Completely Inconsequential Hot-Takes

[enderlord99]

No.

I meant the post-apocalypse scene is from the second one. That's what we were talking about. Towards the beginning of Spongebob 2: Sponge Out of Water they discover that the Krabby Patty formula has been stolen and the town dewcends into a stereotypical post-apocalyptic state.

edit:

Spoiler

Show

Oh. See, I didn't realize that happened, because like Ionathus, I only watched the one that wasn't crap.

...

That take was too cold; how about...

"Despite being terrible, the second and third Spongebob movies (which I have never seen) hold some value."

...still not enough...

"Camp Coral is better than the modern parts of the main series and almost (but not quite) as good as the classic parts of the main series. This is a reasonable opinion for someone like me (who has never seen Camp Coral and has watched very little modern Spongebob in general) to express with confidence."

...that might have been too hot a take, TBH. Still posting it!

[veti]

Oh. See, I didn't realize that happened, because like Ionathus, I only watched the one that wasn't crap.

...

That take was too cold;

No, that was pretty fair. The second movie was crap. The writing was just... bad.

Script sample, from the scene Bohandas posted shots of earlier:

Mr K: "Welcome to the Apocalypse, Mr Squidward. I hope you like leather."

Squidward: "I prefer suede."

See? That second line - just didn't need to be there. Squidward's face is quite capable of conveying everything it needs to extract the minimal humour value there is to be had in this exchange, and having the line just to ram it in - makes it feel very laboured. The whole movie is like that.

I didn't even know there was a third movie until just now.

[Bohandas]

I think the second movie was better. It was truer to the show, the original characters were funnier, and it had less pacing problems.

On a tangential note since we're talking about movies based on TV shows, I feel that the first Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie was the best adaptation of a TV show into a movie ever. There may be adaptation movies that have a higher overall quality, but in terms of being an adaptation of a TV show and judged based on that the firat Aqua Teen movie is the best. Most other movies based on TV shows come off as if they were made by people who have never actually seen the show; Spongebob 1 falls into this category.

Also, additional hot take, the WORST version of movie adaptations not being true to the show are the ones where characters who have no business being there randomly wind up in New York instead of the show's normal setting (ie. The Smurfs, Masters of the Universe, etc.) What the actual hell is up with these movies?

[veti]

I think the second movie was better. It was truer to the show, the original characters were funnier, and it had less pacing problems.

Everyone is entitled to be wrong.

Also, additional hot take, the WORST version of movie adaptations not being true to the show are the ones where characters who have no business being there randomly wind up in New York instead of the show's normal setting (ie. The Smurfs, Masters of the Universe, etc.) What the actual hell is up with these movies?

Or Godzilla.

New York is very... iconic. In terms of a movie trailer, a quick shot of the NYC skyline carries more cultural baggage than pretty much anything else you could fit into the same number of frames.

[DavidSh]

New York is very... iconic. In terms of a movie trailer, a quick shot of the NYC skyline carries more cultural baggage than pretty much anything else you could fit into the same number of frames.

I would argue that particular quick shots of Paris or Giza (outside of Cairo) are slightly more recognizable, and carry as much baggage. Pisa is as recognizable, but just says "tourist Italy".

-- and --
I decided not to leave in the quoting artifact that would have said, essentially, "Everybody is entitled to be Godzilla." No, you're only entitled to be Godzilla if you fit into the rubber suit.

[Peelee]

Also, additional hot take, the WORST version of movie adaptations not being true to the show are the ones where characters who have no business being there randomly wind up in New York instead of the show's normal setting (ie. The Smurfs, Masters of the Universe, etc.) What the actual hell is up with these movies?

Or Godzilla.

Hot take: Hercules in New York is a masterpiece and I WILL BROOK NO DISSENT.

[Rockphed]

Hot take: Hercules in New York is a masterpiece and I WILL BROOK NO DISSENT.

Kevin Sorbo did what now?

[Peelee]

Kevin Sorbo did what now?

Sorbs? No, someone who could actually play Hercules. Arnold Strong.

[Draconi Redfir]

Or Godzilla.

