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Emma @ The Movies (1786 KP) rated Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) in Movies
Jun 22, 2019 (Updated Sep 25, 2019)
Five years after Godzilla saved us from the MUTO attack the world (or some of it at least) wants to see an end to the potential threat of the Titans. Monarch are studying them and hiding them away from the world, but there are calls to destroy the monsters before more devastation befalls the planet?
Dr Emma Russell has developed the Orca, a device that communicates with the Titans and can be used to calm them and stop any further destruction. Not everyone has the same idea about how to use the Orca though and it's taken, along with Dr Russell and her daughter Madison, after its successful test run. The race is on to recover the device and avert the impending crisis.
Godzilla is one of my favourite monsters. For years the 1998 film with Matthew Broderick and Jean Reno in it was one of my favourite films. I also love the "proper" Godzilla movies where they destroy Tokyo at every given opportunity. To have new films felt like a wonderful thing... until I saw 2014 Godzilla. I rewatched it before going to see King Of The Monsters and I remembered how underwhelmed I was. The characters didn't grab me and I found the whole thing uninspiring. The prospect of a second wasn't great, but then I saw the trailers, they were spectacular.
I really enjoyed this and went to see it again in 3D, a much more peaceful screening than the first viewing. The girl who was sitting a couple of seats away was animatedly jumping at every opportunity, her reaction was far scarier than anything that happened on the screen.
This was much improved on the last instalment. I loved that it embraced the original films and the fact that it switched its focus more to the monsters than the humans. You go to a monster movie to see monsters, and Godzilla 2014 felt like it had forgotten that fact.
If I had to describe this film to someone I'd say it was a combination of Infinity War and Jurassic Park, just with slightly larger monsters... yep, I'm fairly happy with that comparison. I may have been imagining it but I felt like there were a few nods to JP jumbled in there... maybe that's just me.
There's a collection of recognisable faces in the cast and I don't think there's a single person who underperforms. I thought that Millie Bobby Brown gave a great performance as Madison, she managed to give us a child character that wasn't particularly annoying, which may actually be a first in creature features.
Charles Dance makes an excellent bad guy, there's something about his look, a cross between a vampire and the restaurant critic from Ratatouille that works for me. He also gets to have a great moment of silent humour with Brown when they're in a lift together, it was very unexpected for their potential on-screen relationship.
We get to see four of our Titans in this movie as main players. Godzilla, obvs, Mothra, Rodan and Monster Zero, or King Ghidorah to his friends. The sheer scale they've gone to is amazing, and I thought the way they were created with their individual traits was beautiful. The one drawback to the beautiful glowing monster bodies is that the scenes have to be fairly dark to appreciate that aspect. They manage to use those aspects of the creatures to give the extra lighting the scenes need meaning that you get something that's both dark and scary as well as light and hopeful. The colours were something that really stood out to me in the advertising, the lightness of the blue and green against the anger of the orange and yellow, it shows the good and evil relationship really well.
The size of the creatures is mad and sometimes a little impossible to gauge, we get a few moments where we're given some perspective with man-made structures but they do a good job of trying to get it across in basic visual techniques too. You see a lot of them from "human" angles, from the ground running, from buildings and vehicles. It feels like an exercise in shock and awe and takes you back to Dr Serizawa's point at the beginning of the film that we're Godzilla's pets, it's not the other way around.
The effects/animation looked solid, at no point did I see anything on-screen that drew my attention away from the action. One moment in particular stood out and that was a large explosion somewhere in the middle of the movie. It was given an old fashioned kind of a look and it gave me the impression that they'd really looked at things that had come before it for inspiration.
You have to obviously accept the facts that in these sorts of films, parents will willingly put their children in immense danger, bad guys will always have prepared a short video presentation to explain their motivations and just because there's destruction happening all around you does not mean you will die. It's got all the classic monster/disaster movie moments that you love to hate in it. "Movie Reality" is awesome.
If you couldn't already tell, I loved this. Much improvement from the last instalment and an entertaining action-packed addition to the monsterverse. Oscar winner? Probably not. Entertaining escapism? Most definitely. I am a little concerned about how the story will progress from here. They had plenty of scope for lots of movies after some of the things they showed in the film, but the events of KotM mean that there's little room to move with it all, we'll have to see what happens in Godzilla Vs Kong next year.
What you should do
This really deserves to be seen on the big screen. The sound and the effects combine to make some great viewing.
Movie thing you wish you could take home
If they could adapt the Orca for human use I'd be interested.
Dr Emma Russell has developed the Orca, a device that communicates with the Titans and can be used to calm them and stop any further destruction. Not everyone has the same idea about how to use the Orca though and it's taken, along with Dr Russell and her daughter Madison, after its successful test run. The race is on to recover the device and avert the impending crisis.
