May I just say that there aren’t any large multicellular animals that stand a chance against human technology — they are intrinsically fragile — which makes the fear of this creature rather unbelievable. I’m much more terrified of microorganisms.
Also, Bryan Cranston doesn’t look a thing like Raymond Burr.
But I might actually enjoy this movie anyway.
*For a given value of large. Cane toads and rabbits are winning in Australia.
Maybe we should focus on roomba sized robots roaming the world, killing all the pests.
I will see this movie because it contains Ken Watanabe.
Giant robots won’t cut it. Just ask Mechagodzilla.
I will see this movie bc I like Godzilla.
I hope it is better than that crappy 90s ‘Zilla movie.
And he’d better breathe fire!
(this is loosely related to the OP…talk of robots and stuff)
I came across this fan made animated short pitting Batman against (a? the?) Terminator.
I can live with a largely ridiculous principle premise (giant indestructible lizard) as long as the rest of the movie isn’t *stupid*.
Sadly, the monsters in Pacific Rim were not the most ridiculous part of the movie.
kyoseki:
Not having seen the movie (no great urge to either), what was the most ridiculous part?
This is the first trailer I’ve seen, and I think it looks good. I like the serious tone. No camp. The monster design looks solid. I’ll see it.
I dunno, you don’t have much a history of liking movies.
Tony
Stupidity, it’s nearly always stupidity.
HUGE FUCKING SPOILERS ahead, but seriously, if you’re watching Pac Rim for the storyline, you really need to get out more.
Unresolved questions:
1: Since all the Kaiju come through the same fucking hole, how is the entire planet’s nuclear arsenal not pointed at it?
2: What the fuck do you mean Gypsy Danger is analog and therefore immune to EMP? Is the entire thing driven by cables? Because all of those electronicky doodads you’re waving around look suspiciously fucking digital to me.
3: Aside from setting up a great looking CGI set piece, why the hell would you spend half an hour trying to punch a giant monster to death before remembering you have a 40 foot long sword attached to your forearm?
4: Why did it take 5 generations of Jaegers (the giant killer robots) before it occurred to someone to mount missiles on the fucking things?
… and that’s before we get into all of the physics problems with the damned thing and we’re not talking anything complicated, but more a case of “why are they falling upwards?” and “how are they running out of oxygen if they’re wearing spacesuits?” etc..
They’re not just carrying the idiot ball, they’re playing volleyball with it.
Pacific Rim is a great looking movie, but jesus christ, it’s dumber than a bag of rocks.
… hopefully all of these questions, and more, will be addressed in the inevitable sequel.
kyoseki:
Ooooh boy.
Those are some stinkers all right.
I’m displeased with the idea that in this version the 1954 thermonuclear tests were actually attempts to kill Godzilla when Godzilla was originally a statement on the horror of nuclear weapons and was inspired in part by that particular test, which resulted in accidental Japanese casualties (see here).
~*~*~*~*~*~
kyoseki (#10)
What sci-fi action movie isn’t? I hate that about them. A smart script wouldn’t have to undercut the excitement of the action and effects. But they don’t even try to be less stupid.
Burr did his best, and I loved the American mishmash called “Godzilla – King of the Monsters!” as a kid, but the original Godzilla is still the best giant monster movie ever made, from both the dramatic, horror, entertainment, and artistic standpoints.
Too bad the science in it is so casually ridiculous, even for the time.
The trailers are impressive enough to make me consider seeing this new version, though. Cranston can eat scenery on a Gojira-like level.
A. Noyd
I honestly don’t remember them being this insultingly stupid though.
Alien, not a stupid movie. Blade Runner, even the Terminator, they weren’t blindingly stupid films, but these days, it seems that since we’ve given people the ability to do anything with CGI (and I say that as one of the guys who does it), they’ve decided they don’t need to bother with something as mundane as script or story.
Looks like a pretty man-centric cast, but it’s hard to tell from trailers, sometime (cue obligatory frightened-woman-with-child at the end there).
