Monthly Archives: June 2019

Guest Author, Blog

Family in the Endgame

Guest Writer: Eric Anderson, founder of Nerd Chapel

This weekend Avengers: Endgame is re-releasing in theaters. I have teamed up with Scott Bayles and Nathan Marchand to provide content on each other’s sites inspired by the great film. Spoilers!

When we first met Tony Stark (Iron Man), he was a businessman who liked fast cars and lived for himself. Now as we enter the theater for one last big hurrah, and a huge one it was, all we knew is that he is stuck on a planet far away. We knew from trailers he seems to be stranded in space, and that is how we find him at the beginning of Avengers: Endgame. In deep space, he has no hope to give.

Captain Marvel finds Nebula and Tony on the last bit of oxygen and food they had left. Stark has even passed out and could barely look up to see her as she came to assist. His morale, like all of them, was so low, it wasn’t even reachable. They had lost and half the universe was disintegrated by the Mad Titan.

He is essentially carried home to Earth and painfully steps out of the ship dehydrated and barely able to stand. We soon learn how angry he is about everything. This was the man who had risked a one-way trip during the invasion in New York during The Avengers to save the Big Apple and stop an invasion; who tried to build “a suit of armor around the world” in Age of Ultron; who implored Captain America to stay on his side during Civil War. Now, it was time for, “I told you so.” Captain America had left him and wasn’t there to fall with him, even though he did protect Earth while Tony was away helping Dr. Strange. Tony is angry about the separation, but he’s also beaten and almost out of health points. Tony doesn’t even go with the team to face Thanos when they find out where he is. Dr. Strange had given up everything to save him, but when they first go to take the battle to Thanos, he is passed out in a hospital bed.

After finding out that Thanos has destroyed the Infinity Stones, they all come back cope with defeat and loss. Each one in his own way. For Tony, it means starting a family. He and Pepper get a house on a lake and begin raising a little girl named Morgan. Their form of coping is through family and solitude.

Family is an important theme in Scripture right from the beginning. Genesis tells us that Adam does not have a suitable “helpmate,” and so God creates a wife for him. God then tells them to “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 2). As we continue reading, we find that many Bible heroes had families. Abraham had two sons, one of whom was born miraculously in Abraham’s old age. This same Abraham rescued his nephew Lot after he and many others were captured. David had many children. Unfortunately, he did not always make good choices, and so not all of them made good choices, either. Gideon had over 70 children and multiple wives.

We are not meant to live alone in isolation. Not all of us need to have five kids, but we should all have family of some form. Family can sit with us even without the words we need and still comfort us. They know what food will calm us down and how to make us laugh. On the flip side, we can fill those same voids for them on their rough days.

The other way Tony copes after all of this is solitude. In Psalm 46:10, we are commanded to “be still and know that I am God.” This means ignoring the five thousand needs to step away and pray. Jesus Himself stepped away and prayed in lonely places on many occasions. He sought a refueling from His Father in isolation. Again, family and solitude together.  

Finally, Tony’s solitude is interrupted by Steve, Natasha, and Scott with a wild idea. Tony blows it off at first, but it lingers. They go back to experiment without him, but he does his own research. Now, in much better health, he reluctantly rejoins the fight. They use Scott’s 12 percent of a plan and, with some more input for the plan, they get the Stones. While Bruce Banner is the one to bring everyone back, in the end Tony pays the high price of his life and a snap to stop Thanos once and for all. The man who started this journey 22 films and 10 years ago as a self-absorbed party animal gives his life to save the world. All he needed was to see the great needs around him and take a break from it with solitude and family before sacrificing himself to save this planet. It didn’t need “a suit of armor around the world,” but we did need an armored knight to accept the winning blow for the world. Nothing is more Christ-like than that.  

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Why ‘Godzilla: King of the Monsters’ is Underperforming

(Pardon me, True Believers, as I get back into the habit of blogging).

As I discussed a few weeks ago, the American kaiju fandom had a meltdown when the Rotten Tomatoes score was revealed for Godzilla: King of the Monsters. It slowly dropped to 40% over the film’s opening weekend. Meanwhile, the audience score remained high (it sits at 83% currently). Unfortunately, despite pushback from outspoken fans, the film has been underperforming at the box office, only making $49 million its opening weekend. There’s been a lot of talk as to why, but I don’t think it’s just one thing but many working in tandem, and unlike he did in Godzilla: Final Wars, Big G couldn’t defeat all of these opponents.

