Godzilla vs King Ghidorah (1991)
Part of my series of reviews of the Heisei era Godzilla movies. Spoilers within, but we’re talking 90’s Godzilla movies here.
Spoiler alert: White people ruin everything. Again.
This movie tried to do a lot, and while I’m not sure how much it succeeded in most of it, I can’t deny it was enjoyable and engaging.
The plot is overly-complicated, and the time travel doesn’t even hold up to most pop-culture time travel logical standards. The movie really wants to say something about Japan’s complicated relationship with 1) Godzilla, 2) the West, 3) Nuclear power; and while it does indeed Say Things about all of that… I’m not sure exactly what points it’s actually trying to make. But it sure is fun to go along for the ride.
There are a few different ways to structure these kinds of movies, and this one goes for First Half: Characters and Story, Second Half: Monster Mayhem. I personally prefer the structure where the monsters are introduced from the beginning and their presence builds gradually throughout the movie until they dominate the narrative by the end, but in this case, the first-half sci-fi plot is entertaining, if convoluted. And I get why they wanted the first time you see Godzilla in the movie to be his pre-kaiju, dinosaur form. But this one goes in the file of “Godzilla Movies That Could Have Used More Godzilla” (see also, the first Monsterverse Godzilla, and Minus One).
There are a lot of engaging characters in this movie, but none of them are very deep or realized. For some reason the creepy white people entertained me to no end, and the idea of the villains from the future (and from the past) all being weird looking white dudes I believe was intentional and related to the above-mentioned attempts at Saying Things. But man, they were creepy and campy and fun to watch.
Also, that Steven Spielberg joke tried WAY too hard.
A fun movie I would watch again, though it won’t make any more sense next time, I’m sure.
Rating: 3+/5
Watched: 26 February 2024
Just scheduled a bunch of Godzilla movie reviews to post here over the next few weeks. Now, the real challenge is trying to remember to make other posts in between those, lest this just turn into a Godzilla review blog… (Though there are worse fates than that…!)
Godzilla Heisei Era Master Post!
Earlier this year, I watched all the Heisei era Godzilla movies as part of a bigger, less-organized desire to make my way through the entire series and a bunch of other kaiju-centric media.
I’m going to post my “reviews”1 for each movie individually over the next few days, but here is my ranking for the series, with links to each review added as I post them:
Heisei Godzilla Movies, Ranked!
- Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla 2
- Godzilla vs Destoroyah
- Godzilla vs Biollante
- Return of Godzilla
- Godzilla vs King Ghidorah
- Godzilla vs Spacegodzilla
- Godzilla and Mothra: Battle for Earth
Also: Godzilla 1985, the American cut of Return of Godzilla
1. These aren’t really reviews, more like the kind of excited, rambling nonsense I’d likely spew from the backseat on the way home if you were unfortunate enough to take me out to the movie theater.↩
Taking Thursday and Friday off of work. Why do the vacation-shortened work weeks feel longer than the full-size ones?
(Probably a bad sign that the work week already feels too long, and I haven’t actually started the first day of it yet…)
Steadily reaching the point of transition between setting up a new digital space/tool/platform and actually using it as a practice. Fully disclosure: I often struggle to make this transition well…
Every day I….
am hustlin'
have the blues
write the book
have to look up the difference between “i.e.” and “e.g.”…
CCB 007 - Surprise Yourself
When you drop all ideas about pleasure causing happiness and pain causing suffering, then you can find happiness where you might expect to feel pain and you can see how certain pleasures can lead to certain suffering. When you pay attention to your actual feelings rather than what you might expect to feel, you will surprise yourself.
💬 Source: Pleasure, Pain and Happiness
Unexpected Song
Listening to musicals still makes me sad sometimes. Especially some musicals, and especially some times. It’s been nearly twenty years since that part of my life. I never fully closed the door to that part of me, but it’s also a room I can’t go into completely. It’s a room I don’t think I’ll ever fully inhabit again. And yet.
Shelves of scripts I’ll never give away. Soundtracks moved from device to device that I can’t listen to anymore. Boxes of programs and cast party souvenirs in the attic.
It’s cliche to say this, but it was a lifetime ago. I think back to that period and it’s not unfamiliar but it is foreign. Like walking through your childhood home and realizing you aren’t in a memory but in a dream that’s slowly melting into a nightmare.
