#it feels like a goddamned cult on there and every time i dip my toes i come out feeling slimy and sick

[here-there-were-dragons]

every time i think the "staff can do no wrong and any form of complaining or expressing literally anything other than "yaaay love it <3" with no further comments is bashing and literally evil we should never say anything that could even potentially be interpreted as mildly critical ever because ~some artist who worked hard on this is probably reading the forums and might feel bad if we ever express anything but praise~ also we must be constantly positive at all times unless we're passive-aggressively shaming someone for having an extremely polite and apologetically worded criticism and if you ask the staff for literally anything you had better be prepared to preface it with 3 paragraphs of apologizing for breathing air" attitude is bad on tumblr, i take one look at the forums, and holy fucking hell is it SO much worse on site

[scifrey]

I'm super pleased to announce that my satire novella THE DARK SIDE OF THE GLASS is returning to print as CITY BY NIGHT, published by Short Fuse. 

The Cover Reveal is on its way, but in the meantime, how would you like to read the first three chapters for free? They will be released one at a time on Wattpad this week, leading up to the October 6th publication date. And if you'll be at Con-Volution on October 7th, join us for the release party!

This is a story about Mary, number one fan of the hottest cult vampire detective TV show, City by Night...until it becomes all too real.

An accident with the Craft Services truck sends her hurtling into the world of the show, and Mary is thrilled--who wouldn't want to live alongside their favorite TV characters? Unfortunately, living in TV-land isn't all that Mary thought it would be. The charm fades when Mary realizes that the extras still don't speak, the matte paintings don't become real, and all the infuriating flaws in the writing are just amplified when you have to try to interact with the shallow characters. And then, of course, the lead character Richmond DuNoir falls for her!

Sure, fine, he's hot...but he's also a bit, well, poorly written. And his admiration comes with its own set of problems: Antonio, Richmond's psychotic stalker, has a habit of killing off the girls-of-the-week. Not only is Mary disillusioned with what she thought was a lush world until she had to try to maneuver in it, now she's about to be murdered by one of the stupidest clichés in the history of television in a world that, pardon the pun, totally sucks.

A loving satire of the Toronto film industry, vampire-cop television, and what it really means to be a "fan" from award-winning science fiction author J.M. Frey.

READ THE FREE PREVIEW ON WATTPAD | PREORDER THE NOVELLA ON AMAZON

Chapter One : Concerning Rabbit Holes and All That

When Mary comes to, she is lying face down in the grass beside the road.

Her first conscious thought, beyond Ow ow ow, is How long have I been lying here? Followed closely by Ouch and Am I really so unimportant that nobody has helped me? and Ouch and Where am I? Followed again by Ouch as she tries to get her hands under her shoulders and push herself onto her knees.

Rain has pooled in her upturned left ear. Her toes are frozen. Everything aches. Her head throbs. Her knees and her palms burn. Her left arm and left leg are bleeding, both from jagged gashes right above the joint that look way, way grosser than anything she's ever seen people sporting after a visit to the Effects Makeup trailer. There's grit in the long cut, and when Mary flexes her fingers, she can feel the sickening grind of grains of dust against her muscles. It feels disgusting, the way that frogs squashed by a little boy's shoe is disgusting, with that sort of oozing pop.

The Craft Services van that hit her is nowhere to be seen. The studio is gone, too, even though she was pretty sure she hadn't run that far. Something warm and salty stings her left eye.

She's on a street she doesn't recognize, at night, with streetlamps that only mostly work. They cast an amber glow over the glistening pavement, so perfectly moody that it looks like something out of a cinematographer's wet dream. There's grass between the sidewalk and the road, and it's wet from a storm that must have passed over her while she was unconscious, if her wet hair and ear are anything to go by. The air smells of...nothing.

Nothing at all. For reasons Mary can't fathom—reasons which make her heart beat faster, her shoulders ratchet up to her ears—this unnerves her. It's unnatural.

