Ask a Dork: Movie-to-Game Tie-ins & Godzilla

 “What summer movie, from this year, would you have liked to see have a video game tie-in/adaption?”

Godzilla. Who doesn’t like Godzilla? Filmmakers, apparently.

The Godzilla we received this summer was earnest in intent. It was trying to bring Godzilla back to the public in respectable form, which was a noble goal. A goal it succeeded at, in spite of itself. You see, Godzilla, as always (excluding the 1999 sh*tshow), was in good form. He was a badass. He was the head boss in charge, and people were afraid of him. The problem was that he was in only two scenes in the movie.

Two scenes. Seriously.

The entire movie was a continual build up to Godzilla. He was teased, and teased, and teased until the audience had blue-balls. And the payoff? Good, but not great. Certainly not worth the teasing. In fact, Pacific Rim (a movie I have a lot of problems with) had far more satisfying action overall. The problem? The people – humans, specifically.

Godzilla is in this film, but he isn’t the focus of the movie. The movie focuses on the humans DEALING with Godzilla IN THE BACKGROUND. That wouldn’t be a problem if the characters were (a) well-developed, (b) interesting, and (c) relevant to the gravity of the events. Sadly, none of those are the case. You’ll watch this movie with the expectation of watching Godzilla tear sh*t up, and instead be berated by scene after scene of boring people problems that seem to have been ripped off by every big-budget action movie ever made (Independent Day, Armageddon, Transformers, etc.). I didn’t care, and neither should you have.

Which is why I think this new gritty Godzilla needed a quality game tie-in. And yes, I acknowledge that there was a video game released in Japan last winter but I don’t give a damn about that. What we need is to control this new Godzilla and destroy everything in third-person mode. I want to BE GODZILLA. I want to see what he was doing for the 80% of the movie that he wasn’t around for. I want to bring cities to their knees. I want to be the f*cking king of all monsters.

That’s the Godzilla I want. That’s the Godzilla we need.