New York is very... iconic. In terms of a movie trailer, a quick shot of the NYC skyline carries more cultural baggage than pretty much anything else you could fit into the same number of frames.

Oi!

1. That's not Godzilla, that's Zilla.
2. That is a good movie and Zilla is a good monster. Don't be rude to Zilla! #ZillaForMonsterverse



Anyways they should put Zilla in the Godzilla monsterverse. I could see him as being like, a man-made attempt at a kaiju, maybe with some but not all of Godzilla's DNA. Since he's not a true Kaiju, he probably can't feed on radiation just right and so needs to eat a lot of fish or other meats. Might spend more time inland then Godzilla who is more about the ocean, so you could use that to play up the "people think that's Godzilla" aspect if they've never seen Godzilla in person themselves.

Naturally Godzilla is much bigger and stronger then Zilla, but i could see an argument for Zilla putting up a fair fight by way of being faster, stealthier, and more agile. serise of hit-and-run tactics or something maybe, ducking between buildings and staying hidden. If you go the "Zilla-ling" route, then hey the humans of the story might have smaller zillas to contend with themselves, and/or maybe they just swarm Godzilla as well zerg-rush style.

Ideally it'd end with Zilla not dead, but alive and subservient after their resulting fight. or maybe Zilla dies and one of his kids grows up to be a new Zilla who can be an ally to Godzilla in the future. I just really wanna see Zilla and Godzilla team up one day okay?

[Metastachydium]

Sorbs? No, someone who could actually play Hercules. Arnold Strong.

Meh. You and your fixation on Austria again.

a quick shot of the NYC skyline carries more cultural baggage than pretty much anything else you could fit into the same number of frames.

For you, perhaps. I might recognize a building or two from there, but it means precious little to me, culturally or emotionally, and even that is not what I'd describe as a good and positive meaning.

[Peelee]

Meh. You and your fixation on Austria again.

I have no qualms against steroid use (with informed consent, obviously) and Arnold Strong is quite smart, and picked good scripts when he had the ability and inclination to. Hardly his fault the studios dumbed them down. Plus he did a lot of fun roles.

[Rater202]

2. That is a good movie and Zilla is a good monster. Don't be rude to Zilla!

Oh Please, we all know that that tuna-eating lizard isn't up to much.

[Draconi Redfir]

Oh Please, we all know that that tuna-eating lizard isn't up to much.

i mean i never said he had to WIN against Godzilla. Just be a credible threat.


it's not like Kong and Godzilla himself didn't get huge upgrades in those movies themselves.


From everything we know about him, Zilla is smaller, stealthier, faster, able to reproduce, all things Godzilla seems to lack.

Plus it could be a chance to bring the Cartoon series into the movies if you follow a similar plot. Someone creates Zilla in an attempt to have a human-controlled Kaiju, it goes badly, Zilla escapes and reproduces, Godzilla gets involved and defeats Zilla, and one of the surviving offspring is captured and tamed into an actual human-controlled kaiju that could act as a first-responder to other monster attacks, going up against malicious monsters to keep damage to a minimum until Godzilla shows up to do his thing, if he actually shows up at all.

[Peelee]

What's wrong with eating tuna?

[Rater202]

i mean i never said he had to WIN against Godzilla. Just be a credible threat.

What's wrong with eating tuna?

....I take it that neither of you saw Godzilla: Final Wars?

Though admittedly I misquoted it, the line was actually "I should have known that tunahead wasn't up to much."

[Draconi Redfir]

....I take it that neither of you saw Godzilla: Final Wars?

Though admittedly I misquoted it, the line was actually "I should have known that tunahead wasn't up to much."

Yeah I've seen it, they should still introduce Zilla to the monsterverse tho.


it's not like they DIDN'T intentionally undermine what Zilla can do for that fight. they just wanted to kill the guy and would have found a way to make it look easy no matter what.

[Bohandas]

I thought it was the 1998 Godzilla movie that happened in New York

[Peelee]

I thought it was the 1998 Godzilla movie that happened in New York

That was the last Godzilla movie I saw. Or Godzilla-adjacent.