There's no one on the barren street. It's a strangely harmonious mix of residential and storefronts made out of the converted ground floors of houses, all dark and closed up for the night. There is, by some strange cosmic luck, or fate, or universal synergy, a phone booth less than a block away, on the corner. Mary hasn't seen a phone booth in years, but she doesn't own a cellular phone herself because she never wanted to be distracted at work. She hates her coworkers when they tap away with their thumbs, instead of paying attention to who is going in and out of the studio gate like they're being paid to do.

It takes Mary a few minutes to get upright. She is reminded unpleasantly of the cliché about the wounded gazelle on the Serengeti: weak and tottering, but too afraid of attracting the wrong attention to bleat for help. Her head throbs again, and then a very stupid realization bubbles up to the surface of her muzzy brain: she is alone.

Totally alone.

There is no one on the street. There doesn't even seem to be anyone in the houses. The Craft Services van driver, her boss, and her co-workers have all just abandoned her, left her for dead on the side of the road. Clearly, nobody came after her. Nobody even stopped to make sure she was alive, as far as she can tell.

That says a lot more about how they think of her than Mr. Geary's horrible insults about her scripts. The ungrateful...jerky jerks! Mary thinks, clutching at the gash on her arm.

She has given City By Night two goddamned years of her life. She just wants the show to love her in return. Is that so very much to ask?

Apparently, it is.

Anger fuels her enough to get her over to the phone booth, helps her exchange pain for momentum. Clutching at the scarred metal frame of the door to stay upright, she stares in stupid incomprehension at the coin slot for a second. Her left hand dips unconsciously into her empty pocket, which is its own sort of special agony. She nearly cries when she realizes she has no quarters. It takes her a few more fuzzy, swimming moments to realize she can probably make emergency calls for free. Hopeful, she fumbles up the handset and dials zero. The operator—female and far too perky for Mary's dark frame of mind—comes on and asks what she needs or where she would like to be connected. "I need help," Mary says into the handset. She can practically hear the operator frowning, because, duh, why else would she be talking to one? "I was...I think I was hit by a car. A van. Whatever."

"Holy sugar!" the operator says, all professionalism thrown out the window. Mary wonders if the operator calls her husband punkin. "Stay where you are, ma'am. We're tracing the call and an ambulance is on the way."

Mary winces; she's too young to be called "ma'am" just yet, and it's another dig at her self-esteem that she really does not need today. It's pretty thoroughly dug already.

"Thanks," she says, and lets the handset clatter out of her grip, relieved because it was pressing into her road burn. She slumps down the side of the phone booth to wait. She folds bruised elbows over bruised knees and rests her head back against the Plexiglass and tries to stay awake. She read that you're not supposed to go to sleep if you've hit your head, and she thinks getting smacked in the skull with a Craft Services van counts. The cord for the phone handset isn't long enough to reach all the way down to her ear, so she just lets it dangle, detachedly amused by the way the operator's voice is squawking out at her. She's pretty sure that she's probably in shock. She's also pretty sure that the fact that she's in shock isn't supposed to be funny, but she realizes belatedly that she's giggling all the same.

Hysteria makes Mary drift for a while. She's aware of closing her eyes, of replaying every time Crispin Okafor winked at her from the back seat of his car, the way she received the cast photo poster after the Season One wrap party, already signed with what she assumed at the time was a personal message. She thinks about how much she threw herself into the show, and how she's never seemed to notice or care that she has been bouncing off of brick walls.

It's a sucky thought. She stops giggling and lets herself be sad for a little while.

She might have even cried, but by then, her head is pounding and her whole body is like one stiff, hot rip. She thinks maybe the wetness on her face is tears, but it could also be rain, or blood; it's hard to keep track, especially when the liquid feels so warm, and her skin is getting so cold.

She wonders if she should be mad for a bit, just to change things up, keep her life interesting until the ambulance arrives, but she isn't sure whether she should be madder at the crew or herself for being so gullible. That spirals her back down into depressing aching sadness again, so she decides to stay there.