But the nightmare isn’t now, it was back then, when I violently ripped out that page from my life and tossed it to the wind. Only later realizing there were words on the page I’d never see again, never stumble across and only sometimes be able to remember the vague shapes of. Words that were so important to me not just lost but discarded. A secret formula, a spell, a code, a key. Gone.
At the time, I thought my love of theatre defined me. I couldn’t imagine myself or my life without that as the foundation. What does that mean now, for the things I see around me that I cling to? The stuff I surround myself with that I hang my identity on?
Maybe its encouraging, empowering even. That part of my life is gone, and yet I remain. Completely different and exactly the same.
There was so much more violently lost back then than just my connection to the stage. So much more pain caused and endured. And yet most of those scars have healed over and I am stronger for it. Leaner. Smarter.
But there was such potential then. I was just starting something, intoxicated with the potential of it all, and I drunkenly wrapped my life around a lamp post. The wounds healed. Relationships irrevocably lost, but hearts grew back. I am better for that time in my life. Much didn’t survive the transition. Much did and is stronger as a result. But in between, or maybe holding it all together is… theatre. That life of mine, just getting started, never to resolve.
Hanging in the air. A ghost light on stage waiting for the next show that will never come. But at least the theater is never truly dark.
This melancholia brought to you by:
Journal Excerpt
…wandering forward, sometimes only by inches. But I am moving. And so is everything else. I will never truly get to pause everything and have a proper look around to get my bearings. But I can keep dropping pages like breadcrumbs as I go, and following the marks on the trunks of trees left before me, and keep chasing the sunlight I see streaming through the trees ahead.
And that will be enough.
From a journal entry dated 10 April 2024
CCB 006 - The Ever-Mutating Life of Tumblr Dot Com
Okay funny story - I wrote the below little post over a year ago, and for some reason, never published it. Instead it was hiding in drafts nearly lost to history and my memory.
Spoiler Alert: I did end up rejoining Tumblr, but then got back off of it around the change of the year as part of a general rejiggering of my internet/media/art-experiencing habits and routines. I do miss some aspects of Tumblr (again) but not enough to got back…
Anyway, original year-old post follows:
As a service, Tumblr’s lack of commerciality and consistent inability to successfully monetize itself is part of its whole appeal. There’s a whole genre of Tumblr posts that just screenshot and mock the bizarre hosted ads that spawn on the dashboard like mutated fish in a radioactively-poisoned river.
But it’s a loving kind of mockery—users seem, for the most part, to be genuinely grateful for the state of the site. For many, it’s a refuge from the dystopian insanity that the rest of the internet has come to represent. “It’s like anti-social social media,” says Bec, regarding Tumblr’s continued paradoxical appeal.
[…] for those who value creativity without the pressures of “hustle culture,” and wish to avoid the current-events performative outrage that has crept in, kudzu-like, and swallowed up almost every single other area of open expression online, Tumblr remains ideal.
The corollary of that, of course, being that those who appreciate that creativity without necessarily needing or wanting to express it themselves can also find happy homes on Tumblr, as spectators to a healthy culture of simply liking things.
Source: The Ever Mutating Life of Tumblr dot com
Tumblr was absolutely my social media “home” for a long time - though I never saw it has a social media platform, per se. It was communal blogging and celebration of cool shit. It was the only platform I ever amassed any sort of following on, and the only one I ever saw my self wanting a following on.
I deleted my account and my tumblogs (hell yes, that is what I did and will aways call them) when the porn ban came down - mainly because the site/admins/corporate overlords were handling it, oh so badly. But it sounds like a lot of that has calmed down now…
And now, I’m nostalgic for it? I am feeling… things? This will not do, not at all.
I’m not considering getting back on Tumblr? …am I?
Oh no.
I am afraid to put dates on entries.
I am intimidated. I feel pressured by them.
I understand and agree with their usefulness in the world of ‘blog as archive’, but among the other parallel worlds of what a blog can be, I kind of like the ambiguity of posting without them. Does it really matter that you know exactly what day I said this? Or, how close this is, temporally, to the previous post? To the (hopefully) next one?
I mean, it might matter! I don’t actually know! I’m asking you!
Undecided. Is there a date on this post? Depending on when you are looking at it, there might be. Or there might not. I’m not sure if there is a third option.
