Remove ads

What are the best kaiju movies- going by human parts only?

Q99

Q99

Here's a tricky one!

Picture all the kaiju movies you've seen- now focus entirely on the human parts. Pretend the kaiju parts are still there, but gloss over them and think of them as the same quality/not factoring in. Godzilla fighting a giant shrimp is equal to the biggest Ghidorah throwdown. Gipsy Danger vs Otachi and the Giant Claw (Giant Claw being a movie that I think particularly benefits from this question). Or better yet, imagine you just fast-forwarded past them and only watched the human scenes.


What movies are the best when it comes to just the human parts? What's your top picks? Also, what's the worst?


Anyone who feels like they can do a top-10 or more for the hardcore kaiju fans among us, go for it ^^
 
Last edited:
Pacific Rim for nailing way too dramatic speechifying and having a will they/won't they where they fucking don't. And it isn't because tragic sads.
 
Q99 said:
Here's a tricky one!

Picture all the kaiju movies you've seen- now focus entirely on the human parts. Pretend the kaiju parts are still there, but gloss over them and think of them as the same quality/not factoring in. Godzilla fighting a giant shrimp is equal to the biggest Ghidorah throwdown. Gipsy Danger vs Otachi and the Giant Claw (Giant Claw being a movie that I think particularly benefits from this question). Or better yet, imagine you just fast-forwarded past them and only watched the human scenes.


What movies are the best when it comes to just the human parts? What's your top picks? Also, what's the worst?


Anyone who feels like they can do a top-10 or more for the hardcore kaiju fans among us, go for it ^^
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I think Cloverfield would be a pretty strong contender, just because it has essentially no scenes that rely on full body shots of the kaiju wrecking New York. It isn't by any stretch the best kaiju movie, but it might win out just by virtue of being entirely intact, narratively and thematically. Of course that is kind of cheating.

The original Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again are both more human focused than the films that follow them up until the Heisei era, but probably fall pretty flat relatively to anything since then.
 
mesonoxian said:
I think Cloverfield would be a pretty strong contender, just because it has essentially no scenes that rely on full body shots of the kaiju wrecking New York. It isn't by any stretch the best kaiju movie, but it might win out just by virtue of being entirely intact, narratively and thematically. Of course that is kind of cheating.

The original Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again are both more human focused than the films that follow them up until the Heisei era, but probably fall pretty flat relatively to anything since then.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

It's one of the least-affected, but Cloverfield also relies more on the 'found footage of a disaster' angle rather than the characters.

Like, rip out the mechagodzilla from Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla and you have... spy vs spy to protect a sacred relic and uncover an alien base. It stands quite strongly on it's own.

Or Pacific Rim Uprising, you have a former top student turned scavenger get taken back into the fold by his big sis pulling strings to protect him, and giving him the job of teaching some trainees along with his old partner, one of the trainees he connects with over seeing a lot himself in her. As well as the relationship of Hermann and Newt and them reconnecting their friendship.

Or Godzilla vs Biollantee, where there's both a scientist dealing with the memory of his lost daughter and a conflict between corporate black-agents and an agent of a rogue state trying to steal a bioengineered discovery with potentially huge international consequences.

There's a number of movies where, while the monsters are more central, the human plot is itself an interesting and well developed one.

So putting in Cloverfield against the others is entirely fair in my book!
 
Last edited:
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top