[Rater202]

it's not like they DIDN'T intentionally undermine what Zilla can do for that fight. they just wanted to kill the guy and would have found a way to make it look easy no matter what.

Did they really? In the 1998 movie Zilla's main thing was that it was big. Its only real power was that it didn't collapse under its own weight. It even died to conventional military force. The whole reason he's called "Zilla" is becuase he "took the god out of Godzilla."

Unless you're conflating it with "Godzilla Junior" from the animated series spin-off, which was noted in-universe to have additional mutations beyond what was inherited from his parent to make him stronger(which is why he gets to have God in his name when he's referenced by Toho.)

[LaZodiac]

I mean Zilla also had a fire breath, but then I come from the era where we called her GINO.

[Rater202]

I mean Zilla also had a fire breath, but then I come from the era where we called her GINO.

No, actually. If you pay attention, Zilla is just roaring in that scene. The fire was the result of shockwaves setting off explosions.

The problem with the Tristar Godzilla movie was that they tried too hard for realism in an inherently unrealistic premise. The monster was presented as a large frightened animal and only had the powers you could expect of a creature that size.

Which could have worked, mind you, if it was anything other than a Godzilla movie, but Big G comes with certain baggage.

[Draconi Redfir]

again though, who HASN'T gotten a powerup in the monsterverse movies? if i recall correctly, King Kong CLIMBED the empire state building originally, now he towers over it at ground level.

All I'm saying is he's another monster in the register, and it'd be nice to see him included. You can even keep and include the whole "people think he's godzilla but he's really not" thing by having him stay or originate more inland or something. it's not like he spent a lot of the time in the water anyways.


Honestly, i preferred the realism aspect myself. Big animals would need to eat a lot, would want to reproduce, and wouldn't have the ability to shoot atomic energy from their face. As fun as OG Godzilla is, it's fun to see creatures that don't run on "Because magic" logic.

Square-cube law nonwithstanding. We obviously need to conveniently ignore that one, otherwise we won't get to do anything fun.

[LaZodiac]

Ironically the Monsterverse setting did all that realism part WHILE also keeping the atomic breath.

That being said, I do think it is time to re-evaluate Zilla. The disgraceful thrashing at the Sydney Opera House in Destroy All Monsters was funny at the time, but I think having an agile lizard creature that combines the ferocity of Godzilla with the intelligence of King Kong could be interesting- Zilla's kind of a middle ground between the two, like how the seeming villain of the next one is going to be some kinda ****ed up Orangutan that is ALSO a middle ground between the two of them only evil.

... also in this canon Zilla would be a modified Skull-Crawler with G-Cells, raised from puppy size. I unironically think it'd behove Monarch to follow the lead of that silly Godzilla 1998 tie in show that's Actually Good and have a more directly controllable kaiju protector initiative.

Also god I forgot 1998 Zilla didn't even have FIREBREATH. Pathetic. Poor girl. Your movie's greatest claim to fame is "stealthy kaiju" and "this is just the raptors scene from Jurassic Park".

[Draconi Redfir]

i was thinking some of Zilla's DNA could be Godzilla DNA, just to get the general shape down, my thought was that he's basically a failed clone, they tried to full out clone Godzilla, but Kaiju DNA is just impossible / very hard to work with properly, so while they were able to get the general shape and reptilian stuff, it still came out very skewed, and they had to stitch in some other stuff Jurassic Park style in order to keep it all together, could show a bunch of other failed clones, and Zilla is just the most successful of the bunch.

Basically, i am 100% down for Zilla being an intentionally man-made Kaiju by Monarch or some other corporation to try and get a controllable Kaiju.


Way i see it, Zilla escapes a facillity somewhere inland, starts wrecking havoc, destroying buildings and eating livestock and the like, and people who have only ever seen Godzilla on TV or in stories and don't know a lot about him are like "Hey what's Godzilla doing here? why is he doing all this?" this hearkening back to the confusion / misname. you could even get someone who knows who Godzilla really is to say "There is no God" in that thing" if you like, (which would actually be very fitting, since he's man-made!)

