Box Office Discussion

[HannibalBarca]

[Cookie]

[Gwangi]

Have faith, plus LP seems determined to reach that covieted $200K mark (unless of course, they start cooking the books the way Paramount did with "The Transformers" ). Around here, "Godzilla" has yet to rearch our local dollar theater, which is still playing "Captain America". Plus, every Labor Day weekend, our biggest Cineplex here always brings back a couple of earlier summer movies, in case anyone missed it the first time around (of course, it gets yanked the following weekend). If LP is that determined, they may just want to go that route as well.

[Benjamin Haines]

[Legion]

[walshiam]

^^Exactly. Godzilla should never be the co-star in his own movie.

[Destroysall]

I loved the little dosages of Godzilla in this movie, but I agree.. Edwards and crew are going to have give him a ton of screen time in the sequel.

[jellydonut25]

I don't think Godzilla needs a "ton" of screen time in the sequel, but he will need more, and I don't really think the slow-burn approach would work as well a second time around, unless that slow-burn were the build-up to a final monster.

I mean, you could do a slow-burn approach to Rodan or something in the vein of how the film Rodan is built, with people not knowing exactly what it is or what's happening for a while...but if you hold off on Godzilla until the end again, people will be rather dissatisfied.

With the slow-burn approach, I would worry about the movie feeling less like a worthy sequel and more like a rehash, which, as much as I liked the new film, I really don't want.

[king_ghidorah]

Kaiju films operate on spectacle inherently. I feel like you need to up it, and give the audiences what they want, for the sequel.

[Legion]

The main complaint was that there wasn't enough Godzilla. It would really hurt the second film if the same thing happens again.

[king_ghidorah]

I want a new director and I really want a new script writer for the sequel.

[Jorzilla]

[Gojiraknight]

[king_ghidorah]

Edwards did well enough for the first film but I have serious doubt if he can evolve beyond his "keep everything a mystery" shtick. There are moments in the film that are amazing. Godzilla's arrival in Hawaii is one of my favorite parts of a Godzilla film ever.

But there's also a lot of stuff that doesn't work and I don't think it can all be rested at the feet of the script writer.

Like I said, I think Edwards did a good enough job for the first one but the second one really needs to kick it up several notches and I'm not sure he's the one to do it.

[HannibalBarca]

I thought that the movie had an absolutely fantastic visual style to it and would be all for keeping Edwards around on the strength of that visual style alone. If he insists on his "hide the monster" shtick, hopefully someone higher up the food chain with his finger on the pulse of the audience can restrain him. I'll agree with pretty much everyone else that a change in screenwriter would probably be for the best, though.

And as for treating the source material with respect. Well. I guess that he didn't do anything particularly egregious to it, like making Godzilla a hermaphroditic T-Rex/Iguana crossbreed that gets taken out by a handful of missiles. But I'll agree with a point that Steve Ryfle made, perhaps a bit too forcefully, when the movie was first released: Godzilla was whitewashed in this movie to the point where he barely means anything, beyond Serizawa's confusing and pointless homilies about Godzilla being nature's "power to restore balance." Most of Godzilla's role as an allegorical representation of mankind's arrogance, overreach, and failure is gone, to say nothing of the nuclear subtext, which is basically nowhere to be found with Godzilla's character, at least. I'm not sure how respectful it is to basically make Godzilla meaningless in this movie beyond his role as a plot device.

[angilas]

As horrible as the idea of more hide the godzilla sounds this movie was leagues better than anything else that's been proposed in the US except possibly the DeBontzilla film. Godzilla Returns script leaking reaffirms this point. I'd want Edwards still at the helm if nothing else but to ensure any maniacal ideas about Godzilla or his design that very too far from the essence of the character get chucked. No offense to Banno who I felt made an excellent film with Smog Monster, but I'm not sure from his position he has much creative control and even if he did his biggest mistake was flying Godzilla which turned one of the possibly greatest Showa films into kind of a farce, no matter how much you try to use science and logic to explain it away.

Anyway I agree so long as he is told to give the big G spot time that he's the right man for the job. I say a post credit scene too since every showing I went to people were waiting for and expecting it.