I thin it’s taking itself a little too seriously, but it might be a fun watch anyway – Pacific Rim had problems, sure, but it wasn’t too bad. It’s not like I watched it for the science anyway. :)
Also, this. As if humans didn’t invent nuclear weapons for each other.
Alien was not stupid.
Blade Runner was stupid.
面白い。
kyoseki (#14)
Hmm, I have to wonder if they’re actually any worse nowadays or if it’s just easier to remember the better ones of the past because people go out of their way to preserve them and forget the terrible ones. I really don’t know.
A. Noyd
This is true, we likely forget the truly awful ones, but the truly awful ones didn’t have the budgets they do these days.
Hopefully Godzilla isn’t bag of rocks stupid.
My bar is set pretty low. I just want it to be better than the 90s Emmerich film. I’d love it if the film somehow turns out almost as good as Gojira but I don’t see that happening.
OTOH, If he reprises his role as Walter White, likely he will kill Godzilla with a giant lozenge of blue meth and picric acid!
or was it prophetic?
http://io9.com/economic-study-suggests-were-heading-for-a-blade-runne-1524219449
Up from the depths
Thirty stories high
Breathing fire
His head in the sky
Godzilla!
Godzilla!
Godzilla!
And Godzookie.
@chigau (違う) #16
Opinions be opinions.
And yes, big monsters should be squishy. The thing I hated about Cloverfield was the way of course they couldn’t use bunker-killer bombs that can cut through meters of concrete and steel (giant monster brushes off physics!), it had to be a nuke. The mighty nuke. Asshats.
Golly, does this take me back.
Just kidding! This is about the–eek–14 year-old Roland Emmerich remake/reboot. On the long ago archived and kept-alive-by-T-shirt-ads site The Brunching Shuttlecocks, they once asked their readers to send in their complaints about the movie, anything and everything with one exception:
And then the show begins. What a list. I’m guessing most of these will apply to the new film as well: http://brunching.com/harpongodzilla.html
I think there is a fine lime that is the goal to walk between a stupid scyfi movie plot and an “accurate” one too much reality and it is pointless or too darkly terrifying or too serious
that is the ones with monsters and big impossible enemies
I’m getting too old for big monsters or robots I just can’t seem to suspend my disbelief very easily any more.
uncle frogy
“History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men…”
Crap. Can’t remember the next part.
That’s pretty much exactly what the cane toads were supposed to do.
I knew an old woman who swallowed a fly…
Solaris (the 1972 version) was not a stupid movie.
2001 was a bit opaque, but once you get the symbolism it is not a stupid movie.
Tarkovsky’s “Stalker” (1979) was not a stupid movie.
-Together, they prove what can be achieved by competent scripts, competent directors and competent actors using a competent dialogue.
Other SF/non-realistic films that were not stupid: 28 Days Later. Blade Runner. Groundhog Day. The sticky fingers of Time. Alien. Terminator. Moon.
“Different outcome” films: Sliding Doors. Lola Rennt.
And let’s not forget the various versions of The Midwich Cuckoos. Or the original version of Quatermass and the Pit.
It pretty much can’t help being better. :-)
The makers of this one definitely paid attention to the original first movie, which portrays Godzilla as a natural disaster.
…Somebody throw a million dollars at these guys. Or two million. Or twenty. :-o
Giant radioactive lizard. The indestructibility is logically caused by the radioactivity, because radioactivity is magic. :-)
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!
:-D :-D :-D
As somewhat of a connoisseur of the genre, may I gently suggest your memory might be failing you? Other than the EMP howler, none of the things you mention are any worse than anything in Aliens and the biology was actually better in most respects (due to the Kaiju being from an alternate universe, at least) than anything in Jurassic Park or its sequels.
And let’s not get started on taking down an entire alien network with a computer virus uploaded from a Powerbook, shall we?
I can usually put all of that aside while watching one of these. They are like brain candy – tasty, but not good for you in large doses.
Nah. Ricin. In his Stevia.
Think back to anything with the name Emmerich or Boll or Bay attached to them. And do you really think the original Gojira was an intelligent movie packed with good science?
