Does the movie affect your perspective of previous films?

[ILL GREEN]

The new G'14 film is underneath my favorite showa movies.

Long live Eiji.

[Kilaak Kommander]

G14 made me more open minded about CGI in kaiju films. For all its flaws, suitmation gives a sense of weight and physical impact that's hard to match. CGI (and stop motion animation before it) usually feels lightweight and cartoony. It didn't in G14. The sense of mass and power was there. The effects team did an incredible job. I still love me some suitmation, but I'm willing to accept that it may not be the best way to do kaiju effects anymore.

This is kind of random, but I'm appreciating Jun Fukuda more these days. Making a great monster movie isn't as easy as it sounds. We've had some pretty decent American monster flicks lately (Cloverfield, Kong, PR, and now G14) but no truly great ones despite all the talent and technology involved. Fukuda didn't make great movies either, but he had dwindling budgets and some really bad concepts to work with. I really like a lot of his work. He had more talent than I ever gave him credit for. #respectfukuda

[Tohosaurus]

Not really, but that's probably a good thing. Now we've had our big budget Hollywood version, but special effects aside I don't find it superior to G85, Biollante, even G2K (dub aside), much less the original or GMK. More money does not automatically make the movie better. It's not a slam on LPG because I enjoy it plenty, but am merely pointing out that for me at least it by no means renders the prior films obsolete the way Nolan's movies render the non-1966 and 1989 Batman movies obsolete (in a way - I've still seen them).

It almost makes it more saddening that G98 didn't feature a proper Godzilla depiction, because so many years later we might've had an entire series of Hollywood Godzilla movies already.

[tymon]

I still love me some suitmation, but I'm willing to accept that it may not be the best way to do kaiju effects anymore.

Yeah, I dunno. G14's effects are excellent, and in some ways better than the practical effects we've seen, but I still think suitmation/miniatures have a lot of unmined potential - the two things holding Toho back have always been budget and time, so even their best movies have been rushed, and the FX suffer as a result. Imagine an American-sized budget/schedule, but with the best Japanese practical FX technicians. This was the basic concept behind the unmade US film Godzilla Reborn - and with CGI as a supplement, I think it may be the best way to portray giant monsters. I doubt we'll ever see it, though, since CGI has pretty much completely taken over...

But really, what this franchise needs more than anything is good storytelling, and good characters. G14, like most Godzilla films, failed in this regard. Spectacle is the easy part.

[Zentenk]

It makes me appreciate the talent of Toho much more. Yes, this movie was more modern and crisp as I saw it in IMAX 3D... but that is about it. I came to see Godzilla, and for the amount of screen time he had... I left somewhat disappointed.

[tymon]

^Agreed. If you're going to hide the monster, at least give us some interesting characters or, hell, something resembling a plot. Everything was so boring and aimless, and the lack of Godzilla was just insult to injury as a result. If the writing was better, those teases would have worked in the film's favor rather than against it.

[Zentenk]

I never understand America with monsters needing to be glimpsed throughout a film... is it to piss us off? Are they afraid they aren't good enough with their CGI? I laughed when it showed up on the news broadcast where the kid was watching it... "Oh, now I get to see them fighting!" Then it cuts back to a belly shot, foot shot, head... focus on the mouth for the roar, now back to the piss poor military actors.

[three]

alright guys lets not turn this into a thread about what we did/didn't like about the movie.

[three]

alright guys lets not turn this into a thread about what we did/didn't like about the movie.

Look at this entire subforum. That's all that's been happening.

wow. way to DEPRESS ME.

[HannibalBarca]

Are they afraid they aren't good enough with their CGI?

That's a pretty big part of it. The human eye is better than you'd think at recognizing fakeness. If you put the giant CGI monster front and center for too long, your eye will eventually realize just how fake it looks. This occurs even more quickly for something with bright colors, or that's fully visible with a lot of light. That's why these movies (i.e. CGI monster movies) like to play hide the monster, and have their action scenes at night with plenty of smoke, fog, and weather effects.

[three]

so short and sweet: this movie made bad movies in the series i look really bad (and thus even harder to like, especially if i didn't like them already) but also accentuated the overlooked brightspots of the series for me (like Godzilla Raids Again).