changes, and we're five movies into the MonsterVerse. It felt like it was time to do an updated version. And so my approach ended up being one where it started on the script phase because it was important that it wasn't just, Okay, here's a new version of Godzilla. He's updated for no reason other than it looks cool and whatever. I wanted the drive, the story to be around why Godzilla's look is evolving and changing. And so his half of the story ended up sort of becoming almost about that."
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