  1. Highly Competitive Movie Season

As much as I love Avengers: Endgame, it sucked the air out of the proverbial room. Every major studio tried to give the Disney/Marvel juggernaut at least a two-week breadth. Heck, if I remember correctly, KOTM’s release was pushed back a week or two to give the superhero epic as much space as possible. Unfortunately, KOTM still opened amidst stiff competition from other big franchises: Detective Pikachu, John Wick 3: Parabellum, Aladdin, and Dark Phoenix (making this the second time an American Godzilla film opened the week before an X-Men film). Given that Endgame dominated filmgoers’ time and money, they were less likely to go see something else that soon.

2. Ads Revealed Too Much

KOTM had an ad campaign almost as aggressive as a certain other American G-film. So aggressive, in fact, that Legendary/Warner Bros. gave too much away. It revealed things that should’ve been surprises, both in terms of plot and the kaiju fights. By contrast, the ad campaign for Godzilla in 2014 erred on the side of minimalism (much like the film itself). Warner Bros. could’ve learned something from that or the advertising for Endgame, which kept secrets from the audience. As it stands, some people probably felt like they’d seen the whole movie just from the trailers.

3. Niche Audience

Like it or not, kaiju films aren’t “mainstream.” The superhero genre managed to broaden its appeal, but kaiju have yet to do that. I don’t know why since there’s a lot of overlap with the two, but even in Japan, where the genre came into being, the same is true. Ultraman is more popular than Godzilla. Regardless, the kaiju fans turned out in droves to see KOTM, but their numbers don’t compare to the likes of Marvel fans.

4. Audience Doesn’t Know What It Wants

On a related note, the kaiju fanbase, at least in the States, can’t seem to agree on what a kaiju movie should be. From what I can tell, every Godzilla film from both sides of the Pacific has divided them since 2004. There were complaints that there was too much human story and not enough monsters in Godzilla (2014) and Shin Godzilla, but now the complaint with KOTM is there’s too much monster action. The same was said about Godzilla: Final Wars (2004). Yet if you ask a fan to name one of his favorite entries in the series, he’ll likely pick a Japanese film that had little monster screen time like Monster Zero. This division not only makes the films and the fans look bad, it confuses filmmakers and undermines box office. It’s possible those disappointed with Godzilla (2014) for those reasons stayed home even though the problem was rectified.

5. Long Gap between Films

While some moviegoers complain of superhero fatigue, one of the secrets to the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s success is it usually releases two or three films a year. This maintains narrative momentum and brand recognition. Even individual series within the MCU often only have a two-year gap between entries. It’s been five years since Legendary’s Godzilla reboot. Yes, Kong: Skull Island came out in 2017, but it wasn’t marketed as part of the MonsterVerse. This stymied both recognition and momentum.

6. Critics’ Reviews…

While I previously wrote that review aggregate sites like Rotten Tomatoes have been given too much power, the fact remains that a film’s RT score can affect box office turnout. For better or worse, filmgoers will pay attention to the scores. It doesn’t always affect it, but it more often than not does.

7. …and the Fan Backlash

That being said, the fans attacking critics as hacks because of their negative reviews hasn’t boded well. While I can’t say for sure, many of their attempts to fight against the tide of bad reviews by saying, “It’s a Godzilla film! It’s supposed to be stupid!” isn’t making anyone interested in seeing KOTM. If anything, they should try talking about what they liked about the movie or try to explain how the critics are wrong. You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar. Sadly, the internet is flooded with vinegar.

Because of all this, Warner Bros. considered delaying the release of Godzilla vs. Kong so they could “make an A+ movie.” There were several reasons why this might’ve happened, but that’s a topic for another blog (that I may or may not write).

In the end, Godzilla: King of the Monsters is a good film that faced an uphill battle, and the hill just kept getting steeper.

What do you think? Are there other reasons KOTM underperformed? What are they?

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Godzilla vs. Rotten Tomatoes: A Balanced Response

After nearly a year of escalating hype, Godzilla: King of the Monsters dropped in theatres this weekend. It was one of my most anticipated films of 2019. As a fan of nearly two decades, the co-creator of Kaijuvision Radio, and a raging nerd, I went into it excited but cautious. I remembered another American-made Godzilla movie from 20 years ago or so that had just as much, if not more, hype, and it failed to deliver.

I walked out of my local IMAX theatre with a huge smile on my face. Most fans did.

Critics didn’t.

All this week the Godzilla fan community (in America, anyway) has been in a tizzy. As the critics score on Rotten Tomatoes dropped (it sits at 40% currently) and the audience score remained high (it hovers around 90%), the fans got defensive. They became the latest fandom to declare critics “hacks” who didn’t know what they were talking about, who just didn’t understand the genre or Godzilla. While many fans—including myself—said King of the Monsters wasn’t what critics claimed it was, others stamped their feet, crossed their arms, and said, “I like because it’s bad like all the other Godzilla films!”

