Collins' Crypt: Do you like GODZILLA movies?

The last weekend, Godzilla: the king of monsters open to $ 47 million, a bit below expectations that were already a bit muted for a mega-budget movie in an ongoing franchise. I will come back to this more when the next Drawn & Quartered will be available, but for the moment, I will simply point out that in terms of ticket sales, not only has this been a big step forward compared to the 2014 remake, but also at the hated price Version 1998 also. Hell, even Cloverfield He held more seats during his opening weekend, which was in full winter and for a fraction of the budget. Since next year Godzilla vs Kong is already shot, we know we will have at least one more movie in this "Monsterverse", but unless it produces Marvel figures, I would not expect to see the titans roar again on the big screen so soon.

And it's a shame, because in terms of entertainment, the franchise is three to three in my book. Would I have liked a little more action in the 2014 movie? Sure. Could Skull Island have been better if John C. Reilly has been in the game all the time, and / or if John Goodman has not been killed so soon? Certainly. And … well, I have no complaints to make about King of monsters. As a fan of Mike Dougherty's other films, I was delighted when he was hired to bring his kind of genre cooking (I consider it "a lovely horror") on a playground as gigantic after his KrampusAnd I was not disappointed. The fights against the monsters were really exciting, and although I was not about to rush to buy the action figures, I thought the human characters were an improvement over the 2014 movie (Kyle Chandler > the guy who played the other Quicksilver). And I saw it in 4DX, which added enormously to my pleasure by sending my chair aside and back while the mists of water and wind blew to my face during the appropriate scenes – this Was a perfect entertainment for the summer.

But alas, the box office discussions and the "twitter movie" type suggest that I may be in the minority, at least for the moment. As with the 2014 film, I've seen complaints that too much time was spent on humans, that battles were not spectacular enough, and so on. But it's interesting to note that the biggest supporters of my entourage were well-known and longtime fans of Godzilla the franchise as a whole, and if you ask me, these are the most difficult to satisfy with an American production. They caught all the Easter eggs, the tributes in Bear McCreary's score, and so on. and had fun – but those I've never heard of before have expressed disappointment. That's why I thought and later I even heard in clear terms (including from one of my BMD colleagues) that the problem may not lie in the movies themselves. same, but in the fact that people seem to like the idea of these movies more than they actually want to sit and watch them, because in reality … well, let's just say that they all ask yourself to be a little patient.

Now, I am by no means an expert on this franchise. I've only seen a handful of 33 films in their entirety and have probably only identified some of G's most iconic foes by seeing a photo (Rodan not among them; j & # 39; 39 needed one of the humans to explain it to me when he showed in KOTM). But I've seen enough to know that Dougherty (and Edwards, by the way) was doing nothing unusual by limiting Godzilla 's action to a handful of scenes, because that' s the way it works. was the status quo of the series since the first day. As a child, one of my local chains in Boston used to show movies on Sunday mornings (with scams and fallout of course), and I was used to knowing that I did not have to m & # 39; 39; annoying before the final confrontation between Godzilla and the enemy of the film, because I knew that the essential of the foregoing was clear about the action of the monsters and that I, at the At the age of eight, I did not care about their yakkety-yak.

I do not understand why some people seem to think that the Monsterverse entries are the only ones guilty of this approach. Dougherty and Edwards have actually followed closely the formula of Japanese films: Godzilla arrives a little early, has a brief skirmish with another monster later and, after a "defeat", returns for a revenge at the climax of the film. Between these three or four sequences, there are talkative human scenes and people watching monitors in the control rooms. Your mileage will of course vary according to your personal tastes and peculiarities. As a father, I found the fate of Kyle Chandler in the new film quite compelling – he understood that Godzilla had not specifically "murdered" his young son (at the events of the first film there was at five) and that, failing that of a better term, he was the "good guy" in this monster-driven world, but that did not change the fact that he still hated the thing and wanted her dead.

Others may find it boring, and that's fine – provided they understand that there is literally no Godzilla film without focus on human melodrama. The original film and the best contains a lot – there is even a love triangle that takes about as much time as Godzilla, or more. And the 30 movies between them were not different. this site (and others) literally took a stopwatch for all the movies (not the new one though) and found that in the 31 films tracked, Godzilla appears in at least nine of them – including the original – even less than him in the US movie of 2014. (Fun, the movie in the middle? The horrible of 1998.) And there is no correlation that says "More Godzilla = best movie "; one of his longer appearances on the screen was in Godzilla 2000, a film that was rejected by critics in Japan, his native country, for having this bad pace. It seems that there is no way to please everyone, and that is precisely what these films have to do to recover their huge budgets. I doubt that the executive sleeps comfortably knowing that the guy from the Collins Crypt is in their corner when they open at prices below those of Rate R John Wick 3 it had a quarter of the cost.

The complaints that the newer movies are too serious (Edwards is more than Dougherty) also baffle me, making me wonder if they've ever seen the original and best-regarded film, which has almost no foolishness count the primitive effects of time (do not do that). The shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki hovers heavily over the 1954 film, devastatingly embedded around the end of the film's second act, after its largest sequence of Godzilla's attack. Once he returned to the ocean, we went to a hospital where the wounded are being treated. Children were tested positive for radioactive poisoning and parents cried over their losses. It's downright horrible to watch and, at least in other Japanese films that I have seen, nothing has been matched in terms of presenting Godzilla as a serious threat with devastating consequences. As the most acclaimed film in the entire series, it is not surprising that American films try to emulate it, for example: Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla II. Of course, this kind of thing would not support a great frankness, and there is nothing wrong with making them more child-friendly, but there is certainly nothing wrong with trying to find that. your darkest, either, especially when it is proven that he holds up well after 65 years.

That said, one of the things I really liked King of monsters Has Dougherty found a good balance between the serious and legitimate approach of this film (and some others, like the recent Shin Godzilla, who invoked the recent devastation caused by the tidal waves for his plot) and the more exuberant appeal of other children's mornings (which, again, also reduced the time spent on monsters to a minimum). There are three other major monsters in the movie besides the big guy, and they all have their big moments before a big fight at four (for Fenway Park!) For the climax, thus allowing many enjoyable moments for the audience and I do not have the exact time, a decisive increase of the 2014 film. But it's still about some real ideas; the human antagonist voluntarily releases the monsters as part of Thanos-y's attempt to reduce the population and prevent the planet from becoming unsustainable, which – like the current human drama – is a good idea or a bad one depending on your point of view, but it is nevertheless an idea, which is always superior to stupid action in my eyes. I would stupidly bored with two hours of nonstop action of monsters because then that would be basically a Transformers Following various creations of CGI – the "slow" parts contribute to make the carnage even more exciting when it occurs, as opposed to being numb at the end of the film.

Again, maybe it's not the fault of the movie or its paying members; it is possible that moviegoers (a lot more here than overseas, although the new movie was a little short too) simply do not care about the giant monsters attacking the cities. The first film was close to $ 200 million, but if you look at inflation, you will find that it still sells fewer tickets than Emmerich's revisited movie. Pacific Rim entries have completely flopped in the United States. Skull Island OK, thanks to its release of the summer, which should help next year Godzilla vs Kong As it is also a release in the spring, but did not meet expectations and failed to match its production budget at the national level. Sharks and dinosaurs, which are largely confined to the ocean and to Isla Nublar, still seem to frequent the American public. Maybe the view of the buildings being demolished is too commonplace now to be exciting. And what worries me is that future films will try to satisfy an audience that may not even exist, or that is guided by erroneous memories of what they really were. I know I'll be there for them when they open their doors – I only hope I'm not alone in the theater OR that I'm excited.