My beef with all Godzilla shit from Godzilla 2000 onward is that it's too damn expensive. Godzilla totally works as cheap schlock. It's like Waterworld: that movie would have been dope if executed at roughly the same budget as Steel Dawn as originally intended. For $180m? Jesus christ. Tremors is an incredible movie because it's effectively the best B-movie ever made. Ramp the budget up to something real and it becomes crap. The original Blob is a great metaphor because it's cheap and obvious; the remake of The Blob is terrible because it's so expensive it has to take itself seriously. This is why everyone hates Mars Attacks!. It would have been awesome for zero dollars. For $100m? Fuggedaboudit. I don't need to see giant monster movies in which the giant monster relies on suspension of disbelief... and then they spend $200m to make my disbelief harder to suspend. Regarding Devlin & Emmerich's Godzilla: So you let Godzilla stomp into the film, all scary like, then bring on some other big monster for him to fight, so the audience gets to cheer, and then let Godzilla kick ass, swing that big J-Lo tail around... and if a few buildings get smashed in the brawl, hey, that's the price we pay for having the lovable lizard defending our earth. And there's your Godzilla movie. You're scared, you're excited, Godzilla kicks ass, you cheer, and bring on the sequel. Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich, I'd argue, screwed it up. Godzilla became a mom who wanted to go lay eggs in New York City. And when military guys fired guns at him, Godzilla would... I can't believe it even as I type it... Godzilla would actually squeal, turn, run and hide. Squeal... run away... and hide. In a Godzilla movie.GODZILLA is a perfect case study. I'd argue we got the basic approach right: people wanted to be scared of Godzilla, but they also loved him and wanted to root for him.
In a way, I totally agree. I like all three eras for different reasons. I like the Showa Era because the cheap, all practical effects give it all a campy and/or underdog feel, but you can still take the movies seriously. The drawback is, a lot of people don't like it for the cheap effects and that's understandably fair. I like the Heisei era because it's one, continuous story. I think the drawback from that era is that the suits are too complex and as a result, a lot less mobile, so instead of a bunch of guys wrestling each other you get beam battles. The Millenium era is great because it has really fun, really enjoyable, self contained stories. There's no worry about continuity at all. The computer special effects though? They totally don't hold up. Personally, I think The Millenium era films would have stood the test of time better if they avoided CGI as much as possible and stuck with practical effects. Model tanks, jets, missiles, the whole nine yards. At the time, the visuals were passable, but nearly two decades later and they stand out and detract from the films. To kind of illustrate what I'm talking about, look at movies like Alien and Star Wars. Those movies are from what, the '70s and '80s, pretty much zero CGI, and they still look great. I feel like traditional Tokusatsu effects can still be impactful and fun, but for them to work, the philosophy and methods of the style needs to be embraced as much as possible.