The Core.
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.
Crack in the World.
Mars Needs Women.
The genre is mostly packed with clunkers, and has always been this way.
On non-stupid monster movies: how about The Host, the 2006 Korean movie? It was not without problems, but wasn’t insultingly stupid, and the human characters had more depth than is typical for creature features.
Another non-stupid sci-fi:
Sexmise (Sexmission 1984, most kick-ass year because that’s the year I was born and Orwell’s novel *didn’t* happen.)
At least from what I remember – I guess I’ll have to watch it again…
“Chicks dig giant robots.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koesW3xMKtY
Barbarella.
Flesh Gordon.
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.
I’m with PZ regarding microorganisms being far scarier.
Having said that, nobody can make a distressed or frightened face better than Bryan Cranston. His acting skills are topnotch.
The booboos on the Statue of Liberty were interesting.
Sound track should probably come with a hearing damage warning.
chigua @ 36
One of these things is not like the others.
Ah, Cloverfield 2!
I don’t think realism and scientific accuracy are particularly high on the priority list of the creators of this kind of film. Aren’t giant monster/robot movies pretty much the archetypal ‘popcorn’ movie – pretty much brainless fun that should never be chilled by the application of actual scientific knowledge?
Definitely – Contagion is by far the scariest movie I have ever seen. Laughably oversized radioactive lizards don’t even come close. Indeed, there are even within the realms of purely fictional threats not directly rooted in real peril (in the manner that pandemic disease outbreaks are) all manner of things much scarier and more credible than giant city-crushing lizards.
A Terminator style scenario springs to mind, where we create advanced machines that ultimately decide they are better off without is, and so set about removing us by the most efficient means available.
Of course, anything that reminds us how corrupt and authoritarian our supposedly ‘benevolent’ rulers really are, and gives us a glimpse of the kind of society that all too many of the powerful, rich and privileged would create given the chance, is never anything short of terrifying. Well, terrifying if you are a fairly privlileged person yourself – if you belong to an underprivileged goup, then you are living in that type of dystopia already.
Even that old corny standby of Hollywood, the alien invasion, can be pretty effective if its creators remember that if an established interstellar travel capable civilisation actually knew about us, wished us ill for some reason, and could be bothered to travel the vast distances involved to do something about it, then the gulf in technological capacity between us and them would make any notion of actually fighting them utterly ludicrous – it wouldn’t be a war in any meaningful sense, any more than a field of wheat can fight against a combine harvester. Our Stone Age ancestors would stand a far better chance against a modern army than the amassed military capacity of humanity would have against such a foe.
It wouldn’t exactly be the kind of ‘American manifest destiny’ plotline that Hollywood goes for, nor would it have an easy ‘War of the Worlds’ style cop-out ending where an immensely advanced culture somehow never developed diagnostic medicine or the wit to realise that an unknown biome might present a danger from pathogens, but it would have the virtue of reminding us that we really aren’t the bigshots we like to pretend to be as a species, and that inventing a fictional deity to worship does nothing to change that. The universe is vast, and nothing much would change for the bulk of it if our little species, or even our whole solar system, ceased to exist tomorrow.
There are any number of frightening and even slightly thought provoking options without a big lizard in sight.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarella_(film)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesh_Gordon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Buckaroo_Banzai_Across_the_8th_Dimension
Worry about the mid-size robotic cane toads.
The minority report spider is just some smoothness and miniaturization away from the iRobot SUGV (Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle). Are these armed yet?
http://www.dinkybox.co.uk/acatalog/kubrick_minority_spider1.jpg
http://www.irobot.com/~/media/Images/iRobot/Robots/Defense/SUGV/Content%20Footer/ad-sugv_information.jpg
Chigau@ 16&36
Blade Runner was stupid?
Buckaroo Banzai was stupid?
Them’s fightin’ words.
No.
I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my communication skills.
My viewing of Cloverfield was disrupted, so spoiler wanted. I know the human protagonists got offed, but did the USAF manage to nuke the critter?