Godzilla is one of my favourite monsters. For years the 1998 film with Matthew Broderick and Jean Reno in it was one of my favourite films. I also love the "proper" Godzilla movies where they destroy Tokyo at every given opportunity. To have new films felt like a wonderful thing... until I saw 2014 Godzilla. I rewatched it before going to see King Of The Monsters and I remembered how underwhelmed I was. The characters didn't grab me and I found the whole thing uninspiring. The prospect of a second wasn't great, but then I saw the trailers, they were spectacular.
I really enjoyed this and went to see it again in 3D, a much more peaceful screening than the first viewing. The girl who was sitting a couple of seats away was animatedly jumping at every opportunity, her reaction was far scarier than anything that happened on the screen.
This was much improved on the last instalment. I loved that it embraced the original films and the fact that it switched its focus more to the monsters than the humans. You go to a monster movie to see monsters, and Godzilla 2014 felt like it had forgotten that fact.
If I had to describe this film to someone I'd say it was a combination of Infinity War and Jurassic Park, just with slightly larger monsters... yep, I'm fairly happy with that comparison. I may have been imagining it but I felt like there were a few nods to JP jumbled in there... maybe that's just me.
There's a collection of recognisable faces in the cast and I don't think there's a single person who underperforms. I thought that Millie Bobby Brown gave a great performance as Madison, she managed to give us a child character that wasn't particularly annoying, which may actually be a first in creature features.
Charles Dance makes an excellent bad guy, there's something about his look, a cross between a vampire and the restaurant critic from Ratatouille that works for me. He also gets to have a great moment of silent humour with Brown when they're in a lift together, it was very unexpected for their potential on-screen relationship.
We get to see four of our Titans in this movie as main players. Godzilla, obvs, Mothra, Rodan and Monster Zero, or King Ghidorah to his friends. The sheer scale they've gone to is amazing, and I thought the way they were created with their individual traits was beautiful. The one drawback to the beautiful glowing monster bodies is that the scenes have to be fairly dark to appreciate that aspect. They manage to use those aspects of the creatures to give the extra lighting the scenes need meaning that you get something that's both dark and scary as well as light and hopeful. The colours were something that really stood out to me in the advertising, the lightness of the blue and green against the anger of the orange and yellow, it shows the good and evil relationship really well.
The size of the creatures is mad and sometimes a little impossible to gauge, we get a few moments where we're given some perspective with man-made structures but they do a good job of trying to get it across in basic visual techniques too. You see a lot of them from "human" angles, from the ground running, from buildings and vehicles. It feels like an exercise in shock and awe and takes you back to Dr Serizawa's point at the beginning of the film that we're Godzilla's pets, it's not the other way around.
The effects/animation looked solid, at no point did I see anything on-screen that drew my attention away from the action. One moment in particular stood out and that was a large explosion somewhere in the middle of the movie. It was given an old fashioned kind of a look and it gave me the impression that they'd really looked at things that had come before it for inspiration.
You have to obviously accept the facts that in these sorts of films, parents will willingly put their children in immense danger, bad guys will always have prepared a short video presentation to explain their motivations and just because there's destruction happening all around you does not mean you will die. It's got all the classic monster/disaster movie moments that you love to hate in it. "Movie Reality" is awesome.
If you couldn't already tell, I loved this. Much improvement from the last instalment and an entertaining action-packed addition to the monsterverse. Oscar winner? Probably not. Entertaining escapism? Most definitely. I am a little concerned about how the story will progress from here. They had plenty of scope for lots of movies after some of the things they showed in the film, but the events of KotM mean that there's little room to move with it all, we'll have to see what happens in Godzilla Vs Kong next year.
What you should do
This really deserves to be seen on the big screen. The sound and the effects combine to make some great viewing.
Movie thing you wish you could take home
If they could adapt the Orca for human use I'd be interested.
Gareth von Kallenbach (980 KP) rated Moonfall (2022) in Movies
Feb 3, 2022
The late ’90s and early 2000s was filled with epic, over-the-top disaster movies focusing on all methods of world-ending cataclysmic events. Alien invasions as seen in Independence Day, set on destroying all humans and snatching our planet’s remaining resources, global warming resulting in floods and freezing temperatures, even threats of asteroids crashing into the earth. While many of these movies were ridiculous and epic at times, they all focused on a singular threat facing humankind and a group of ordinary (yet somehow extraordinary) people to save the planet and ourselves. Moonfall attempts to take another stab at the formula that made these movies famous (even infamous) resulting in some mixed and head-scratching results.
Moonfall, directed by Roland Emmerich, stars Halle Berry and Patrick Wilson as a pair of NASA astronauts that are attacked by a strange mechanical swarm while performing a routine satellite repair mission from the space shuttle Endeavor in the mid-1990s. The attack resulted in the death of one of the crew members and severely damaged the shuttle. Brian Harper (Wilson) and Jo Fowler (Berry) successfully return the shuttle to earth only to see Harper take the fall for the death of his crewman and the fall guy for a coverup to prevent the citizens of earth from truly understanding what they encountered.