Eventually either Godzilla himself feels a disturbance in the Kaiju force and starts going off to fight Zilla, or humanity tries to lure Zilla to the coast to get Gozilla to deal with him, good way to include the "that's a whole lotta fish" line again if you'd like. They fight, Godzilla wins, at some point Zilla lays eggs and the zilla-lings start attacking people and/or Godzilla himself, so the humans have something to do in the meantime, and either OG Zilla surrenders to Godzilla, or one of the Zilla-lings survives and is re-captured to be properly raised by Monarch or some other company as a human-controlled guardian. Maybe Godzilla's radiation even provides it with some of those "Extra mutations" Rater mentioned.



Or alternatively, rather then being a villain in a Godzilla movie, Zilla could just get his own movie in the same universe, plays out the same, but gets defeated by humans instead of Godzilla. Then Zilla Junior could show up in future movies as an ally to humanity / godzilla, etc.

Personally i'd love more monsterverse movies that focused on things other then Kong or Godzilla. Where's the Mothra movie for example? or a movie covering that giant mammoth or spider or something?

[Peelee]

Also god I forgot 1998 Zilla didn't even have FIREBREATH. Pathetic. Poor girl. Your movie's greatest claim to fame is "stealthy kaiju" and "this is just the raptors scene from Jurassic Park".

Topical reminder that in the novel, while the T-Rex is the main antagonist and has a very Jason Voorhees/Terminator-esque vibe in her unrelentingness, and the raptors are relegated to a more circumstantial role, the raptors are also goddamn ****ing terrifying. Absolute psychopaths.

[enderlord99]

No, that was pretty fair. The second movie was crap.

"hot take" means "controversial or unpopular"

It has nothing to do with fairness.

[LaZodiac]

Topical reminder that in the novel, while the T-Rex is the main antagonist and has a very Jason Voorhees/Terminator-esque vibe in her unrelentingness, and the raptors are relegated to a more circumstantial role, the raptors are also goddamn ****ing terrifying. Absolute psychopaths.

Oh I'm well aware. It's such an iconic thing the Godzilla 1998 movie decided to just whole-sale lift the entire sequence involving them and put it in their film, but instead of kids and archeologists they are dealing with French revolutionaries.

Because this film was whack in a retrospectively very funny way.

[Ionathus]

Less an actual hot take and more a minor rant/pet peeve:

I can't stand the "that is" turn of phrase when somebody's being hyperbolic. It wrecks the flow of any sentence for me and inevitably pulls me out of the cadence of the insult/point they're making. To explain what I'm talking about:

Cats (2019) is the worst movie I've ever seen. The hellish, eyeball-gouging, ear-piercing torment that is Cats (2019) will haunt me for the rest of my days.

IMO it's the clunkiest way to communicate your idea. It's like you're trying to add gravitas to an otherwise simple sentence, but it just comes out sounding faux-intellectual instead of actually being a compelling writing trick. Don't gild the lily! Simple sentences are allowed! The above review, for example, is just overall cleaner if you remove the "that is" and let it read more simply and more naturally:

Cats (2019) is the worst movie I've ever seen. The It is a hellish, eyeball-gouging, ear-piercing torment that is Cats (2019) and it will haunt me for the rest of my days.

I know of good writers who have used it and it's been fairly inoffensive, but it's still distracting to me in the best of times. But I fully recognize this is a personal taste thing. Maybe it comes from being in too many creative nonfiction writing workshops where I had to read someone struggle to find their endearing tongue-in-cheek "essay voice" but went too far into smarmy territory.

[Bohandas]

The phrasing in the example almost sounds like it's intended for some kind of search engine optimization or something, especially the extra name drop

[Rater202]

If I could make one thing a law, it would be that delivery apps, especially ones owned by the food service you're ordering from, can't charge delivery fees unless 100% of the fee is being given to the delivery person as a tip.

Either ordering food through these apps will stop being unreasonably expensive compared to just going to the place yourself or a job that doesn't get fair pay will have slightly more fair pay.

I'd consider either scenario to be a win.