Anyway, what about a part-synthetic giant organism where the critical load-bearing components are assebled by self-replicating nanotech? And such an organism would be as interested in steel as in human flesh.
Kind of looking forward to this, since it seems they’re going to hew much closer to the original concept of Godzilla being an instoppable force of nature here to punish mankind for their hubris and destruction. not to mention the catharsis of finding a way of facing the almost incomprehensible destruction of the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Coupled with the current “giant storm” destructions and nuclear fear of the post-Japanese Tsunami, it could very well tap into the same kind of horror as the classic.
My only objection is the use of Georgi Ligeti’s Atmospheres on the sound track. That is far too serious for a popcorn movie, and is already associated with the greatest sci fi film of all time, an association I, for one, do not wish to sully.
Correction: it might have been from Ligeti’s Requiem, I cant find the exact identification, but the point still stands.
I don’t see why people keep saying “popcorn” movie.
it seems more of a disaster-horror mood and theme than a fun action blockbuster.
@brigerjohansson- yes. The final strike on the Cloverfield monster was apparently a nuke (raising the question of how the “found footage” would have survived). The monster doesn’t die on screen, but it was officially confirmed in source material that it died of its injuries shortly after.
And one of the reasons that Pacific Rim contains so many howlers is because it’s a live action homage to Neon Genesis Evangelion. If you haven’t seen that anime, don’t. It’s many hours of really awful faux symbolism and psuedo-religion. After the first fifteen minutes or so, I was hoping the monsters would win just because all the main characters were that unlikable. And then it had an ending that was apparently inspired by… honestly, I have no clue. Pacific Rim was much better.
@davidjanes #30: To be fair to Independence Day (not something I ever thought I’d say), they infected the network with a virus and then kersploded the command ship. Possibly it housed the servers for their enterprise malware protection as well as the only uncorrupted backups of the control systems for the atmospheric-assault ships? I mean, *I* certainly wouldn’t design a system that needed off-site network connectivity for fault tolerance and malware protection, but then I know any number of people who utilize ONLY internet-mediated off-site backup (“cloud” storage – I’m honestly not sure why we needed a new marketing term to replace “online”), so not entirely implausible. For that matter, my university is presently considering subcontracting/privatizing our data retention services; the aliens WERE the ultimate colonialist capitalists, after all, so idiotic systems design resulting from slavish adherence to a broken economic philosophy is actually pretty consistent.
Granted, the film has all sorts of problems matching reality in other ways, but then it also has Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith to compensate.
Say, why wasn’t Goldblum in Men in Black? He and David Duchovny really should have had cameos.
It’s NUCLEAR! It’s all you need to know.
This and the above might be related. I saw a local critic call it “Nukes-as-the-good-guys Syndrome”, pointing out it affects many American blockbusters. We need them nukes, just in case we’re attacked by giant monster aliens brought by the god of mischief in flying saucers throwing meteors at us.
Maybe we should focus on roomba sized robots roaming the world, killing all the pests.
“Screamers.” Be careful how you define “pest.”
knut7777@48: You’re right. It’s Ligeti’s Requiem for Soprano, Mezzo Soprano, Two Mixed Choirs and Orchestra. The ‘Monolith Music” form 2001.
@GIJoel, 22:
You made me smile.
’nuff said.
Yeah, yeah, giant monsters are impractical. So are giant robots, superpowers, faster-than-light travel and jump kicks, just to cite a few. I’ll call you when I start giving a shit.
microraptor:
I think NGE’s ending was inspired by Gainax running out of money. (And I’m really not convinced that Pacific Rim was a homage to NGE. For a start, where was the penguin?)
Oh, it’s not like Godzilla eats. He’s nookular-powered. His stomach has, uh, mutated into a plasma gland.
The thing is, those were aliens. Windows viruses don’t run on a Mac, or vice versa. Why would any Earth virus run on an alien OS!?!
How many bits do they even have in their bytes!?!
