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KManX89 said:
curl-6 said:

Yeah I've never understood this either. Even setting aside budget, you can't just show 90 minutes of monsters slugging it out. The people are necessary to provide the context. 

A giant monster by itself is meaningless. Even the fact that it's "giant" is only relevant in relation to our own human sense of scale. They might as well be five feet tall if there's no people around. Kaiju are given meaning and purpose through their interaction with humanity.

Yes, the monster fights are the main attraction, and this film wisely treats them as such, but a monster film with no people at all is like making a disaster film about a volcano blowing up on an uninhabited planet.

I know! Imagine if Cloverfield were just 90 minutes of the Clover monster destroying shit (which the movie's entire runtime is 90 minutes) with no human interaction. It'd have no plot and no build up to any of it. 

And comparing it to humans in the Bayformers movies? That's just pure ignorance if I've ever seen it.

You need humans to advance the plot of kaiju movies.
You DON'T need humans to advance the plot of Transformers movies (ever seen any of the animated films? They work just fine without humans!).

Hell, not only are they not needed, they actually get more focus than the effing Transformers in those movies (!), are completely unlikable and make stupid jokes (AoE literally goes out of its way to justify statutory rape FFS!), whereas humans have always been important parts to any kaiju film, so those 2 aren't even remotely comparable. The fact that Steph Cozza feels the need to compare humans in the two movies is just baffling, and I say this as somebody who's subscribed to her and agrees with a lot of her reviews (her GhostBusters 2016 one in particular is real "juicy" ).

The way I see it, the human element of King of the Monsters is certainly nothing to write home about, but I didn't think it was below average either for a kaiju film or for a Hollywood blockbuster in general. At least in they had a strong cast of competent actors like Charles Dance, Zhang Ziyi, Sally Hawkins, Ken Watanabe, etc.

As a piece of cinema it's far from perfect, but to its credit it really is a love letter to both the kaiju sub-genre and its fans.