Fast forward to current day and a “crazy” conspiracy theorist K.C Houseman, believing the moon to be a megastructure built by aliens, discovers that the moon’s orbit is rapidly eroding. He attempts to reach out to NASA and after several unsuccessful attempts releases his findings via social media. The top minds at NASA confirm what has been identified and estimate that they have only three weeks to execute a plan to prevent the moon from crashing into the earth destroying everything and everyone. The race for the survival of the planet is quickly on which will focus on not only the NASA “team”, but each of their family members.
Let me get this out of the way first, I personally loved many of Roland Emmerich’s wildly outlandish films. I thought Independence Day was fantastic, and even though many found The Day After Tomorrow a bit to preachy and ridiculous, I still found it entertaining for what it was. So, I was excited going into Moonfall. I was ready for a fun movie that I felt would be a mindless, fun adventure which was something I had really missed in many of the movies that had come out over the past year or two. Unfortunately, my aspirations (and even the low bar I had set my expectations for) would be quickly dashed.
Moonfall is a movie that struggles throughout to find an identity. I found myself instantly comparing several of Emmerich’s films during its roughly two-hour run time. At times its reminiscent of Independence Day, with its alien destruction of earth storyline, and then quickly jumps to a disaster film about the moon crashing into the earth. It’s as though Emmerich took pages of several of his previous films and cobbled them together into some sort of Frankenstein’s monster. There are so many plots and subplots going on that you never truly know what the main threat is. It touches on everything from the birth of humanity to the overly aggressive military, to the dumbing down of NASA all at the same time. With the exception of our heroes (and of course their entire families, because why not), everyone else is just resigned to the fact that nothing can be done. Riots of course breakout, the military is quick to decide to nuke the moon is somehow going to save the planet, and no level of crazy plan is off the table.
I’m happy to forgive an outrageous plot if the actors are able to pull it off with some semblance of believability. I know none of the actions have any real-world chance of success, and I can forgive plot holes for the sake of entertainment. Unfortunately, the acting is where Moonfall really lets the audience down. Each character is portrayed in a completely over-the-top fashion, it reminded me of watching a movie that is intentionally attempting to spoof another movie. The emotions are not believable, and the lines being delivered are literally derived from popular lines of other movies. Bonus points if you can identify which movie they are from as the film progresses. The saddest part is, this movie is trying to take itself seriously, it’s not intentionally being campy, for the sake of being campy. I think the character portrayals could have been forgiven if that was the case, but it’s clearly not. It’s actually a distraction when the story of a film is already struggling to deliver.
The movie effects go from truly spectacular, to overly CGI-infused. Ironically the space shots, which you think would be the hardest to pull off are some of its best, yet the vehicle driving scenes through the snow-covered townscape are some of the worst. It’s almost as though they spent so much of their budget on the space scenes that they had no money for the earth shots, which would be fine if they didn’t literally look so bad. It’s jarring going from one area to another and makes for a very inconsistent experience the entire time.
I believe one of the biggest tragedies of the film however is the absolutely blatant product placement. Yes, I understand that product placement has sadly been a staple in the film industry since the dawn of time. Yes, I understand that when someone is using a MacBook on-screen or riding a Peloton, it’s there for a reason. Moonfall however takes this to a Hallmark movie level. If you watch a Hallmark movie sponsored by Folgers for example, there will be clear shots of the Folgers coffee on the counter, with the cast explaining how much they love Folgers’s coffee, Moonfall utilizes this very trope. Kaspersky Anti-Virus is plastered on everything, even the Space Shuttle is protected with Kaspersky Anti-virus (which some might argue has other implications, but I won’t go there), and while avoiding looters driving through the snow-packed roads, do we really need the character to explain the need for the off-road settings on their Lexus? Talking about it is one thing, but do we really need to see the dial up-close and personal? It quickly takes you from the scene to a Lexus Christmas commercial and back again.
Sadly, Moonfall is a very disappointing film. If it were released in 1998 maybe it would be a super hit and I’d feel differently about it, but the industry has moved on since then. I had gone in knowing the film wouldn’t be realistic, but I was hoping it would at least be a nice escape from what is going on in the world today. As I have stated before, I’m a huge fan of Emmerich’s films, and while Moonfall may not be his absolute worst, it is one that will quickly be forgotten. I don’t even know if it’s one I’d revisit if it premiered on HBO or Showtime. As excited as I was, I just wouldn’t be able to recommend it.