PZ Myers
It’s honestly not the terrible science that bothers me the most, although Dara O’Briain does a brilliant bit on 2012’s magnificent “the neutrinos are mutating” line, it’s when people act in staggeringly stupid ways – Mano Singham had a post about it a month or so ago, about using rank stupidity to drive the plot forward.
For example, as previously mentioned, demolishing most of Hong Kong in a giant robot fistfight because apparently the person overseeing the retrofit of the thing forgot they had a giant sword installed.
… and it’s never explained why ranged weapons stopped working, in fact, the movie shows that ranged weapons work very well, but for some reason only one Jaeger is equipped with them, why?
It’s just lazy writing, obviously they want to set up the big Hong Kong CGI deathmatch, but seriously, a single line of dialog or a quick throwaway plot trope (eg. “oh no, the sword’s jammed!”) would do it, but they don’t even bother with that.
eg. In Iron Man 2, far from a cerebral film, when he busts out the spinning red lasers of death that obliterate everything, there’s a quick exchange to the effect of “why the hell didn’t you start with that one?” and the response is “I can only use it once” – ok, fine, I can deal with that if I don’t think about it too much, but at least they addressed the issue.
It’s one thing if the pacing of the movie stops you from having to think about it for more than half a second, which is why Michael Bay tends to get away with a lot of this kind of thing, but when you have principal characters who are soul crushingly stupid, they become completely unrelatable and any sense of tension is lost because you simply don’t care about them.
Chigau@ 16&36
…
Buckaroo Banzai was stupid?
…
The Deuce you say!
I guess it just drives me nuts that so much time, money and effort goes into creating something so monumentally stupid.
It gets pretty old spending anywhere from 6 months to over a year working on CG for a movie that’s going to suck balls, too.
Do not complain about Pacific Rim’s crappiness (having it on my tablet made it easy to ignore crying kids and other distractions on a recent flight, so it has served some purpose) unless you’ve been exposed to its “mirror image” film, Atlantic Rim
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2740710/
Side comment: In the 60s, when I was a youngster, I was allowed to stay up Friday and Saturday evenings to watch the late night movie showings of all sorts of crappy monster and sci-fi movies from that era and earlier. I got used to bad acting and lousy special effects wrapped around bad movie plots at an early age.
I view the current movies as newer editions of what I grew up with. I know they’re not going to be good but they are fun (to me), especially at the end of a long day.
Moon (2009) was wonderful. Sam Rockwell deserved an Oscar for that performance. Monsters (2010) was great – atmospheric and thought-provoking.
The 1978 remake of Invasion Of The Body snatchers is powerful and beautifully made, but I’ll watch anything with a cast like that in it.
Not sure what they meant by “analog” power, but the reason Gipsy Danger was able to get out and save Striker Eureka after the EMP blast was that its systems were all offline at the time, and its nuclear core was unaffected. I kind of just took “analog” to be a figure of speech.
As for the nukes not being pointed at the hole, there was the stated point that they didn’t want to poison the earth with frequent nuclear attacks. They only decided to send one down after Newt and Herman drifted with the kaiju and learned how the rift worked. There were no missiles on the early jaegers because there was no feasable way to make them work, as missiles large enough to take down a kaiju couldn’t be launched from a mobile platform. Striker Eureka’s rockets were a new invention made specifically to target kaiju and burrow into their skin.
As for the sword, I’ve got nothing, except possibly that Mako didn’t want to force Raleigh to adapt to a new weapon he’d never trained with on their first time out.
Pacific Rim was a big dumb movie, but I found it addressed most of the major issues, I feel.
Ah, Raymond Burr, I remember reading that he was gay.
If you have a copy of Judy Garland’s “A Star Is Born”, look at the extras and you’ll see there is a track with footage of the premiere.
Burr is one of the guests and he has a handsome young sailor “just back from Korea” whom he gushes over as a guest along with a young starlet from one of the studios. You can guess which one was his “real” date.
I’d love to see a mashup between this and “Noah”, with Godzilla blasting the ark into oblivion while Russell Crowe yells “WTF”!?!
