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Movie Time!
So! Time to give up the dirt on the latest movie run!
First off, Star Wars: Clone Wars Volume 2 is the second installment of the critically-acclaimed Clone Wars saga started a couple years ago on the Cartoon Network. Taken together, Volume One comprised all the 3-minute shorts into a single half-hour to an hour-long whole, relating quite a rather good tale depicting the first steps of Anakin Skywalker towards the Dark Side and how he was first tempted onto that path. Volume 2 consists of five half-hour long episodes which form a more cohesive story and are also just darn well-written. It is the ascent of Anakin Skywalker to the rank of Jedi Knight and how his progress towards the Dark Side continued and yet somehow went unabated by the Jedi. It also gives the very dramatic events which lead up to the first scene in Ep. 3.
Now, I acknowledge that it's silly to have to see this in order to understand the events in Ep.3. Personally, I think that Clone Wars should have been Ep.2, and Ep.1 should simply never have been made, with Attack of the Clones being Ep.1. (And that someone with more experience writing romance be brought in for those scenes in Ep.2. Literary Romance needs to get a restraining order against Geo. Lucas. But that's a rant I've done before. Actually the romantic bits in Clone Wars, what few there were, were much more emotive than the ones in the movies. Which, when talking about 2D animation, says something.) That being said, I highly recommend watching Clone Wars simply because it's just good stuff. Good story, good animation, good visuals, and Anakin is a well-written character with a terrible destiny again.
So, next up, we have Godzilla: Final Wars, supposedly the last daikaiju (giant monster) film that Toho will be making for a while. Of all the Gojira films, this is one that fans will either hate or... well, reluctantly admit was pretty fun. The original Godzilla was a cautionary tale about "things man was not meant to mess with," with Godzilla being awakened to wreck havoc on Tokyo after the atomic bomb tests. Over time, the kaiju flicks became more campy and less entirely serious; this is the culmination of that trend.
The film is campy fun; you watch it with beer and pretzels or your beverage and snack of choice and make up drinking games. The special effects are good, the story has promise, and of course there's plenty of giant monster fights and human/mutant fights. But there's so much stuff packed into this film -- it's over two hours long, one of the longest kaiju movies made -- that the pacing suffers horribly. It's hard to develop any sort of emotional attachment to any of the characters, or the monsters for that matter.
Nutshell summary sans spoilers: Gojira gets imprisoned in the ice in the South Pole thanks to an Atragon-esque flying/drilling battleship called the Gotengo. Years later, Earth is slowly winning the wars against the monsters, in part due to the rise of super-powered, super-ability mutants, many of whom are organized into combat formations. Then the Xillians, aliens with incredible technology, show up and teleport all the monsters away. Oh, you don't really expect these aliens to be good guys, do you? Of course not....
One reviewer said that this was three movies packed into one. I would say it could do with being four: the final battle against Gojira could/should have taken up a whole film by itself. I mean, that should have been an epic battle in and of itself. There's so much going on that it needs more screen time to develop everything. So in this, the film disappoints and degenerates into a campy film rather than the penultimate Godzilla movie. There's not much that can redeem it from this, though it tries.
First off, Kazuki Kitamura totally steals the screen whenever he's on. He's a wild personality who just goes nuts on screen and has a lot of fun doing what he does, which is mostly taunting the puny hu-mans and siccing more monsters on Gojira. He throws the most incredible hissy fits when his monsters loose. He also has some fun lines. More on this later.
In addition, Don Frye gets more screen time than even Raymond Burr in any Gojira Film, and continues an interesting trend which seems to have started way back with Godzilla 2000: there is a significant amount of English dialogue in this film. Don Frye speaks only English, which makes scenes interesting when everyone else is speaking Japanese and he's replying and conversing in drawly English. (He also carries around a no-dachi like some-- no, I can't and won't compare him to Mifune Toshiro. But it's a big-ass sword. And he uses it -- near as I can tell he actually had a few kendo pointers for those scenes.) There's also significant numbers of secondary characters who speak fluent English as well. There are a number of fight scenes, particularly with mutants, which smack strongly of things like The Matrix -- the movie seems packed with a variety of homages to several recent major films, such as the "Burly Brawl" from Kung Fu Hustle.