“The only one among us not free to change their mind is the one who does not decide…”
CCB 005 - Eternal Return
[Nietzsche] accepts the inevitability and suffering of reality (eternal return) but insists that the person, the self, must change perception. This change of perception must address only oneself, for no other expectation or altered circumstance but only sheer will, insight, and perception, can give us a new ability to understand, tolerate, and transcend suffering. The present moment of existence must become the tablet on which to etch one’s aspirations, intentions, conclusions, directions, not change any external circumstances but to see through everything, to live in its contradictions. [Emphasis mine.]
Eternal return is purgation of past weaknesses, failure, error, desire. The self must embrace not only the will to pursue a new self but what would be associated with Nietzsche as the will to power, meaning no more than the taking control of one’s self in life and destiny. Because this self-made destiny is the fruit of a personal struggle, the self must overcome much that is irrevocably external affecting the inner person. The will must transform the self not through attack but through transvaluation, the will overcoming obstacles, subjectivities, falsehoods, not reliant on society, culture, others, but forging one’s own path and system of thought and values.
From: Eternal Return via Hermit’s Thatch
Once again I’ve been thinking about eternal return (heh).
Once again I find myself circling, hovering around the periphery of action.
Once again I find myself going through all of the motions and preparations leading up to an actual change. I make the run up closer than I ever have.
Yet still the gulf remains. The gap. The canyon between me and It.
I have been at this point so many times before.
I just need a better approach, I say. So I retreat back. I plan the route. I clear the path. I wait for favorable weather. The wheel turns again; I set off running. It’s easier this time, I am gaining speed. I see the Other Side. I see where I can land. I just need to jump, and…
And I skid to a stop, right at the edge. Again.
It is easy to get lost in that. Here I am making the same old mistakes. Here I am again, not doing the thing I claim I want to do.
The gravity of my goal, my task, has no doubt captured me. But I can’t come into land. I simply spiral tighter and tighter around it. And sometimes I drift away and maybe that’s what I need - to let it go and float off somewhere else - but no, at the farthest reaches, the arch of orbit tugs at my back, my retreat slows, and my path bends and I am on the approach again.
How many times will I do this?
But to think that this isn’t yet another repeat of every other failed attempt… to realize that I am not being cursed with another frustrating iteration, but blessed with another chance to get it right…
…that despite how many times I have found myself here, the only thing that exists is this present moment…
“…the person, the self, must change perception.”
CCB 004 - Who Are We, Really?
Sometimes, alone, I feel like a ghost. Unmasked, I walk through the world as if I’m embodying impressions. I channel the wind, the sadness the rain brings, the spring gloom. My identity is composed of memories, of spirits of places, of things I tell myself, and of things others tell me. I know it’s all in flux. The masks are shifting.
…this reminds me of:
Miles walking, the sound of breaking waves the other side of me, Paumanok there and then as I thought the old thought of likenesses, These you presented to me you fish-shaped island, As I wended the shores I know, As I walk’d with that electric self seeking types.
💬 from Walt Whitman’s “As I Ebb’d With The Ocean of Life”
In times of crisis, we set out to find ourselves. Perhaps we will find whatever it is that constitutes us out there in the Himalayas, or somewhere out west. Perhaps we’ll find ourselves in another person who teaches us to see, or in the sun that sets over the Pacific ocean. Often we’ll gain access to another part of ourselves through a story that inspires us.
But this quest to “find yourself” is somewhat self-defeating when the more precise goal ought to be “to create yourself,”
Discovery: Searching for a fixed point; you can miss it, never find it
Creation: Always happening, and especially when you realize it, and do with intention. Never has to end. Is complete when you say so…
In Hinduism, the ego is a trapping of the physical world. The body is often likened to a flesh tomb, and the ego is like the glass that contains our true self and shapes it. The true self—the atman —is a silent, conscious witness. It exists within every creature at its core.
I really enjoyed this piece, and find myself returning to it. I’ve read it two or three times already, and though it doesn’t necessarily contain any revolutionary, knock-me-off-my-chair epiphanies, it does that amazing and crucial task of giving form and structure to the kind of wordless questions and wonderings I often have, and allows me to re-engage with them, chew on them in more tangible forms than when they are swimming in my head…
Source: Who Are We Really?