And then watch the Fundies react to the blasphemy…
In the trailer, Godzilla appears to have destroyed Las Vegas. I approve.
edmundog
This would make some sense, but it isn’t really played that way in the film. The way it’s played up is that Gypsy is immune to the EMP because it’s old tech, not simply because it was turned off at the time – particularly since there’s nothing stopping the creature from triggering another blast (it never gets the chance to, but that’s hardly known at this point of the story).
I’ve seen the movie a few times and do not remember anything like this, when do they say that? The only thing I remember about environmental side effects is the “Kaiju Blue” pollution stuff, certainly nothing about not wanting to use nukes.
Are you thinking director commentary or something? Because the only significant line I remember is “to fight monsters, we created monsters of our own”.
Again, this is not explained in the movie. It might be in some secondary materials, I know there was a book release, but you can’t leave plot points this large out of the narrative and expect people to read the Pac Rim wiki to find it out.
It’s certainly a big dumb movie and I actually quite like it, it certainly looks fantastic, but when they get a little too dumb, where people are “carrying the idiot ball” simply to set up CG set pieces, it gets annoyingly stupid.
Just about any minimally practical proposal you can think of is going to be more effective than giant robots.
That’s radiation, not fire!
Cuttleson collected all of the old Godzilla movies, and we have watched them all multiple times. I want this movie to be made by someone who loves Godzilla like my son does.
Looks promising.
Honestly, I loved Pacific Rim. Was it stupid? Yes. And its cheese level were well over 50,000 camemberts. BUT it was so much fun! And it looked beautiful. The whole point of the movie, according to Guillermo del Toro was to make the audience feal like 10 year old kids watching Voltron or something, which, as far as I’m concerned, means mission accomplished, because that’s exactly what it was like.
as these movies and the stories behind them go they are our nightmares our “monsters from the id” projections of our fears. They succeed best when they can touch that fear regardless of the reality .
A couple of things in the current movie trend of giant creatures/robots and alien invasions supper hero battles that really just stop me is the barely acknowledged collateral damage that also happens in crime dramas. Those battles in cityscapes make the Twin Towers look like a prat fall come on .
The other thing is this projection of our worst history of invasion, concurring , colonization and enslaving our fellow humans you would think that we were afraid of war and did not engage in it all the fucking time. Why would the inhabitants from a place that is thousands of light years from here with the technology to get here want or need to fight us for our planet?
There is nothing here except us that would not exist between here and there and be easily accessible to anyone who could get here from there.
one of the most realistic scify post apocalyptic movie (one of my favorite kinds) was The Road
very disturbing
uncle frogy
@CRIP DYKE 55
When you were a kid, did you get your friends to sing the theme whilst you sat on the bottom of the pool, and then burst onto the surface, and made a rawwr noise, when they hit the first Godzilla?
I did. :)
Godzilla is art. Peasants do not ‘get’ Godzilla. They do not deserve Godzilla. They should just continue to run away screaming.
Given known materials and gravity there are, from a simplistic engineering standpoint, strict limits on how big things can be. Biological systems, lacking access to things like titanium and carbon fiber, are even more limited. A lizard as large as depicted would lack the strength to stand and if it did try to stand it would crush its own bones, fall flat, and, in any event, likely suffocate. No need to fight it at all. I dies well enough all by itself.
But that assumes there are not some sort of super materials, perhaps some sort of anti-gravity stuff. Not bloody likely that there is any such material but one never knows for sure.
These sorts of film demands a facile willingness to suspend disbelief.
Pacific Rim was ridiculous as it depicted humanity, well in the future, reliving ancient history, discovers fists and wrestling are not the end-all of weapons and rediscover the sword and club.
@ microraptor 50:
The original ending to NGE can be explained quite simply: Anno was in the midst of a psychological breakdown. The final episode was, quite literally, written during a therapy session.
If you like the basic premise of NGE, but hate the nihilistic bait-and-switch, I would suggest going to eyrie-productions.com and reading Neon Exodus Evangelion. (Fair warning, it’s a ‘replace Shinji with someone who belongs in a cockpit’ fic and DJ is _really annoying_ in the early parts.)