That leads me of course to the heart of the film, what people go to see Godzilla films for: giant monsters kicking other giant monsters' butts! The kaiju, unfortunately, get too little screen time. The monster fights are way too short. The first one is over in, literally, fifteen seconds... though admittedly, it's Gojira wiping out Zilla (the American, 'tuna-eating' Godzilla-In-Name-Only) and nuking him (along with the Sydney Opera House.) The other battles take a bit more time. The last battle between Gojira and Monster X/Kaiser Ghidorah is much longer but still somehow disappointing. Mothra's battle is particularly disappointing. (I won't give away spoilers, but suffice to say you'll be saying, 'That's IT?!') The battle between Gojira and his old nemesis Kaiser Ghidorah could have been a bit longer, too, though it was plenty eventful. Even so, it looks like between now and when the movie is set, all the monsters have been taking lessons in kaijujitsu since there's a lot of impressive monster martial arts going on -- the monsters tend to do more than just run at each other madly, and they seem to be fighting smarter. Whomever they got to do the human fight choreography was apparently involved with the kaiju fights as well. There are a lot of live-action anime moments, too.
Gojira maintains some level of moral ambiguity in this film; he's still a force of nature who still hasn't forgiven humanity, but he's not as all-fired 'Holy crap, he's EVIL!' like he was in Giant Monsters All-Out Attack. I think I could have done without Minilla, but I think Toho wanted to get as many monsters into the movie as possible. Unfortunately, this means that most monsters get only a few moments of screen time. And of course there's no sign of Gamara. (ObMST3KRef: He's full of turtle meat!)
So, the short chant: Campy fun, watch it for the fight scenes, wish Toho had made it a miniseries, make up a drinking game to go with it, cheer when Zilla gets atomic-fried, weep for [deleted to prevent spoilers] and that she had much more time on-screen, enjoy seeing many kaiju-flick veterans, gape in awe at Don Frye's stony performance that somehow still works, be amazed at Kazuki Kitamura's awesome rantological abilities and be glad he's not your upstairs neighbor, and try not to imagine a Mary Sue fanfic of it... even though you KNOW it's out there, somewhere, lurking in some un-rototilled soil-bed of the Internet....
Thirdly, Ong-Bakk, the Thai Warrior, will be reviewed as soon as I watch it. I still need to watch Battle Royale when I'm good and angsty, and finish watching Immortal, Zaitoichi, and Azumi.
More later. There should be some interesting news coming up next week, but I'm trying not to get my hopes up. Pax.
First off, Star Wars: Clone Wars Volume 2 is the second installment of the critically-acclaimed Clone Wars saga started a couple years ago on the Cartoon Network. Taken together, Volume One comprised all the 3-minute shorts into a single half-hour to an hour-long whole, relating quite a rather good tale depicting the first steps of Anakin Skywalker towards the Dark Side and how he was first tempted onto that path. Volume 2 consists of five half-hour long episodes which form a more cohesive story and are also just darn well-written. It is the ascent of Anakin Skywalker to the rank of Jedi Knight and how his progress towards the Dark Side continued and yet somehow went unabated by the Jedi. It also gives the very dramatic events which lead up to the first scene in Ep. 3.
Now, I acknowledge that it's silly to have to see this in order to understand the events in Ep.3. Personally, I think that Clone Wars should have been Ep.2, and Ep.1 should simply never have been made, with Attack of the Clones being Ep.1. (And that someone with more experience writing romance be brought in for those scenes in Ep.2. Literary Romance needs to get a restraining order against Geo. Lucas. But that's a rant I've done before. Actually the romantic bits in Clone Wars, what few there were, were much more emotive than the ones in the movies. Which, when talking about 2D animation, says something.) That being said, I highly recommend watching Clone Wars simply because it's just good stuff. Good story, good animation, good visuals, and Anakin is a well-written character with a terrible destiny again.
So, next up, we have Godzilla: Final Wars, supposedly the last daikaiju (giant monster) film that Toho will be making for a while. Of all the Gojira films, this is one that fans will either hate or... well, reluctantly admit was pretty fun. The original Godzilla was a cautionary tale about "things man was not meant to mess with," with Godzilla being awakened to wreck havoc on Tokyo after the atomic bomb tests. Over time, the kaiju flicks became more campy and less entirely serious; this is the culmination of that trend.
The film is campy fun; you watch it with beer and pretzels or your beverage and snack of choice and make up drinking games. The special effects are good, the story has promise, and of course there's plenty of giant monster fights and human/mutant fights. But there's so much stuff packed into this film -- it's over two hours long, one of the longest kaiju movies made -- that the pacing suffers horribly. It's hard to develop any sort of emotional attachment to any of the characters, or the monsters for that matter.
