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Showing posts with the label kaiju

GODZILLA: KING OF THE MONSTERS - VIDEO REVIEW

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I talk a bit about the new Godzilla movie which, I think, stars Godzilla.

PACIFIC RIM: UPRISING - REVIEW

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Guillermo Del Toro's Pacific Rim was something of a breath of fresh air back in 2013. The increasingly tedious Transformers franchise was still going strong so finally seeing a genuinely fun and well made movie about giant robots fighting was hugely satisfying. For all its flaws, Pacific Rim was exactly what it sought out to be: a modern yet proudly cheesy version of Robot Jox crossed with a deadpan Japanese Kaiju movie. This was a thoroughly entertaining visual treat with some memorable city-set fight scenes and one delightfully over-the-top Idris Elba speech. Pacific Rim: Uprising takes place some years later as we meet Elba's character's son Jake Pentecost (John Boyega), a former Jaeger pilot turned thief who sells Jaeger parts on the black market. When he encounters Amara (Cailee Spaeny), a street-smart young orphan who has managed to make her own Jaeger, they are both caught by the Defense Corps and put to work as new recruits. As China's Shao Corporation g

SHIN GODZILLA - REVIEW

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Also known as Godzilla Resurgence , this was Japan's answer to Hollywood's own reboot about the iconic monster released a couple of years ago with Toho coming back to re-introduce Godzilla once again in style. The film initially shows Godzilla when he first appears in modern day Japan, in a lesser form. Out-of-control and extremely destructive, he of course creates a lot of carnage even before morphing into an evolved and more familiar form. Members of the Japanese government and the military, along with the US are therefore forced to figure out the best way to take him out before he reaches Tokyo. Everything you'd expect from a Godzilla movie is in this one including boring talks between officials, buildings toppling left and right, people being evacuated, planes dropping bombs on the beast. There is definitely more cool stuff to look at in Shin Godzilla than there was in the American Godzilla reboot, which was basically unwilling to show us Godzilla until the very e

ULTRAMAN SAGA - REVIEW

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Released in 2012, Ultraman Saga was a Japanese superhero movie set in a post-apocalyptic world where cities are being invaded by Godzilla-style monsters as a team of big robot-controlling tough gals and the last remaining giant heroes try to defend what's left. Mixing CGI, colourful anime visuals and dudes in monster/Ultraman costumes, this is a modern precursor to Pacific Rim with a proudly retro look and feel. It is a sequel to Ultraman Zero: The Revenge Of Belial , released two years prior, and stars familiar faces from the series as well as members of the J-pop group AKB48 because pop stars make excellent actors, as we all know. The good thing about this one is you don't need to know anything that happened before because, fear not, the film is packed with flashbacks and exposition so it's all pretty self-explanatory. Hell, even without the subtitles I'm sure any non-Japanese speaker would easily figure out the plot: monsters bad, everyone else good. The afo

PACIFIC RIM - REVIEW

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You'd think something as simple as big robots and big monsters would be super easy to get right in a movie, but with the likes of the Transformers trilogy and 1998's Godzilla in its back catalogue, that kind of flick badly needed a makeover. Good thing Guillermo Del Toro knows roughly what he's doing! Yes, Pacific Rim is the Hellboy director's take on monster movies and big robot movies: the result? A decidedly fun, brainless mesh of anime-style melodrama, epic nonsense, cartoonish lols and  Robot Jox -type live-action 80's goofiness. It's very retro, very silly but very cool. It's one of those movies you can't take too seriously and demands that you sit down, suspend your disbelief quite a bit and enjoy yourself. Nitpicking Pacific Rim would really be missing the point. Now the reason that some pan the Transformers movies, me included, is that their flaws really are completely distracting and do affect the style the films themselves are going