May 16th 2014! Let the countdown begin!! http://movies.yahoo.com/news/warner-bros-godzilla-gets-2014-release-date-012816059.html I am so stoked!!!
Gareth Edwards did a great job with a limited budget on Monsters, so I'm interested to see what he can do here, especially with a David Goyer (and others) penned script. Looking forward to hearing more about this.
I also am glad Edwards is the director. He is a fan and understand the character. It will be interesting to see what he can do with a large budget.
I've never heard of Edwards, but David S. Goyer has a pretty uneven track record. For every Dark City and Batman Begins there's like a dozen things he's involved in that are terrible. A new Godzilla movie could be great. Hell, an American Godzilla movie could be great - the original Godzilla film was strongly inspired by contemporaneous American monster movies, so full circle and all that. But I've been down this road before. [yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_oiHWXLIFI[/yt] Here's to hoping this'll be different.
^ I loved that trailer. I wish they kept that scene in the movie. I did like the American Godzilla movie, although I have a difficult time seeing the creature as Godzilla. But as a Giant Monster movie it is a fun movie. Edwards has said he wants to capture the dark tone of the 1954 original and I am all for a modern update of Godzilla in that style.
I dunno, I'm not sure it's really feasible to recapture that. The original film was such an artifact of the particular zeitgeist of that country and era, an allegory for the spectre of nuclear destruction that still hung over Japan nine years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and a rumination on the ethics of weapons of mass destruction at a time when nuclear weapons were being openly tested in large quantities with little regard for the consequences. Watching the film with awareness of the historical context, knowing that the scenes of devastation and human misery were made by and for people who'd experienced the real thing in their own lifetimes, makes it truly powerful. I'm not sure you could really capture that for American audiences in the modern era. Maybe you could approach it by evoking the spectre of 9/11, but how do you make Godzilla an allegory for terrorism? (And would it be wise to try?) Still, I guess you could make a pretty solid, dark Godzilla movie if you followed the original's lead and focused on the human cost of Godzilla's rampages, on the terror of the people about to be killed and the despair and suffering of the survivors left in his wake. That's something that no Godzilla film I've seen has really dealt with since the original (though I haven't seen the first two Heisei-era films and I'm only two films into the Millennium series at the moment). 2000's Godzilla vs. Megaguirus, which I just saw yesterday, comes closest, but not to the same degree the original did by a long shot. It wouldn't have the same allegorical weight as the original, but it would make the film more potent to follow the original's lead and focus on the human side of the story, with Godzilla portrayed more as a natural disaster, a catalyst for the human drama, than as the central character in his own right. (Which is not to say that it should be like Cloverfield, however.)
Christopher. I do agree with you that the 1954 Godzilla is locked into the issues of Post War Japan and I do not think that they should try to capture that. We live in a different era now. But I think they can capture the tone and mood of the 54 original if they focus on the human tragedy as you said and center it around a different historical context while still making Godzilla force of nature that we humans are responsible for creating.
Well, in the original film, we didn't so much create Godzilla as displace him. Assuming the subtitles on the version shown on TCM a few months back were reasonably accurate, the original idea was that Godzilla was of a dinosaur species that had survived in the ocean depths for millions of years, like the coelacanth, and had been displaced from his normal feeding grounds by the nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands (much like the origin of the giant octopus in Harryhausen's It Came From Beneath the Sea, which came out just a year later -- which also was giant to begin with, not mutated by radiation but simply made radioactive enough to scare away its food supply so it had to search for new food sources including people). Further evidence comes from the sequel, Godzilla Raids Again, where the title monster was explicitly referred to by Dr. Yamane as "daini-no Gojira," "a second Godzilla" -- explaining how it could exist when the original had been decisively killed. That means there were at least two identical members of the same species living down there, which seems more consistent with the idea that they were like that all along. It wasn't until Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah in 1991 that they introduced the retcon of Godzilla being a more "normal" surviving dinosaur (a Godzillasaurus) that had been mutated to daikaiju size by nuclear radiation. And many of the later films I've seen are unclear on whether their version of Godzilla is the same one who attacked Tokyo in '54 or a second one. GvKG obviously requires him to be the same unique mutant, but the final film in the same continuity, Godzilla vs. Destroyah, references "the first Godzilla" being killed by the Oxygen Destroyer (at least in the English dub).
2014 feels so far away. looking forward to it though. the 98 film is the only one i've seen in theaters. always wanted to see a real Godzilla movie in theaters. for some reason my local theater didn't run Godzilla: 2000.
Slightly off-topic, but I was always curious. Was his name actually Godzilla, or was he simply the god Zilla that got mistranslated?