Nutshell summary sans spoilers: Gojira gets imprisoned in the ice in the South Pole thanks to an Atragon-esque flying/drilling battleship called the Gotengo. Years later, Earth is slowly winning the wars against the monsters, in part due to the rise of super-powered, super-ability mutants, many of whom are organized into combat formations. Then the Xillians, aliens with incredible technology, show up and teleport all the monsters away. Oh, you don't really expect these aliens to be good guys, do you? Of course not....
One reviewer said that this was three movies packed into one. I would say it could do with being four: the final battle against Gojira could/should have taken up a whole film by itself. I mean, that should have been an epic battle in and of itself. There's so much going on that it needs more screen time to develop everything. So in this, the film disappoints and degenerates into a campy film rather than the penultimate Godzilla movie. There's not much that can redeem it from this, though it tries.
First off, Kazuki Kitamura totally steals the screen whenever he's on. He's a wild personality who just goes nuts on screen and has a lot of fun doing what he does, which is mostly taunting the puny hu-mans and siccing more monsters on Gojira. He throws the most incredible hissy fits when his monsters loose. He also has some fun lines. More on this later.
In addition, Don Frye gets more screen time than even Raymond Burr in any Gojira Film, and continues an interesting trend which seems to have started way back with Godzilla 2000: there is a significant amount of English dialogue in this film. Don Frye speaks only English, which makes scenes interesting when everyone else is speaking Japanese and he's replying and conversing in drawly English. (He also carries around a no-dachi like some-- no, I can't and won't compare him to Mifune Toshiro. But it's a big-ass sword. And he uses it -- near as I can tell he actually had a few kendo pointers for those scenes.) There's also significant numbers of secondary characters who speak fluent English as well. There are a number of fight scenes, particularly with mutants, which smack strongly of things like The Matrix -- the movie seems packed with a variety of homages to several recent major films, such as the "Burly Brawl" from Kung Fu Hustle.
That leads me of course to the heart of the film, what people go to see Godzilla films for: giant monsters kicking other giant monsters' butts! The kaiju, unfortunately, get too little screen time. The monster fights are way too short. The first one is over in, literally, fifteen seconds... though admittedly, it's Gojira wiping out Zilla (the American, 'tuna-eating' Godzilla-In-Name-Only) and nuking him (along with the Sydney Opera House.) The other battles take a bit more time. The last battle between Gojira and Monster X/Kaiser Ghidorah is much longer but still somehow disappointing. Mothra's battle is particularly disappointing. (I won't give away spoilers, but suffice to say you'll be saying, 'That's IT?!') The battle between Gojira and his old nemesis Kaiser Ghidorah could have been a bit longer, too, though it was plenty eventful. Even so, it looks like between now and when the movie is set, all the monsters have been taking lessons in kaijujitsu since there's a lot of impressive monster martial arts going on -- the monsters tend to do more than just run at each other madly, and they seem to be fighting smarter. Whomever they got to do the human fight choreography was apparently involved with the kaiju fights as well. There are a lot of live-action anime moments, too.
Gojira maintains some level of moral ambiguity in this film; he's still a force of nature who still hasn't forgiven humanity, but he's not as all-fired 'Holy crap, he's EVIL!' like he was in Giant Monsters All-Out Attack. I think I could have done without Minilla, but I think Toho wanted to get as many monsters into the movie as possible. Unfortunately, this means that most monsters get only a few moments of screen time. And of course there's no sign of Gamara. (ObMST3KRef: He's full of turtle meat!)
So, the short chant: Campy fun, watch it for the fight scenes, wish Toho had made it a miniseries, make up a drinking game to go with it, cheer when Zilla gets atomic-fried, weep for [deleted to prevent spoilers] and that she had much more time on-screen, enjoy seeing many kaiju-flick veterans, gape in awe at Don Frye's stony performance that somehow still works, be amazed at Kazuki Kitamura's awesome rantological abilities and be glad he's not your upstairs neighbor, and try not to imagine a Mary Sue fanfic of it... even though you KNOW it's out there, somewhere, lurking in some un-rototilled soil-bed of the Internet....
Thirdly, Ong-Bakk, the Thai Warrior, will be reviewed as soon as I watch it. I still need to watch Battle Royale when I'm good and angsty, and finish watching Immortal, Zaitoichi, and Azumi.
More later. There should be some interesting news coming up next week, but I'm trying not to get my hopes up. Pax.
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