The Terminator is the only film that uses time travel as a plot device that I respect. This is because there is no paradox: although Skynet tries to change the past, it inadvertently causes exactly the future it was so desperate to escape. This raises all sorts of horrible questions about free will, so I hope it’s not how the actual universe functions, but as a narrative structure I find it satisfying, even poetic, that all the time travel shenanigans simply create a self-sustaining loop.
All the other films throw that out the window. Chris and I argue they should not.
When we first recorded this, it was pretty timely. Godzilla vs. Kong was still in the popular discourse. Except then Chris’ mic turned out to have been broken, so there was only my side of the conversation. Then we tried again, but got distracted about 10 minutes in and ranted about how awful Disney and Marvel are for a few hours instead. Then I think the third time, we got super drunk and ended up appreciating Gerry Anderson’s model shot prowess into the small hours of the morning.
Even on the day we finally managed it, there was chaos on the trains and I barely made it to Glasgow for the session. Then it took about six months to edit because the acoustics were a bit off (and/or I started eating Pringles directly into the microphone). But at last, it is here! Godzilla vs. Kong is extremely full of holes, but every time I watch it I get fired right up, so it truly must be Close… But No Biscuit.
It once felt like my love of Godzilla disappeared along with my childhood, but in truth it merely retreated underground and lay dormant, waiting for the moment it would emerge from the darkness to wreak havoc once more.
With Hollywood taking on the mantle of the Big G over the last few hears, that time has come. Since Toho have still refused to release everything in the UK, I had to turn to crime to work through every single kaiju film Toho ever made.
Why is this relevant? Because Godzilla: King of the Monsters bears a superficial resemblance to Ghidrah the Three-Headed Monster, the very first time our favourite world-destroying space dragon appeared on screen, and a film that I never saw as a child. Crucially, in this outing King Ghidorah was only stoppable by the combined forces of Godzilla, Rodan and Mothra — the same four mon-stars appearing in King of the Monsters. As a firm fan of 2014’s Godzilla and its pseudo-prequel Kong: Skull Island, I was mightily intrigued to see how Legendary would approach that classic four-way rumble with the more grounded fiction of their modern franchise.
It was… quite something. I had to see it twice at the cinema before I could make up my mind. Needless to say, there is only one answer to such conflicted thoughts: Chris McPhail and I had to sit down and do a Close, But No Biscuit podcast about it.
I hadn’t seen the 1998 Godzilla film pretty much since it came out. I went to the cinema at the time of course, by that point already being a committed fan of the big G’s Japanese adventures from their spurious showings on Channel 4 at one in the morning, but beyond that I have little memory of whether or not I actually enjoyed it. I certainly didn’t get it on video, and kept instead returning to the few Toho films I’d managed to tape off the TV.
In hindsight, though, I realise how much this film coloured my desire to see Godzilla 2014 before the event. When I fell in love with the original Godzilla, I fell in love with his moves, his friends and his enemies — the tail-slaps, the atomic heat breath, Anguirus, Rodan, Mothra, King Ghidorah, Gigan, Mechagodzilla, the Japanese Self-Defence Force…
98 had none of these. They gave him no opposing monster, no atomic breath, and even the American army lacked any fun bonus tech like maser tanks and space rockets. Alas it is not merely a poor excuse for a Godzilla film — it’s a bad film, full stop. It’s a bad monster movie, a bad action movie, and a bad disaster movie. It has aged horrendously. So as with all such things… Chris McPhail and I had a podcast chat about that!
Oh, it’s been a while since we talked movies, hasn’t it?
I had no particular affinity for the Predator films until I actually paid attention to them; whereupon I realised that Alien vs. Predator is actually really good (another hill I’ll die on, alongside Battleship) and that Predator 2 is a way better film than the original. Erk!
Before you start bagging me, listen to the full discussion Chris McPhail and I had on the subject — plus our meandering writers’ room thoughts on where the franchise could have gone afterwards to have fun and make maximum use of that crossover potential…
I’ve got a couple further thoughts for after you’re finished listening, which can be found below.
I think Kong: Skull Island is one of my favourite films of all time. It’s a big, meaty monster movie with plenty of focus on the monster(s); Kong is not the footnote to a human story, but an integral part of a story that occurs in a natural world. It also strikes the perfect balance of fun with the straight faced delivery required to carry off a giant ape bashing giant dinosaurs in the face.
It also has a post-credits sequel hook, but you don’t need to watch that or the lightly-linked precursor Godzilla (2014) to enjoy it. This is the holy grail of shared-universe films: each one standing on its own, but quietly accentuating the others when taken in wider context. This is world-building done right.
The longer answer is: yes, but it was flooded with so many fantastic ideas. Alas, fantastic ideas though they may have been, most of their final forms are confused, contradictory, or simply malnourished. Independence Day: Resurgence starts off so well, genuinely extrapolating a possible future from What Happened in the First Film (instead of, ahem, desperately rebooting so they can retread the same stuff but worse) — then it almost immediately trips over its own shoelaces and stumbles off into mediocrity and crass over-spectacle.
I fuckin’ love dinosaurs. There’s something ineffably cool about big walking lizards, with their scaly skin, razor-sharp claws and teeth as long as your forearm (regardless of how anatomically realistic they actually are). When aliens and monsters are designed for games and films, it always irritates me how they end up being mostly-mammalian and very few creature designers seem to turn to our favourite prehistoric pals. (Risen 3 did and it’s amazeballs.)
The Jurassic Park films are not my favourite films in the world but I do love dinosaurs and the escalation of the Jurassic Park franchise is a bit wobbly — so here we are, back again to take a meandering examination of what went right, what went wrong, and what could have been salvaged with a few choice tweaks.
Unfortunately I was a bit off the boil when we recorded this, so it’s mostly Chris rampaging and me failing to articulate a few choice observations. Ah well.
Rao Dao Zao 