And somewhere in all of that, she thinks she sees Crispin Okafor. Crispin—the damnably beautiful lead actor who knows just the right way to smirk at a paparazzi camera, what angle he should hold his head and shoulders at—is sticking his face into the phone booth. He's dressed in his costume; that black leather jacket that Richmond DuNoir favors (whose style Mary has copied), in the signature red silk shirt that makes his smoky dark skin take on the depth of velvet, that fake look of honest concern.

"Miss?" he asks softly. "Miss, are you all right?"

"Fuck off, Crispin," she says back. At least she thinks she says it. It might come out just as a slur. Her mouth feels full of marbles and cotton now, and it's getting harder and harder to do anything as simple as moistening her lips. Of course, Mary very rarely swears, so it could be that, too.

She feels like this is an appropriate time to start, though.

"Miss, I think you're pretty badly hurt."

"Go away," she says, miserably. "You're the last person I want to see right now."

He startles visibly, dark eyes becoming dramatic white spots on his shadowed face. Overdone, she thinks. You're trying too hard to emote. Retake.

"You know me?" he asks.

"Seriously, I said go away."

He looks like he wants to argue with her, but cuts himself off, halted by the sudden approaching wail of sirens. The ambulance screeches to a halt beside her, washing the interior of the phone booth red and blue by turns, painting the already pale skin of her arms with deathly tints: blood-red and dead-flesh-blue and back to skin-colored before alternating again. Crispin is gone between flares, melting artistically into the darkness.

Mary's head starts throbbing worse in the flashing light, and she is pretty sure she's going to vomit any second now. She wishes Crispin had hung around long enough so she could do it on his goddamned shoes.

KEEP READING

[richmeganews]

'Farscape' Was Feminist Sci-Fi Before It was Cool

Warning: This piece mentions sexual assault.

As of last week, Farscape—a cult sci-fi series made in collaboration between the Jim Henson Creature shop and the Sci-Fi channel (before it was Syfy!) is officially 20 years old and newly available to stream on Amazon Prime in glorious 4K. You might have heard of it if you move in nerd circles, maybe referred to as “Muppets in Space” (but not Muppets From Space), or the thing superstar video game voice actor Claudia Black did before she was in all the Uncharted games.

It broke barriers in some meaningful ways, first as a serialized show before that was cool (especially in genre TV), and perhaps most importantly as feminist-leaning sci-fi. It was a show so campy and daring that it was allowed to be a little weirder and more progressive than its more straight-laced forebears, especially in its era of latter-day Star Treks. Farscape—which is my favorite TV show of all time, just FYI—was filled to the brim with complex, flawed, interesting female characters, and it played with gender politics in smarter and darker ways than most genre fiction has dared both before and after it aired.

I don’t want to throw Star Trek under the bus here. Voyager and Deep Space Nine (both still running when Farscape premiered in 1999) had plenty of strong women characters, and even some mildly complex ones. These were characters I grew up with as a kid and a young teen, who were role models in many ways, and I’d go to bat for several of their portrayals (what’s up, Captain Janeway and Lieutenant B'Elanna Torres. I see you).

But they are still 90s Star Trek characters. Their growth was often stilted by the episodic format that dominated TV at the time, and the famously not-really-queer ethos of that universe kept a whole lot of interesting stories and avenues of representation firmly in “very special episode” territory. Enter Farscape with costumes and character designs and a general vibe so campy they’d make a Bushwick burlesque troupe blush. With its purposeful playing on gender roles and traditional femme/masc dynamics, its ever-so-light-but-still-super-there foray into kink and leather aesthetics, its queerness, and—on the far more serious side—its raw depictions of trauma, healing, and difficult relationships, Farscape was all the way out there. Sometimes, the show fell flat on its face. But largely it succeeded, and it’s well worth experiencing 20 years on.

Through the widest lens, it’s an action-y, sometimes soap-y space serial. In the pilot, an astronaut named John Crichton (portrayed by Ben Browder) takes off in an experimental spacecraft, goes through a wormhole, and ends up in the middle of a prison break on the other side of the universe where a bunch of weird aliens are taking over their prison ship in a coup for freedom. Everyone here is a criminal or a misfit of some kind (or they’ve been co-opted into said misfit band), and no one here is expected to be perfect. They go on adventures, get hurt, fall in and out of love, and lose and make friends along the way.