Moonfall, directed by Roland Emmerich, stars Halle Berry and Patrick Wilson as a pair of NASA astronauts that are attacked by a strange mechanical swarm while performing a routine satellite repair mission from the space shuttle Endeavor in the mid-1990s. The attack resulted in the death of one of the crew members and severely damaged the shuttle. Brian Harper (Wilson) and Jo Fowler (Berry) successfully return the shuttle to earth only to see Harper take the fall for the death of his crewman and the fall guy for a coverup to prevent the citizens of earth from truly understanding what they encountered.
Fast forward to current day and a “crazy” conspiracy theorist K.C Houseman, believing the moon to be a megastructure built by aliens, discovers that the moon’s orbit is rapidly eroding. He attempts to reach out to NASA and after several unsuccessful attempts releases his findings via social media. The top minds at NASA confirm what has been identified and estimate that they have only three weeks to execute a plan to prevent the moon from crashing into the earth destroying everything and everyone. The race for the survival of the planet is quickly on which will focus on not only the NASA “team”, but each of their family members.
Let me get this out of the way first, I personally loved many of Roland Emmerich’s wildly outlandish films. I thought Independence Day was fantastic, and even though many found The Day After Tomorrow a bit to preachy and ridiculous, I still found it entertaining for what it was. So, I was excited going into Moonfall. I was ready for a fun movie that I felt would be a mindless, fun adventure which was something I had really missed in many of the movies that had come out over the past year or two. Unfortunately, my aspirations (and even the low bar I had set my expectations for) would be quickly dashed.
Moonfall is a movie that struggles throughout to find an identity. I found myself instantly comparing several of Emmerich’s films during its roughly two-hour run time. At times its reminiscent of Independence Day, with its alien destruction of earth storyline, and then quickly jumps to a disaster film about the moon crashing into the earth. It’s as though Emmerich took pages of several of his previous films and cobbled them together into some sort of Frankenstein’s monster. There are so many plots and subplots going on that you never truly know what the main threat is. It touches on everything from the birth of humanity to the overly aggressive military, to the dumbing down of NASA all at the same time. With the exception of our heroes (and of course their entire families, because why not), everyone else is just resigned to the fact that nothing can be done. Riots of course breakout, the military is quick to decide to nuke the moon is somehow going to save the planet, and no level of crazy plan is off the table.
I’m happy to forgive an outrageous plot if the actors are able to pull it off with some semblance of believability. I know none of the actions have any real-world chance of success, and I can forgive plot holes for the sake of entertainment. Unfortunately, the acting is where Moonfall really lets the audience down. Each character is portrayed in a completely over-the-top fashion, it reminded me of watching a movie that is intentionally attempting to spoof another movie. The emotions are not believable, and the lines being delivered are literally derived from popular lines of other movies. Bonus points if you can identify which movie they are from as the film progresses. The saddest part is, this movie is trying to take itself seriously, it’s not intentionally being campy, for the sake of being campy. I think the character portrayals could have been forgiven if that was the case, but it’s clearly not. It’s actually a distraction when the story of a film is already struggling to deliver.
The movie effects go from truly spectacular, to overly CGI-infused. Ironically the space shots, which you think would be the hardest to pull off are some of its best, yet the vehicle driving scenes through the snow-covered townscape are some of the worst. It’s almost as though they spent so much of their budget on the space scenes that they had no money for the earth shots, which would be fine if they didn’t literally look so bad. It’s jarring going from one area to another and makes for a very inconsistent experience the entire time.
I believe one of the biggest tragedies of the film however is the absolutely blatant product placement. Yes, I understand that product placement has sadly been a staple in the film industry since the dawn of time. Yes, I understand that when someone is using a MacBook on-screen or riding a Peloton, it’s there for a reason. Moonfall however takes this to a Hallmark movie level. If you watch a Hallmark movie sponsored by Folgers for example, there will be clear shots of the Folgers coffee on the counter, with the cast explaining how much they love Folgers’s coffee, Moonfall utilizes this very trope. Kaspersky Anti-Virus is plastered on everything, even the Space Shuttle is protected with Kaspersky Anti-virus (which some might argue has other implications, but I won’t go there), and while avoiding looters driving through the snow-packed roads, do we really need the character to explain the need for the off-road settings on their Lexus? Talking about it is one thing, but do we really need to see the dial up-close and personal? It quickly takes you from the scene to a Lexus Christmas commercial and back again.
Sadly, Moonfall is a very disappointing film. If it were released in 1998 maybe it would be a super hit and I’d feel differently about it, but the industry has moved on since then. I had gone in knowing the film wouldn’t be realistic, but I was hoping it would at least be a nice escape from what is going on in the world today. As I have stated before, I’m a huge fan of Emmerich’s films, and while Moonfall may not be his absolute worst, it is one that will quickly be forgotten. I don’t even know if it’s one I’d revisit if it premiered on HBO or Showtime. As excited as I was, I just wouldn’t be able to recommend it.