Original name in Japanese was Gojira which (I think) is pronounced roughly Gah-jeh-rah with no solid emphasis upon any syllabel. Two Toho legends surround the origin of the name. One, that the beast was named after a very large man. Two, jira means whale in Japanese and Go a contraction for gorilla, ie, gorilla like whale. There are no definitive records to prove either. As for changing Gojira to Godzilla, I can only guess that was simply a marketing strategy when it came to the US. One would think the Japanese would be resistant to calling the iconic character by a foreign name, but oddly enough, even in Nippon , packaging uses the english text "Godzilla" as much as it bares the Kanji for "Gojira". Sincerely, Bill
I liked it at the time. I was a lot younger then, though. I'm sure if I saw it today I might think different. The film is such an artefact of its time one scene is clearly inspired by an event from the same year - Godzilla's threat to the fishing boat near the start is a nod to the Daigo Fukuryu Maru, a Japanese fishing boat contaminated by American nuclear experiments. As far as Godzilla going for terrorism... well, really the only fear at this point is it's been done a number of times (Cloverfield may have done it for all I know). Godzilla came out nine years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and we're already eleven years from 9/11, so they're comparable temporally speaking. The issue would be just how to do it well, and not feel like they were treading water. Past the thematic elements, though some could also work like the ethics of developing weaponry (Serizawa's fear that his oxygen destroyer could get into the wrong hands plays nicely with say contemporary fears over nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea), there's material to mine here... ...and even ignoring all pretense to theme, you can just do a dark, serious monster movie about a giant destructive lizard.
Actually the first syllable is pronounced more like the word "go." The second syllable is usually pronounced somewhat like "jee" or "zhee" -- perhaps about halfway in between -- but in some cases it can sound more like "dzee." And the last syllable sounds about halfway between "ra" and "la." And I'm pretty sure the emphasis falls on the middle syllable as it does in English. So Gojira and Godzilla are equally legitimate transliterations of a sound that's about halfway between them. In fact, in watching Godzilla vs. Megaguirus yesterday with the Japanese soundtrack, I noticed the lead actress pronouncing it more like "Goh-dzee-ra" in some shots and more like "Goh-jee-ra" in others (keeping in mind that when I type "r" I'm referring to the Japanese sound that's midway between r and l). The main reason the American pronunciation differs is because of how we read the vowels in the word when it's spelled "Godzilla." However, in 1993's Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II, much of the movie is set at a UN-run Godzilla-fighting organization so there's a lot of English dialogue even in the original Japanese version -- and the English speakers pronounce it "Godzilla" exactly as we Americans do. And that film was produced by Tomoyuki Tanaka, the creator of the character, so it's as official as it gets. Actually the name is a portmanteau of kujira, "whale," and gorira, the Japanese rendering of "gorilla." The legend is that the large Toho stagehand was nicknamed Gojira, i.e. "gorilla-whale," because of his size. Also, in the film titles I've seen, Gojira isn't rendered in kanji (Chinese characters), but in katakana, which are kind of like italics -- the syllabic symbols used for writing titles and foreign words, as opposed to hiragana, which are used for more normal purposes. Gojira in katakana is ゴジラ. There have been some later Toho Godzilla movies that managed to be pretty serious and effective. I particularly liked the aforementioned Mechagodzilla II. But they still pale next to the '54 original. The deeper meanings, the character focus, the emphasis on ethical and philosophical dilemmas over city-smashing spectacle -- it's more than just a monster movie or disaster movie. It's got a substance and importance that none of its sequels have managed to capture.
If any of you want to see Godzilla portrayed as malevolent check out Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack. It is one of my favorite Godzilla movies. Godzilla has white eyes with no pupils and is said to embody the souls of the dead from World War II and is full of destructive rage.
Currently have a hi-def version of that saved upon my DirecTV DVR. One of the few times Ghidorah was handled as a "benevolent" force instead of something worse than even Goji' himself. And Mothra was actually bad-a$$ed. Given your handle is Gojira, I suspect you probably know about the webcomic "Twisted Kaiju Theater". Rude, lewd and many time heavy-handed with the political views, but usually gut-bustingly funny. And the "Kaiju-Girls" are certainly easy on the eyes. Sincerely, Bill
That's next in my Netflix queue, since I'm going through them in chronological order. I'm curious to see how that plays out. I feel there's always been something implicitly animistic behind the idea of Godzilla, that he was meant to be an embodiment of nuclear destruction analogously to the way that, say, the dragon in Spirited Away was an embodiment of a river, or Totoro is an embodiment of the forest. I've even heard that director Ishiro Honda referred to Godzilla as "the Sacred Beast of the Apocalypse" -- while, conversely, some later films portrayed him more as a sort of guardian spirit of Japan. But previous films always referred to him as a dinosaur, a natural force even if there was an implicitly spiritual underpinning to what he represented. I think the only previous daikaiju I've seen portrayed in a blatantly spiritual light, as deities or avenging spirits, were Mothra and Battra. So GMK should be an interesting take on the idea of Godzilla. (And yeah, the idea of King Ghidorah being a benevolent figure this time around is kind of bizarre.)
I figured that was made fairly explicit with the Gojira legend of Odo Island. I mean sure, Takashi Shimura is on hand to give us a lot of scientific sounding rationale for Godzilla's existence, but it's no accident that he's basically explaining in science terms something that the islanders held as an article of faith.