Thread:Project Predacon/@comment-27724978-20190912170600/@comment-4820209-20190914190613

Where do I begin. Well.

Tone
You acknowledged this, but the tone shift was way too radical, going from grounded and serious, to way more silly and outlandish. Draws a heavy divide between a predecessor and its sequel. While I don't like the Showa era either, it at least had the benefit of being a hindsight series. There was no roadmap to it. Whereas the MonsterVerse is, so deviating and making a disjointed series is absolutely terrible to me. Inconsistency sucks. Movie doesn't feel like a sequel, or like it's in the same universe at all.

Continuity
Also plays a part in the last sentence. This movie has no continuity. Be it in the visuals, music, physics, or plot. Like colors. For example, the entire palette of the film is a weird blue-tinged hue, making nighttime sequences not look authentic compared to 2014, where the film used grays, browns, and blacks to then make the monster's lit-up attacks accent the scene. Like the MUTO's eyes, or Godzilla's spines. So they both convey entirely different tones and styles.

For the music side of things, they randomly decided to bring back the Godzilla theme, rather than continuing forward with newer music. Always hated this since 2014 did a good job of straying and making defined themes, over relying on the past. Doesn't help that whenever I heard it, I didn't think "oh, good music", I thought "oh, this is from those other movies". Serves to do more harm than good since it yanks me out of the immersive experience. And with that, they also dropped 2014's music suite entirely, over just adapting it to what we have now. So now 2014 is just its own thing.

Physics and other visuals got Pacific Rimmed. Things are faster now, Godzilla can somehow full on sprint, tail whips are an instant maneuver. Compare Godzilla tailwhipping Ghidorah to him tailwhipping the male MUTO. Radically different uses of physics. I hated it, so much. The other issue is how much small details weren't handled. Like Godzilla rising after being nuke revived. He rises and stands up. In the middle of the ocean. Which he then dives into, and swims away in. Or Ghidorah. When he moves to fight Rodan, he flaps his wings out and holds them out wide, standing upright. While in the air. Miles up. How people confirmed that was okay or didn't catch these issues is beyond me. Especially when using it for a trailer, lol. On top of little miscellaneous details like misuse of lighting through wing membranes, or fast something moves, or how it moves. Like the airborne fight with Mothra and Rodan. It was cool and probably the highlight of the movie, but it was wayyy too fast. Not all of this is inherently physics based, but it's a problem. One that 2014 didn't always suffer from.

The plot also isn't a continuation of 2014's events. It timeskips so far, and does something entirely different, opting to omit the previous cast or their efforts nearly entirely for a "reboot" essentially. To where it doesn't even feel like the same universe. And for some reason this cast is the one they're continuing forward for GvK. When I didn't see this movie for them. I saw it hoping for expansion on 2014's cast.

Lack of foresight
Some of this plays into continuity, but this movie does a lot of bad things for the "rule of cool". Like Godzilla's appearance changing. Makes no sense plot-wise. If he's a 250,000,000 year old monster, 5 years isn't gonna radically shift his form. It's like a day making us grow our hair out. It just doesn't make sense and was only done as an allusion to the 1954 Godzilla. Useless pandering, in my opinion.

Next is the seventeen monsters, which I felt had no thought put into them. It makes sense for Godzilla's species and the MUTO to be the two reigning species in a supersized world. It's too big for diversity, so I can get it. I don't get how we go from two species of monsters, dating back to the Permian, to seventeen species.

Are these monsters all individuals living in different times? Did they all live together? Even if they went with the logical first route, how did only one member of these species just happen to survive to now. How did none of them wake up given the planet's cataclysmic past. If they all lived together, then you deal with the problems of splitting the planet to seventeen individual species, let alone potential breeding pairs, etc, while it makes the surviving until now aspect a tad more believable. Then you have the opposite end, where they all lived apart from each other in different eras of time. This would explain how seventeen monsters could conceivably exist, but doesn't explain how one member of each species just happened to have survived until now. Either way, it's all way too coincidental, and at the worst, outright doesn't make sense. Both of which I consider bad. There's no homework put into what a world like this would be like.

Or scenes done explicitly for the rule of cool. Like Godzilla's beam against Ghidorah in the Antarctic. First, Godzilla's beam takes 11 real time seconds to charge up, and Ghidorah does nothing. Despite just beaming him in the chest to stun him. He just sits in front of Godzilla. Then, when Godzilla's beam is ready to fire, he... aims it at Ghidorah's heads over his chest, who then proceeds to instantly dodge it and shoot a beam back to him, which hits him dead-center in the chest, over the head. Something that also directly contradicts 2014's attack, where Godzilla used his beam to hit the female MUTO center-mass, the largest target, and didn't miss once. I hate stuff like this. Done way too explicitly for the audience to the point of losing logic in the film and its universe.

Distancing from the 2014 film
This movie does almost everything in its power to do this. Be it changing Godzilla, the visual style, music, tone, plot, etc. The most annoying thing to me, and one of the things that angered me the most when I watched it was the pretty blatant killing of everything having to do with 2014. Be it Serizawa, his associate, Vivienne, and an off-screen implied death for Stenz. Almost every link to 2014 was effectively cut with this movie. For the general sake of pandering, or to me, just poor decision making. Over creating a cohesive narrative. That miffed me the most given the most exciting part of KotM's marketing to me was hearing how Ken Watanabe and Hawkins were cast again for the film. Was convinced they'd do something with them, maybe make them proper protagonists. How wrong was I.

Having a fan make the movie
I think this is what killed it the most. Given the fan isn't out to expand upon an established narrative, but make what he saw as a kid. Or loved as a kid. Which results in a movie that doesn't feel like it fits, but is just a quoted "love letter". Which I really don't like. There's a time and place for it. I don't think squandering a cinematic universe with a different initial vision is that time or place.

That ending
Was absolutely terrible. From the deus ex machina of Godzilla being powered up, something never elaborated on or alluded to, to the inconsistency in how said power worked, or what it did. Or why it did that. Like Godzilla's simple stroll through the city melting it, but the actual nuclear pulses doing nothing to everything around him, bar reducing things to rubble. Or Ghidorah's beams doing nothing to Godzilla for... some reason while he just stands there. Or having Mothra's cries and wings be a part of the design aspect of that, which was wayyy too corny and outlandish. On top of him essentially snorting moth dust to get fire high off of it when Ghidorah had him beat 9 times over. (Or you know, how Godzilla somehow survived a fall from the high atmosphere) Or just having Ghidorah's wings, then his two side heads be melted in sequence. For some reason. When heat doesn't work that way.

Which then leads to the dumbest sequence in the entire series. That bowing scene. Dunno who thought that'd be cool. Of course, I don't want to sound hilariously pretentious, but it makes absolutely no sense. If monsters are vying for supremacy, especially Rodan, why would they not kill the one most powerful monster at his weakest. Why submit willingly to something that can and would kill you. Why did they retcon the 2014 film's entire canonical predator/prey conflict with the MUTO and Godzilla by having a MUTO bow to him. This sequence was the equivalent of having deer, rabbits, raccoons, and foxes bow down to a bear. How does every monster know how to bow and what it means. How is bowing universal when animal submission isn't even consistent. Some lower their heads, some avert their gazes, some lower their whole bodies, some roll over. Bowing isn't uniform with anything but "us" to an extent, and even then it's not common. It was just stupid in general and I hated the tone and precedent it set.

Just a little bit of why I hated this movie. Undoubtedly there's more to it, but I've probably forgotten to mention it since the list goes on and on. Feel like five years of my hype life was wasted, lol. Absolutely wasted.