Image via Jim Henson Company

I like to tell people who are first dipping their toe into the series to skip a lot of season one, because, with respect, the team didn’t quite get it together at first. I also tell them that the appeal of this show, inherently, is in its characters and the way the show cares very deeply about their interior lives. It’s primarily interested in this little petri dish of weird people and how they mix and bounce off and cling to one another, given the larger-than-life events of living in a wild space serial. The show loves to take classic sci-fi tropes (body-swapping, time-traveling, alien politicking, you name it) and twist them in unfamiliar ways, especially where it concerns gender, sex, and notions about heroism and doing the right thing. Nowhere is this more evident than in its principle woman characters, all of whom look like they could’ve been bought out of an (especially colorful) sci-fi stock catalog, and all of whom are actually fleshed out, complex, and fascinating.

Aeryn Sun (Claudia Black) is a badass soldier who kicks the male lead’s ass in the first episode. She looks and sounds like the sorta-sterile badass lady stereotype made famous by Sarah Connor and the short-lived Tasha Yar. But she also enjoys (or endures) the longest emotional journey of anyone on the show, grows in ways that are consistent with her temperament and her desire to be, fundamentally, a protector and a fighter, and gets to have a relationship with a man who actually respects her for who she is.

At first blush, Chiana (Gigi Edgley) is a classic femme fatale sexpot and artful dodger who slinks her way in and out of wild situations. But Farscape doesn’t deny her pleasure or punish her for it. Everyone on the crew knows how much Chiana loves to fuck. It’s only a problem, per se, when she uses that sex bomb to hurt people (which, yes, she does). She’s also kind, loyal, smart as hell, and crew MVP in dozens of sticky situations.

Zhaan (Virginia Hey) is a priest and the ship’s doctor, an anarchist who was imprisoned for a major political coup, who sometimes meditates naked when she feels like it. If there’s a stereotype here, its the Earth mother/healer, but Zhann is also capable of terrifying violence and incredible acts of both selfishness and selflessness. She’s spiritual, she’s a scientist, and yes, she, too, likes to fuck.

Later leading ladies include Jool (Tammy MacIntosh), who first appears to be a stuck-up princess/bimbo type who also has something like four PhDs. Noranti (Melissa Jaffer), who looks like an old hag and also has hilarious ideas about healing materials. But she enjoys a good lay too. And Sikozu (Raelee Hill), a hyper-capable spy who got super into leather and kink.

There’s an obvious through-line here about gender and pleasure. By the time the series has run its course, you’ll see just about every main character on this show enjoy sex in some form, and interestingly, women are mainly framed on top. It’s a subtle element, but wildly effective in communicating the series’ ideas about sex, who owns sex, and who is allowed to enjoy it without punishment. There’s very little slut-shaming to go alongside all that fucking on Farscape, which was revolutionary in a time where the most sex you’d see on a mainstream sci-fi show is a little kissing with a strategic pan to a space blanket. And that was almost always exclusive to heterosexual couples, wherein Farscape has queer scenes and masturbation, and yes, Virginia, puppet sex.

Puppet sex.

I don’t linger on the sex element to highlight the series’ horniness, rather that it had a refreshing attitude toward sex in a pretty prudish time. And there was a difficult fourth-season arc about sexual assault and trauma that intelligently, I think, played on notions about gender and power that was also unexpected at the time.

Farscape does a lot of other things right that earned it its place on my all-time favorite list. It’s very, very funny, and alternately quite dark at times, and rides those highs and lows in ways that allowed its storylines and characters to resonate so strongly. Its colorful aesthetic is wild at times, and never not fun to look at and just kind of soak in. And goddamn, this show can tell an action story.

But it’s primarily those characters that have stayed with me through two decades of my own life, who were formative for me to watch as a young woman and queer person navigating a pretty terrible time to be queer and a woman. And despite some missteps, it’s still a joy to check back on today, this goofy, funny, dark, wonderful, creative show about a bunch of weirdos on a spaceship.

Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.

