May 19, 2014

Podcast Episode 15: GODZILLA Is Amazing. The Humans, Not So Much


I really want to see Godzilla again this week.  In listening to this podcast and reading a few reviews, I suspect that we may have been a little unduly harsh on the film and that it might play much better now that I know what to expect.

In our fifteenth episode, Bart (my resident Kaiju Guru) and I might focus largely on the stuff that doesn't work in this new iteration of the character, but rest assured that there's still a lot that does work, and it works like gangbusters.  The biggest oversight of this podcast is that we fail to mention the absolutely breathtaking direction by Gareth Edwards.  He absolutely kills it, so that even in a scene like the Honolulu landfall where I care very little about the humans scurrying to and fro, the action is staged so perfectly that I'm still riveted to the screen.  Anyone who's seen Edwards' first film Monsters shouldn't be surprised that he holds back on the Kaiju mayhem for as long as humanly possible, but when he finally does let loose...HOLY FUCK.  I defy you to watch the last 20 minutes of Godzilla without cheering.

The movie had the second best opening of the year so far (trailing only Captain America: The Winter Soldier) so of course Warner Bros has already greenlit a sequel.  This can only be good news as Edwards, assuming he returns, can ditch all the deathly dull humans and double down on the King Of The Monsters.  If this movie's worst sin is that it leaves me wanting MORE Godzilla, that's a sin I can live with.

Bart and I also mull over the first peek of Ben Affleck as Batman, the deaths of H.R. Giger and Malik Bendjelloul, and the future of the X-Men as Channing Tatum steps into the spicy Cajun shoes of Gambit and Bryan Singer's Days Of Future Past potentially hits the reset button on the entire franchise over Memorial Day Weekend.






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