Attack on Titan vs. Spiderman

Whoa. Apparently, it's really happening.

It's kind of crazy, but the smash manga/anime from earlier this year, Attack on Titan (進撃の巨人) is apparently going to have a crossover with the Marvel Universe.

C.B. Cebulski, who is one of the people behind Marvel Mangaverse, has pitched the idea as "What if the titans from Hajime Isayama's 'Attack on Titan' atrtacked the Marvel Universe," says it's "not a joke" and also gave a timeline: it hits in two weeks.

I don't know what to say. First off, Titans are truly underpowered compared to the typical powerlevels we see in Marvel. Unless we're focusing on just people like, say, Daredevil and other street-level heroes with minimal super powers, we are going to see an unbelievable trail of carnage made of Titan guts.   Like Thor by his lonesome could easily solo the entire population of Titans around the world.

Regardless, we'll see how it's done. It's all in the writing. We have no information right now who's doing what, but it is a manga that is going to hit Japan in a couple of weeks, so it's probably going to be published by Kodansha, the publisher of Bessatsu Shounen Magazine, the magazine where Attack on Titan is serialized.

All things said, it's going to be an interesting read no matter how good (or bad) it turns out, so let's just keep our fingers crossed while we wait for those two weeks to pass us by. 

Godzilla (1998) vs. Godzilla (2014)

Godzilla was supposed to be the Monster Movie event of the year. It grossed $93M in its opening weekend, it received raved reviews from respected critics all around, it had an all-star cast with a canny director and a huge budget. And yet,  it was boring as hell.

The Cinematic Event of the Year!

I do not understand all the praise this movie is getting, it was one of the worst movies of 2014, not even taking into account its massive budget. Why? Because it was a downright snoozer. There are tons more problems with it, but the main issue is it can easily get you to fall asleep in that cozy dark movie theater.

It's with  much confusion that I muse that, considering how much I hated the 1998 Godzilla movie, I actually found that to be much better and more exciting than this lame excuse for a lizard movie.

So in classic Versus Lounge style, it's time to stack the two together.


The Lead Character

Whereas Matthew Broderick played a trying-to-be-cute white guy trying to woo the apple of his eye, the new Godzilla goes with a former super hero vigilante who, now all grown up, tries to be a hunky alpha male lead flexing his muscles fighting giant lizards.  Unfortunately for us, Aaron Taylor Johnson, delivers all his lines with the same deadpan glaze in his eyes all throughout the film, even when his father dies right in front of him, and I must say I actually miss the funky teen angst he used to have when he was dressed up in green and yellow spandex.

Matthew Broderick was a far better lead than he was, and we have to put up with Taylor Johnson for a much, much longer amount of film time.

This is how you deliver lines when your father is dying. With PASSION.

The Directors

These Godzilla apologists all say it's an artful tactic to prevent viewers from being numbed out by too much monster CGI. That's bollocks. It achieved the opposite: it numbed users out from too much teasing, to the point that all the hundred tease shots we see (and this film makes way too much use of them) make you fall asleep instead of build your anticipation. There's something called too much of anything. These Spielberg-esque shots are a great movie technique, but overuse it, and it becomes meaningless, annoying, and frustrating.

Robert Emmerich did a far better job of using this technique. He gave us a good payoff at a good point in the movie, and after blowing the climactic load, gives us a good Velociraptor-esque bunch of thrills afterwards.  If anyone wants to say Edwards did a great job aping Spielberg's Jaws, unfortunately Emmerich did a far better job aping Spielberg's Jurassic Park. And that's not saying much, which proves to highlight how incompetent Gareth Edwards is helming this film.


Public Reception

In conclusion, I have realied one very important truth after comparing these two very, very bad films.

The main reason people hated the 1998 version was because it wasn't faithfully to the real Godzilla. It turned him into a weak, crappy giant lizard who can get killed by missiles and gives birth to velociraptors. Nobody wanted to see that. Nobody except maybe Jurassic Park fans who have no inkling of what a Kaiju Movie is.  So, even though the film did a much better job cinematically by getting the right pacing, putting enough thrills and action, and having a much better human story, it was panned to hell.

On the other hand, people loved the 2014 film because it stayed true to its source material and respected it. No matter how bad the rest of the film was. It didn't matter that it was a 2 hour slogfest, that the best actor was killed off before even reaching the halfway mark, that the lead was a stoned dufus, that Ken Watanabe spent 100% of his screen time just staring dumbfounded with mouth agape into space, that Godzilla was just a glorified extra in his own movie. This movie enjoyed critical success just because Godzilla god stomped and spewed nuclear fire out of his mouth. That is sad.