Follow Danielle Riendeau on Twitter.

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from WordPress http://www.richmeganews.com/farscape-was-feminist-sci-fi-before-it-was-cool/

[richmegavideo]

'Farscape' Was Feminist Sci-Fi Before It was Cool

Warning: This piece mentions sexual assault.

As of last week, Farscape—a cult sci-fi series made in collaboration between the Jim Henson Creature shop and the Sci-Fi channel (before it was Syfy!) is officially 20 years old and newly available to stream on Amazon Prime in glorious 4K. You might have heard of it if you move in nerd circles, maybe referred to as “Muppets in Space” (but not Muppets From Space), or the thing superstar video game voice actor Claudia Black did before she was in all the Uncharted games.

It broke barriers in some meaningful ways, first as a serialized show before that was cool (especially in genre TV), and perhaps most importantly as feminist-leaning sci-fi. It was a show so campy and daring that it was allowed to be a little weirder and more progressive than its more straight-laced forebears, especially in its era of latter-day Star Treks. Farscape—which is my favorite TV show of all time, just FYI—was filled to the brim with complex, flawed, interesting female characters, and it played with gender politics in smarter and darker ways than most genre fiction has dared both before and after it aired.

I don’t want to throw Star Trek under the bus here. Voyager and Deep Space Nine (both still running when Farscape premiered in 1999) had plenty of strong women characters, and even some mildly complex ones. These were characters I grew up with as a kid and a young teen, who were role models in many ways, and I’d go to bat for several of their portrayals (what’s up, Captain Janeway and Lieutenant B'Elanna Torres. I see you).

But they are still 90s Star Trek characters. Their growth was often stilted by the episodic format that dominated TV at the time, and the famously not-really-queer ethos of that universe kept a whole lot of interesting stories and avenues of representation firmly in “very special episode” territory. Enter Farscape with costumes and character designs and a general vibe so campy they’d make a Bushwick burlesque troupe blush. With its purposeful playing on gender roles and traditional femme/masc dynamics, its ever-so-light-but-still-super-there foray into kink and leather aesthetics, its queerness, and—on the far more serious side—its raw depictions of trauma, healing, and difficult relationships, Farscape was all the way out there. Sometimes, the show fell flat on its face. But largely it succeeded, and it’s well worth experiencing 20 years on.

Through the widest lens, it’s an action-y, sometimes soap-y space serial. In the pilot, an astronaut named John Crichton (portrayed by Ben Browder) takes off in an experimental spacecraft, goes through a wormhole, and ends up in the middle of a prison break on the other side of the universe where a bunch of weird aliens are taking over their prison ship in a coup for freedom. Everyone here is a criminal or a misfit of some kind (or they’ve been co-opted into said misfit band), and no one here is expected to be perfect. They go on adventures, get hurt, fall in and out of love, and lose and make friends along the way.

Image via Jim Henson Company

I like to tell people who are first dipping their toe into the series to skip a lot of season one, because, with respect, the team didn’t quite get it together at first. I also tell them that the appeal of this show, inherently, is in its characters and the way the show cares very deeply about their interior lives. It’s primarily interested in this little petri dish of weird people and how they mix and bounce off and cling to one another, given the larger-than-life events of living in a wild space serial. The show loves to take classic sci-fi tropes (body-swapping, time-traveling, alien politicking, you name it) and twist them in unfamiliar ways, especially where it concerns gender, sex, and notions about heroism and doing the right thing. Nowhere is this more evident than in its principle woman characters, all of whom look like they could’ve been bought out of an (especially colorful) sci-fi stock catalog, and all of whom are actually fleshed out, complex, and fascinating.

Aeryn Sun (Claudia Black) is a badass soldier who kicks the male lead’s ass in the first episode. She looks and sounds like the sorta-sterile badass lady stereotype made famous by Sarah Connor and the short-lived Tasha Yar. But she also enjoys (or endures) the longest emotional journey of anyone on the show, grows in ways that are consistent with her temperament and her desire to be, fundamentally, a protector and a fighter, and gets to have a relationship with a man who actually respects her for who she is.