Cuttlefish:
Can we meet halfway with Radioactive Fire Breath?
Icthyic #20
Just reread a short story from the 80s about a mountain man driving off a dragon using a bullet packed with extracts of coca, peyote, and exotic fungi.
MM
You’re right; Buckaroo Banzai has no sex nor nudity in it (that I recall; very little at any rate)
Ah, Mad Amos. I remember reading that story in high school. Back when I still liked Alan Dean Foster.
I know the picture I use on this account is a little hard to make out, but it’s an Atlas mech from the game Battletech. I have no problem getting my giant fighting mech fix.
The thing about Pacific Rim and other movies like it is that they try to tack an inherently stupid sounding psuedoscientific explanations for why they’re using giant robots to punch huge aliens to death while acting like the explanation wasn’t a problem. The best case when you’re doing something like Pacific Rim is to just lampshade it and move on. You know, give an explanation for why giant robots are being used to fight the aliens one on one because the aliens have some sort of obsession with single combat that nobody’s been able to figure out, but the one time that anyone tried to use cruise missiles and heavy bombers against one of the aliens, the mothership retaliated by annihilating Frankfurt and nobody’s been interested in provoking them a second time.
Also, when making a monster movie, give the majority of the screen time to the monster stomping stuff and looking cool. That was one of the major failures of both the 90s American Godzilla movie and Cloverfield: they kept showing the boring human characters run around and argue or say their lines in very unconvincing ways instead of actually showing the critter that the movie was supposedly about.
microraptor:
Your mileage varies of course.
For my part, I don’t want such a monster movie. To be sure, I do want lots of stomping stuff and looking cool, but I also want to connect to something in the movie. For me, that’s usually the human element. For all the complaints about his movies, I think JJ Abrams does a pretty good job at developing a cast of characters to care about, so that when the monster comes, there’s some investment in the characters. One of my big problems with the Emmerich Godzilla is that I didn’t care about the characters. They were poorly developed and caricatures of real people. I thought Matthew Broderick was the wrong choice for main character as well. There was no on in the movie for me to connect to. Thus when ‘Zilla came a’stompin’ I didn’t really care who he squished.
The same is true of other so-called sci fi movies. Independence Day readily comes to mind. I haven’t watched that in years (and can’t imagine any reason to, unless I play Mock the Movie), but looking back it looks like a sci fi lite B-movie put out by the GOP.
I really liked this movie
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_9
So, did Godzilla cure Walter White’s cancer, or was it the nukes?
Dimensional rift. It pulled the monster through too.
I’ve come to dread the human element in any new Hollywood disaster/monster/invasion movie. After over a decade having to endure trite human drama and utterly unlikeable casts, I just wish they’d stop trying.
Exactly. It’s what film makers keep apparently failing to grasp about Godzilla films: the fans are just here for Godzilla. We already get that the plot is minimal, so don’t waste our time with more flat dialog from the C list actors who sound like they’re ODed on NyQuil.
yeah
I liked the cat in Alien.
-What if the Solaris ocen hacked into godzilla’s brain and created the one thing G. is afraid of? It sure worked to drive the Solaris station crew crazy.
Tpyos: should be ocean, not ocen.
I think it did. Clearly Earth is the thing that Godzilla fears.
– “The American Astronaut” (“Stingray Sam” is also wonderful.)
Lovely. One reviewer described is as a collaboration between Andy Warhol and Ed Wood.
– If you didn’t see Pacific Rim in IMAX, you have no idea what transcendent stupidity is.
– Having said all that I must obviously die, but must also add that JJ Abrams is worst mangler of science in film, ever, because where other film makers wear their stupid like spandex, or serve their fastandloose with Zappa sauce, Abrams manages to mix actual sortascience and pure 12 year old silliness without ever changing tone or winking (though winks appear elsewhere). I hate him because I like him anyway.
