So You Want to Make a Godzilla Cinematic Universe, Again

Last week, Nikkei Style interviewed Toho’s Chief Godzilla Officer, Keiji Ota, about the future of the franchise. Ota, who surely has the coolest job title in the world, revealed a few of the company’s plans; by the far the biggest was a new cinematic universe to begin after 2021. Godzilla will be at its center, of course, but spinoff movies for other monsters are on the table as well.

The Godzilla '98 Production Reports

I don't really have anything fresh to say about Godzilla (1998), the TriStar anomaly celebrating its 20th birthday today. As a Godzilla movie, I think it's the worst in the series; as a monster movie, it's still pretty bad. What I do have is a promotional CD for Godzilla: Online, released as a collaboration between EON Magazine and Taco Bell. The game demo is inaccessible, but there's more to see on this ancient disc.

For me, the highlight is eight "G-Mails" -- newsletters about the production of the film that you could subscribe to through the film's official website. Since they didn't seem to be anywhere online, I took the liberty of retyping them for your entertainment, with a huge assist from an OCR program. They're very conversational, very cheesy, and very in-depth about what goes into movie-making while concealing this particular movie's plot. It seems that the emails continued after this CD was released; if you somehow held onto those, let me know.

Season 2 of Kong: King of the Apes Gets Stranger, Remains Dull

Arad Animation and 41 Entertainment announced Kong: King of the Apes in 2014, with a premise that seemed tailor-made to geek site headlines. The Eighth Wonder of the World would be fighting robot dinosaurs in San Francisco circa 2050, a fugitive from justice thanks to the machinations of the scientist who created them. The 13-episode first season premiered on Netflix in early 2016, but I doubt most fans of the character made it through episode one. The CG animation was mediocre, the dialogue seemed to have been written by a predictive text generator for action-adventure cartoons, and its tame, jetpack-wearing Kong was unrecognizable. I watched all of it for two reasons: because, as previously established, I am a masochistic, completionist dolt, and because of Botila.

I envision a scenario in which a brave, principled screenwriter hacked into the computer responsible for cranking out this show’s scripts, but only had time to change one character. Botila is out of sync with Kong: King of the Apes in the best ways possible. She’s an android created by the human villain who barely tolerates him, heckling his schemes and always on the brink of declaring herself the leader of the Decepticons. (In the last episode, she finally shoves him off a cliff.) It’s not an exaggeration to say she gets all the best lines either. So my interest was piqued when the Season 2 trailer suggested she would be the main antagonist.

Mako Mori's Death by Committee

Before Legendary Pictures released Pacific Rim Uprising, I joked to my friends that I would walk out of the theater if Mako Mori died. Well, I wussed out when that horrible moment came, but know this: I walked out in spirit. When Mako’s helicopter went down, my hopes of enjoying the long-gestating sequel to one of my favorite movies fell with it. Even in a story full of baffling decisions, it was conspicuous.

Here was one of the breakout characters of Pacific Rim (and arguably its central protagonist), a fiery but filial mechanic and co-pilot of a giant, sword-swinging mech. In the increasingly crowded field of 2010s action heroines, she still stands tall. You’d have to be possessed by a Precursor to kill her off in the first act just for a lead-in to the next action scene and a fleeting moment of sadness for her brother. Who among the movie’s higher-ups was so afflicted? And did she get booted out of Scrapper’s cockpit at the end so Jing Tian could steal the spotlight?