Even Godzilla is shocked by his some of his fans’ behavior.

To be honest, I’m not all that surprised. These fans have spent years defending their enjoyment of giant monsters—or perhaps even hid it—when many people relegated such fare to schlock. That’d put a huge chip on anybody’s shoulders. While other “nerdy” genres like superheroes have gone mainstream, the kaiju genre is still trying to gain wide acceptance. I don’t know if it ever will. Regardless, I think much of this pushback from Godzilla fans stems from their defensiveness. Like many nerds, they’ve made their fandom a huge part of their lives, and when they think it’s being attacked, they see it as an attack upon themselves.

This isn’t to say that the fans don’t have valid points. Rotten Tomatoes has grown from a website that helped moviegoers make an informed decision about what films to see to a cultural force that studios think they must placate. “Tomatometer” scores can make or break a film now. At least, that’s what many movie executives fear. An aggregate of bad reviews could destroy the millions of dollars they invested in a film. That’s why they brag whenever one of their movies has a high RT rating. The problem is people aren’t engaging with the reviews; they’re just looking at the score and not reading what was said. They don’t realize that RT’s system a critic only has to answer a yes or no question—“Is it ‘fresh’?”—before posting a review on the site. A rating of three out of five will count as “fresh,” so even a “B-” or “C+” review will count. In other words, the 90% fresh rating could all be average reviews. As one fan pointed out, it has ruined film criticism by reducing it to mere numbers. But these are numbers given tremendous weight and power by lazy often readers who succumb to some form of groupthink, either in agreement or disagreement. This, in turn, has led to some borderline conspiracy theories about studios bribing critics for good or bad reviews as well as theories that studios are censoring bad reviews from users. I’m not saying any of this is true, but it is certainly possible.

The “fresh” and “rotten” logos for both critics (top) and audience (bottom) scores on Rotten Tomatoes.

Fans say critics are prejudiced against the kaiju genre and don’t appreciate it. There’s some truth to that as I’ve pointed out. Their scores and criticisms often seem inconsistent, to say the least. Godzilla (2014) was criticized for allegedly not having enough screen time for Godzilla or the monster fights while focusing on human characters. Now the common complaint from critics is there’s too much time given to the monsters (I disagree, but I digress). Who wouldn’t pull their hair out? It doesn’t seem possible to please them.

But do fans know what makes a great kaiju film? I’ve often heard fans say that they want a film that’s nothing but kaiju fights. This has led to an image of the fandom that is, well, less than flattering (one Twitter user said it made the fandom look like “knuckle draggers”). In some ways it seems hypocritical. They fight against non-fans labeling the films “trash” while advocating for movies that are empty spectacle. As one YouTuber put it, fans like the “social commentaries of the Japanese films, but when it comes to American films, they just want Godzilla to eat buildings and punch monsters.” I’ll be the first person to argue that there is substance—often profound substance—in these films. Even the so-called “silly ones.” That’s why it vexes me to hear such talk from fans. It’s especially annoying because they’re basically saying, “This movie is nonstop action with human characters I don’t care about, so I love it for the reasons critics hate it! Boo-yah!” It’s kinda childish, honestly.

Ultimately, whether the reviews come from critics or fans, they are simply opinions, and as a crude old saying reminds us, everyone has opinions. It’s just that, for whatever reason—be it experience, education, position, or whatnot—we have elevated the opinions of critics. They are the dwellers in the ivory towers who know what true art is while fans are the unwashed, ignorant masses. (Insert “sarcasm sign” here). While fans have wanted to drop Oxygen Destroyers in critics’ laps this week, if their reviews had been positive, I have no doubt they would’ve celebrated and shared them as validation of themselves and their fandom. But do these critics invalidate the opinions of fans? No. They are allowed to like things other people don’t. They enjoyed it based on their own criteria. One man’s trash is another man’s masterpiece. Many people watch Godzilla vs. Gigan and see a silly low-budget kaiju film. I watch it and see a meta-commentary on pop culture and globalism. Opinions often change with time. When Citizen Kane was first released, it has rejected by critics as too unusual. Now it’s regaled as the greatest film ever made. The Empire Strikes Back, which is commonly considered the greatest Star Wars film, was dismissed by critics upon release. I say all of this to remind people that while there are objective criteria for what makes a good story, the evaluation of art is still largely subjective.

I’m gonna have a lot more to talk about on the King of the Monsters G-Fest panel than I thought.

What do you think? Is Rotten Tomatoes helping or hindering films, filmgoers, and/or film criticism? How so?