At first blush, Chiana (Gigi Edgley) is a classic femme fatale sexpot and artful dodger who slinks her way in and out of wild situations. But Farscape doesn’t deny her pleasure or punish her for it. Everyone on the crew knows how much Chiana loves to fuck. It’s only a problem, per se, when she uses that sex bomb to hurt people (which, yes, she does). She’s also kind, loyal, smart as hell, and crew MVP in dozens of sticky situations.

Zhaan (Virginia Hey) is a priest and the ship’s doctor, an anarchist who was imprisoned for a major political coup, who sometimes meditates naked when she feels like it. If there’s a stereotype here, its the Earth mother/healer, but Zhann is also capable of terrifying violence and incredible acts of both selfishness and selflessness. She’s spiritual, she’s a scientist, and yes, she, too, likes to fuck.

Later leading ladies include Jool (Tammy MacIntosh), who first appears to be a stuck-up princess/bimbo type who also has something like four PhDs. Noranti (Melissa Jaffer), who looks like an old hag and also has hilarious ideas about healing materials. But she enjoys a good lay too. And Sikozu (Raelee Hill), a hyper-capable spy who got super into leather and kink.

There’s an obvious through-line here about gender and pleasure. By the time the series has run its course, you’ll see just about every main character on this show enjoy sex in some form, and interestingly, women are mainly framed on top. It’s a subtle element, but wildly effective in communicating the series’ ideas about sex, who owns sex, and who is allowed to enjoy it without punishment. There’s very little slut-shaming to go alongside all that fucking on Farscape, which was revolutionary in a time where the most sex you’d see on a mainstream sci-fi show is a little kissing with a strategic pan to a space blanket. And that was almost always exclusive to heterosexual couples, wherein Farscape has queer scenes and masturbation, and yes, Virginia, puppet sex.

Puppet sex.

I don’t linger on the sex element to highlight the series’ horniness, rather that it had a refreshing attitude toward sex in a pretty prudish time. And there was a difficult fourth-season arc about sexual assault and trauma that intelligently, I think, played on notions about gender and power that was also unexpected at the time.

Farscape does a lot of other things right that earned it its place on my all-time favorite list. It’s very, very funny, and alternately quite dark at times, and rides those highs and lows in ways that allowed its storylines and characters to resonate so strongly. Its colorful aesthetic is wild at times, and never not fun to look at and just kind of soak in. And goddamn, this show can tell an action story.

But it’s primarily those characters that have stayed with me through two decades of my own life, who were formative for me to watch as a young woman and queer person navigating a pretty terrible time to be queer and a woman. And despite some missteps, it’s still a joy to check back on today, this goofy, funny, dark, wonderful, creative show about a bunch of weirdos on a spaceship.

Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.

Follow Danielle Riendeau on Twitter.

The post 'Farscape' Was Feminist Sci-Fi Before It was Cool appeared first on .

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from WordPress http://www.richmegavideo.com/farscape-was-feminist-sci-fi-before-it-was-cool/

[spookshowcinema-blog]

Spook Show Cinema Presents: Gojira

Welcome Cinemaniacs to Spook Show Cinema Presents, a showcase for a few of horror’s finer features. Look at the calendar! It’s October, and you know what that means! It’s the 31 Days of Halloween! For this very special month, we’re going to cap off each work week with a very special feature; Godzillapalooza! All Godzilla, all the time! Now without further preamble, Spook Show Cinema Presents Gojira!

C’mon. You know this one right? Awakened by nuclear blasts, a gargantuan beast from the prehistoric era awakens from the deep and descends upon Tokyo in a deadly display of devastating destruction! Blue Oyster Cult wrote a song all about it? You know the one. “woo oo, Godzilla.” That’s all there is to Gojira, right?

Well, not quite. It turns out that the first film in the enormous Godzilla film franchise is a little more complicated than I remembered, both is content and the story behind the scenes. To get a better picture  we’re going to make some deep cuts and take a look under the skin.

NOTE: We’re going to use the Japanese spelling, “Gojira” when referring to the original Japanese film, and the American spelling “Godzilla” when referring to the character and franchise. Got it? Great. Let’s go.