– Oh. And re del Toro… he could make a movie about alien refrigerators destroying the earth in order to verify the melting point of chocolate and I’d still support him because of PAN’S LABYRINTH. References to which must always, always be made in caps.
The cat is the main protagonist in Alien, in the same way the hyperintelligent white mice are pulling the strings in The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
If the “monsters” are made from alien nanotech particles the “biological organisms are frail” argument fails. Why anyone would create pseudobiological entities like this is another matter.
Why would anyone create poodles? Why would anyone create a computer virus? Somewhere, on another world, a gang of bored, evil teenagersis using a “build an organism” software app.
microraptor
The problem is that the more screen time the monster gets, the more expensive the movie gets.
Visual FX is monstrously expensive (pun maybe slightly intended) because it’s so labor intensive. The FX department is nearly always the largest department on any major movie these days, often outnumbering the principal photography crew by 2 or 3 to 1 and since we’re at the ass end of production, which always overruns, we have to deliver 12 months of work in 6, which means fucktons of (paid) overtime – at least in North America, the guys in London are typically not paid hourly overtime (they’re still made to work it though).
Having a couple of no name actors standing in a room talking about their feelings is a much cheaper way to fill up screen time.
@microraptor
At least NGE had a workable reason for why they didn’t use ‘conventional’ weapons[1]: Only something with an AT-field could take out an Angel and things that could generate an AT-field only came in one shape.
[1] It’s not like we had to wait for an answer to the question: “Why not use a tacnuke?”
I’ll give Godzilla a pass on size. Perhaps Godzilla is not, strictly speaking, a biological organism at all… but is actually a Great Old One.
That depends on one’s willingness to accept the AT-field concept as workable, but I see your point.
I’d be much happier watching a movie that featured less CGI (and, depending on how it was done, less detailed CGI) and devoted more of its special effects budget to cheaper puppets and latex costumes if it meant that I’d get a monster movie starring the monster instead of getting a drama with a couple of minutes of monster movie added on.
You know, it’s really funny that these days horror movies tend to show the monster too much (killing the suspense) while science fiction and fantasy movies tend to show the monster too little.
@pentatomid #71
I am so stealing the Camembert scale of cheesiness :) that is inspired.
@chigau #81
I loved District 9!
It’s such a horrific depiction of human brutality with all it’s stupid, illogical motivations. Mostly xenophobia, also some local superstitions about taking on the characteristics of things you eat, also power corrupting the powerful. Fear and anger and hate directed at things you don’t understand; people being sadistic just because they can and because the object of their sadism is “less than human”. The saddest thing is, if such a broken-alien-mothership situation were to occurr, that’s probably exactly how we’d treat the aliens. It’s a powerful, depressing, horrific-in-places movie, but I’m come across few others that can drum up that level of emotion in the viewer (or this viewer, at least).
@knownot #90
Seconding the praise for Pan’s Labyrinth (sorry; PAN’S LABYRINTH!). I haven’t watched it in years, but the memories of that monster with the eyes in it’s hands still gives me the creeps to this day.
chigau @81
Same!
The worse monster movie of all time has yet to be made: President Palin.
The thug’s vote suppression machine is so effective they not only disenfranchised all non-thug voters, but most of their own base as well. Hence, a small group of even more extreme fruitcakes is able to write-in “Palin”. Micheal is British and not eligible, so it’s Sarah. Sensing its chance, the Vatican instructs its lackeys on the Supreme Court to quash any challenges.
Things proceed downhill fast. Very quickly her handlers realize what everyone else figured out a long time ago, she’s so dumb a whole new mathematics has yet to be invented to describe her dumbness. Even the Koch’s become exasperated. And the Ark Park still doesn’t get built.
So much for Plan A.
Plan B: Reanimate Ronald Reagan. This fails since funds for the necessary research were not approved by a series of thug-immobilized Congresses.
Plan C: Wheel out Dick Cheney, who is still alive thanks to his umpteen transplants and zillions from Halliburton.
Now with a proven team in place, the thugs can begi—— ZAP! Snarglefiogurlepugif…
A drone flies off into the distance…