Godzilla: King of the Monsters在周末开设了＃1，但仍然令人失望，赚钱$47 millionagainst expectations of $50 million or more. That’s not a huge disappointment, true, but Godzilla’s expectations themselves were disappointing. This is the third entry in a franchise, following 2014’sGodzilla, which debuted with $93 million, and 2017’s孔：骷髅岛，which opened to $61 million, and the expectations keep going down. The Godzilla franchise is depreciating, whichhas everyone wonderingWhat Has Gone Wrong对于世界上最心爱的原子蜥蜴。这肯定不是电影很可怕。电影没问题。我很喜欢2014年戈苏拉。I enjoyedKong: Skull Island. Godzilla: King of the Monstersis not as silly asKongbut it has more monsters fighting thanGodzilla, so it’s okay.
To be honest, I don’t feel I can properly review it because my experience seeing it was so bad. The projector bulb in the theater was clearly burning out, and a full third of the frame was lost to darkness, while the remaining image was noticeably dim. For sure, many visuals in莫斯特之王are meant to be stunning—big, wide-shot visuals of giant creatures emerging from darkness, often with one bold color highlighting their terrible visages. Striking stuff, or it would have been, if I could have f-cking seen it clearly. (To repeat: The theatrical experience blows, and until theater owners start investing in it, I don’t care about saving it.) Director Michael Dougherty (Krampus) takes over from Gareth Edwards, though he keeps the tone of the 2014 movie. Which is to say, slow, ponderous, even philosophical.
Which is probably where we should start when trying to figure out why Godzilla is not working for contemporary audiences. I don’t know that there IS a way to make him work, at least when it’s Hollywood trying. Godzilla is not our cultural myth, he belongs to Japan. And in 2016, Toho, a Japanese production company, madeShin Godzilla,这是可能是最好的现代哥斯拉电影。Shin Godzillaupdates Godzilla’s atomic metaphor to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster (a connection the 2014 Godzilla makes, too, though less effectively), as Godzilla causes tsunamis and trails radioactive waste in his wake.Shin Godzilla也是一个梦幻般的官僚讽刺，这是从好莱坞缺少这个怪物的一个元素。目前在哥斯拉的目前正在非常认真地抓住自己，而且King of the Monstersisn’t interested in any kind of satirical or critical examination of power. It proposes Godzilla and the other “titans” as an existential good vs. evil debate. Godzilla is rooted in nuclear annihilation, but except for acknowledging Godzilla’s radioactive origin, the Hollywood movies do not see Godzilla as a representative of nuclear power.
这些新电影至少明白这个神话的一部分是人类面对存在的威胁，而是两者都是GodzillaandKing of the Monsterscan’t quite surrender to the futility of fighting Godzilla, in both movies, scrappy soldiers end uphelping戈苏拉。这是另一件事 - 这些新电影已经将哥斯拉变成了一个好人。我们对核破坏的文化神话进行了文化神话，或多或少地将超级英雄是巨大原子蜥蜴的超级英雄故事。我得到了这个概念，那个哥斯拉和其他泰坦代表了原始秩序，而且怪兽之王,特别是，哥斯拉对西部神话中的概念涉及，主要是众神，当人类走太远时，众神惩罚人类。在这里，我们正在摧毁我们的星球，如癌变的增长，所以哥斯拉和其他泰坦已经来到了比赛领域，并在幸存下来让地球成为一个幸存的机会。这不是一个令人恐惧的方式来思考哥斯拉，但它仍然误解了哥斯拉是什么：anEastern myth. Godzilla sprang from a specific cultural trauma, and even in recent years, Godzilla remains a way for Japan to process specific, nuclear-related events that have occurred in their country. The echo of the original trauma remains.
We’ve spent five years recoding Godzilla into something that one, won’t make Americans feel bad about the atomic bomb, and two, can be processed in a broader sense, without the particular Japanese inflection. The movies are not poorly made, they are, at the least, intermittently entertaining; they are GORGEOUS to look at; and the philosophical hook isn’t bad, in itself. It’s just awfully similar to the same philosophical thread in most superhero movies, with our own cultural myths dealing with good vs. evil, moral imperative, and existential extinction threats.复仇者：endgame.is grounded in the extinction threat—we just told ourselves that story. Maybe people didn’t feel the need to repeat it by borrowing someone else’s symbols when we already have our own. Everyone’s trying to figure out what is wrong with Godzilla, and why audiences aren’t getting onboard with a new Godzilla franchise. But maybe nothing is wrong with Godzilla. Maybe it’s just not our story to tell.
Shin Godzillais available to rent on Amazon, if you want to see a great contemporary Godzilla movie:
