What I’m Watching: Mothra vs Godzilla, end of Watchmen, cartoons

  • Mothra vs Godzilla (1964): Environmental destruction, in this case draining wetlands to make an industrial zone, exposes radioactive material. An egg floats near land, and is brought ashore. The twin fairies and Mothra herself show up asking “please give our egg back”, but a greedy land developer, backed by even greedier billionaire, puts the egg at the center of a theme park. None of this can end well.

    I’m fairly displeased by the green screen/rear projection tricks in this one. It was early days for color, but it wasn’t a technology ready for this time.

    The reporter and sidekick cameragirl are fine, kind of a Howard Hawks-like situation, and they’re not stupid, and not unreasonably competent; there’s only so much the press can do against a developer who doesn’t care. Eggman, the reporter who loves eggs, would be annoying comic relief except he’s not onscreen all that long.

    There’s a visit and multiple visions of the natives of Infant Island, who’ve been nuked and struggle to survive in a barren wasteland. They’re implausible primitive, but Japan has a long imperialist history of its own to deal with here. The fairies sing a song every scene they’re in, which is somewhere between charming, mystical, and “oh shit I hate musicals”.

    The monsters appear after half an hour. Godzilla as the walking force of destruction, Mothra as the ancient mother ready to protect her egg, and sacrifice to help the Japanese who have done her people so much wrong, and later the gross Mothra babies as the cycle of life. Their squeaking really gets on my nerves.

    The military/JSDF is portrayed unusually competent here. In most Godzilla movies, they are baffled, they try to fight, and die, and are utterly pointless. But this time they have competent plans, and are not doing too bad. They can’t win but they can fight Godzilla to a standstill while evacuations take place.

    The ending isn’t reasonable. 10 children and a teacher vs thousands dying on the mainland is a small price to pay. Godzilla hates squeaky little bugs like the Mothra larva, but they aren’t actually harming it, and their secret power takes forever, during which time Big G should nuke them into oblivion. Hmn, in 1968, Star Trek had the Tholian Web episode, which has some similarities.

    ★★★½☆

  • Watchmen: Finished up. Happily this isn’t getting a second season. Big time spoilers, but don’t worry about it, you’re not missing anything by keeping it secret.

    In the comics, Dr Manhattan’s first action as a superhuman was to reassemble himself from nothing, after disintegration. When Ozymandias… inconveniences… him, he pulls himself back together in very little time. So it’s utterly ludicrous that the whole plot of the series was to disassemble Manhattan again, and then “absorb” his “powers”. His power is that his nervous system constantly reassembles matter to stay existing, a magic booster shot of Manhattan won’t make someone else into a superhuman; maybe disassembling them in the right conditions would.

    So the hillbilly Senator, and Lady Trieu’s entire plan, and the egg scene at the end, are just nonsense.

    Adrian’s escape plan is dumb but amusingly portrayed, Jeremy Irons does occasionally wake up and play Ozymandias instead of just sleep-walking across the set in some tired English country drama. That’s about the only part of this entire 9 episodes of bullshit that I enjoyed.

    Later, Adrian using frozen baby squid as an orbital Project Thor system is fun, but the actual effects would be rather more catastrophic, even with frozen organics from high atmosphere instead of tungsten rods from orbit, they’re probably impacting at 3 km/s, ~1 Rick (Robinson, not Sanchez) each, so equivalent to 0.25 kg of TNT per squid, and there’s thousands of squid. Holding a box over your head won’t help. The area impacted would look like a giant cheese-grater had run across it to a few meters depth. And this is why we shouldn’t let psychopaths have teleporters or spaceships!

    Fake delayed tension is all through this shitshow, but most notably in the minutes of “run!” “what?” “take shelter!” “who is this?” “you’re gonna die!” “uh…” vamping when they would clearly already be dead. Again, I hate Damon Lindelof and hope he gets cancer of the fingers and tongue so the world will not again be plagued by his writing.

    Angela Abar (Regina King) is OK, decent action-hero chick, but she plays a detective very poorly; just hits her marks and says lines she clearly doesn’t believe. As Laurie/Silk Spectre, I preferred the dumb but very fit Laurie (Malin Akerman) from the Zak Snyder Watchmen to this one (Jean Smart) who couldn’t do a pushup let alone plausibly be an aging costumed vigilante G-woman.

    Hillbilly conspiracy theory cop Looking Glass (Tim Blake Nelson) is amusing, maybe not good, but funny. Very ancient Louis Gossett, Jr as Grampa Will is kind of sad, I didn’t even recognize him, but I can’t hate on Lou even if the role is badly written. Everyone else is a cypher or a walking meatstick.

    They couldn’t even get Robert Redford to do a cameo as himself. Incompetent Lindelof wrote him a letter, and he wouldn’t even respond.

    ★½☆☆☆ — I appreciate Irons’ Adrian enough to not completely savage this, but don’t watch it.

  • Adventure Time, Space Ghost Coast to Coast, Rick & Morty, etc.: There’s a lot of amusing cartoons for both kids and drunk/stoned adults on here.