[king_ghidorah]

[HannibalBarca]

Another possibility, and one that I'm more inclined to believe, is that while Edwards at least probably understands what Godzilla means, or is supposed to mean (he had said Gojira was one of his favorite movies, and most of his interviews seem to indicate he at least has a basic grasp of what's going on), the opportunity to make an actual Godzilla film in the Gojira tradition simply wasn't there. If I were an exec at WB or Legendary, I would be much more likely to go for a safe, but relatively empty, Godzilla movie that mostly uses the monsters for action setpieces, as opposed to some sort of dark allegorical movie where the monsters have a deeper, nuanced meaning. The former seems like a much easier sell. But, I mean, hell, even G'98 dealt with the nuclear thing more than G'14, even if it was a cursory examination at best. And while King of the Monsters may have scaled back the allegory a bit from Gojira, it was still there. G'14 is really the LEAST willing of any major American Godzilla release to address Godzilla's nuclear origins. Godzilla's entire backstory in this movie strikes me as one big blank slate.

This is all just my guess anyway; marketing considerations would also explain why the movie was so skittish about showing the monsters fighting the military, or making all of the death and destruction implied instead of putting it front and center; or in the case of the tsunami scene, isolating it so thoroughly from the rest of narrative that it could just as easily have happened in another movie.

[walshiam]

The nuclear symbolism was not as intense simply because Godzilla's history had been altered. There was no reference to an attack on Tokyo in 1954. The only reference to nuclear weapons aside from Hiroshima was the U.S.'s "testing" in the south Pacific as a front in their attempts to destroy Godzilla. That was to establish Godzilla's indestructibility as a character trait. There will never be another Godzilla film that matches the intensity of the first because Godzilla no longer is a symbol of nuclear doom. He is exactly what the movie portrayed him to be which is a force of nature........an indestructible force of nature.

[HannibalBarca]

That's just a cop out though. The idea that he's a "force of nature" is just an excuse, a way for the filmmakers to say that he represents something because they aren't willing to make him represent anything real. And he's not even a force of nature in this! He's just a plot device to kill the MUTOs, who are the real stars of the movie, monster-wise.

[Gman2887]

I can't agree at all with this "empty shell" tag being placed on Godzilla in this movie. There are plenty of Godzilla movies that merely hint at the monster's background while using him to tell a story that means something more relevant. I think the man vs. nature theme was fairly strong in the sense that Godzilla, instead of being walking drone with a "volcano" or "tornado" sign hanging around his neck, represented the lack of control mankind has over nature. The characters have a plan to control him, and the MUTOs, falls to pieces. Their plan made as much sense as attempting to control the natural fits of a tornado or earthquake and the end result could never have been avoided. It's stronger than the nuclear themes, which are dated and don't speak as loudly today anyway.

This movie calls back images from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, vaguely using the nuclear ideas and focusing on what caused the accident to begin with. Having a Godzilla movie call back something like that is very much within the realm of the Japanese films and although it's not the strongest metaphor of the series, there are Godzilla movies that do a lot worse. Claiming Godzilla represents nothing through all of this is fairly shortsighted I believe.

[HannibalBarca]

The problem with that is, Godzilla never really meaningfully interacts with the humans at all. He has no effect on their plans whatsoever. The human-monster interaction in this film, at least the interaction that advances the plot, is exclusively with the MUTOs. What scenes Godzilla shares with the humans seem to be almost an afterthought, included because it seems like someone, at the last moment, realized they had to have something like the tsunami scene or the bridge scene. But those scenes don't tie back to the rest of the movie at all. The movie could have happened, beat for beat, as it does otherwise without any of those scenes being included. Without anything tying those scenes to the rest of the narrative, they ultimately feel pointless and, for me at least, completely lacked impact. They were trying to say that Godzilla is this implacable force of nature without really having earned it, because the times that Godzilla did all the force of nature stuff, it had no real impact on any of our characters or on the plot in general.

[Gwangi]

[HannibalBarca]

That's the thing, though. If Godzilla had sold itself and written itself as a big dumb action movie, I'd be willing to let it slide. But both the marketing campaign and the script itself would have us believe that we're watching a movie in the finest Godzilla tradition, a movie that's About Something, where Godzilla is more than just a walking SFX sequence, but represents something more, be that humanity's arrogance, the danger of nuclear weaponry, or a force of nature. But the movie fails to follow through on that promise. It almost demands to be taken seriously, but has not earned it. I like the movie well enough for what it is, but it sold itself as being so much more and failed to deliver.

[walshiam]