So What's it About?

If you grew up in the U.S., there’s a strong chance that you’ve never actually seen the original Godzilla film. “Now Mateo,” I hear you say, “I had Godzilla on VHS! I watched it every week! I watched it every day! I watched it so many times that I wore out the tape in the VHS! Don’t tell me I’ve never seen the original Godzilla!” To you, I say I get it pal. I was in the same boat until just the other day. I was a Godzilla fan. An aficionado, if you will. But as sure as the world turns, we were both victims of the nefarious process known as “Americanization”

Here’s the skinny. “Gojira” was originally released in Japan in 1954 and was a financial success. Spotting a potential blockbuster, American film executives snatched up the film’s international distribution rights and set out to create a monster movie that was more palatable to their intended audience. Gojira was re-cut, re-dubbed, and partially re-shot to include Canadian actor Raymond Burr as a new main character. The result of these efforts was “Godzilla: King of the Monsters”, a film closer in tone to the cheesy giant monster movies that peppered the theaters of the era.

Gojira, on the other hand, is a far more somber and contemplative film. You know how most Godzilla movies are vicarious exercises in voyeuristic destruction, in which one or more giant monster challenges the King for his crown, leading to an all out battle that tramples the terrified teeming masses of Tokyo into dust? Well that’s not how Gojira works. It’s less of a rip roaring monster slugfest, and more of an allegorical exploration of the unpredicted consequences of Nuclear Proliferation, plus the dangers of unfettered application of such destructive technology.

I’m going to skip the bit where I give you the plot of the film. If you’re a fan of the big green mean machine, you owe it to yourself to give Gojira a viewing.

So What's Good?

This is going to sound stupid, profound, redundant, and or all of the above, so bear with me here. In a lot of ways, Gojira is pretty goddamn close to my idealized concept of a proper Godzilla flick. Now before my head starts spinning and steam starts leaking out of my ears, let me unpack that. The Godzilla franchise is a massive ocean of sequels, spinoffs, knockoffs, homages, adaptations and remakes. I’ve dipped my toes in liberally in all of these different waters, and as a result I’ve developed an internal sense of what constitutes a Godzilla property.

Everyone who’s a fan of big franchises has one of these. It’s why you hear angry fans mutter about things “not feeling right” when a new entry makes radical changes that don’t fit in with the franchise’s M.O. When you consume enough of a franchise, you put together all the best pieces in your head to form “the right stuff”. And oh boy, Goijra is jam packed full of the right stuff!

First off, the film features an ensemble cast from all walks of Japanese society. By having a socially diverse cast, the threat of Godzilla feels much more like a national crisis rather than an isolated disaster. So much emphasis is given to the community and how it responds to the existential threat of Godzilla. The countless dead are painted as not just faceless victims, but as sons and daughters, lovers and friends. This gives the destruction a harder edge than normally seen in monster media.

In addition to spreading its cast out on the social ladder, Gojira also excels at fleshing them out. The film feels as if it’s edited more like a modern high production tv show than a film. In the first act we jump from short vignette to vignette, in which we are introduced to unrelated characters and groups of people. We are given just enough time to establish what these people’s everyday lives are like. Then we are shown these lives being cataclysmically altered by the emergence of Godzilla.

You can say that Gojira’s Kaijumation hasn’t aged well, but you’d be wrong. Kaijumation, or the the art of putting a person in a rubber suit and filming them stomp all over a miniature set, is one of those peculiar techniques of filmaking that never quite lose their flavor. Sure, no one will argue that Godzilla’s monster looks more realistic than something out of a modern cg movie. But the one advantage it’ll always have over CG is that it looks real. A man was actually in a giant lizard costume, and actually stomped over miniature sets that were actually there. For a film about a giant monster taking Tokyo, that’s mighty impressive.

So What's The Word?

Gojira is a masterpiece and everyone should see it. I feel like I could write several Thousand word essays on the subject and still have more to say, so for the sake of time I’ll leave it at that. As Always, Stay Spooky My Friends!