Yeah like most people I kind of forgot how dull those movies were. Perks of having the memory of a child.
(Quoting you, but not all of this is directed
at you, just to be clear).
Edit: Also looks like a few people have made the same points while I was typing my response. Oh well.
Most of the later Showa movies were basically generic cop / spy movies that Godzilla wanders into about halfway through. Both
MechaGodzillas, and
vs. Gigan are basically "Detectives / Agents vs. Bad Guys with Monsters". That's not a bad thing at all (Terror of MechaGodzilla's human plot is actually pretty good for a franchise coasting on fumes at that point).
Ghidorah: The Three Headed Monster jumps between sci-fi and cop drama pretty nimbly too.
It's not so much that they're
boring as they are
old. For example, the car chase in T
he French Connection (1971) consistently places on lists of best car chases, but if you dropped that exact chase into a movie nowadays people would say it's dull, and it keeps cutting away to show Popeye's reactions or the train running overhead, and the car isn't flashy enough.
I love the old Godzilla flicks, but you have to take them for what they are; middle-to-low budget foreign genre films. The fact that it's
obviously guys in rubber suits grappling for 15 minutes while the other 60 is astronauts / detectives / reporters doing 'stuff' is part of the whole package. You can definitely tell who grasps that and who hasn't based on the "boring human" comments. As fun as it sounds on paper, 2+ hours of pure spectacle, watching monsters smash shit is kind of a video game you aren't playing.
Also, Godzilla 2014 had more Godzilla screen time than 9 of the other 29 movies. I was honestly surprised to see
vs. MechaGodzilla and
Ghidorah so low since those are kind of my favorites. It also beats out the original 1955 movie by a full minute;
Also, you see Godzilla in the 2014 movie for 9 minutes and 56 seconds. For comparison, here's the screen time for other movie monsters;
The Blob (1958): 1 minute, 26 seconds
Jaws (1975): 4 minutes
Alien (1978): 3 minutes, 36 seconds
Cloverfield (2008): 3 minutes, 26 seconds
With the exception of the Blob, none of those monsters have a full body shot in the first hour (Blob clocks in at 21:47). Cloverfield's director put it best; “there’s nothing more terrifying than the dread, the anticipation of seeing something.”
The problem with Godzilla 2014 isn't a lack of monster; it's lack of good human. They bump off Bryan Cranston way too early, Strathairn only interjects "military stuff" when Watanabe isn't dropping pseudo-philosophical gibberish, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson has all the charm and emotion of a wet gym sock. There's a lot wrong with Godzilla'14, but laying it solely at the feet of "not enough monster!" isn't it.
