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Godzilla X Kong in a nutshell:

Bonus Mothra's subplot:

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ON SIGHT NO (one) EXCEPTIONS

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Kong & Suko....

Godzilla x kong spoilers with no context

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This is EXACTLY what I was thinking when I saw this scene.

I’ve gone ahead and translated that one scene

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I know everyone is talking about a potential Godzilla X Kong follow up, usually with wholesome Mothzilla vibes, but I actually wish we could get something a little more grim. It goes very against Wingard's overall vibe with his films so far, but I'd love for him to explore the immediate negative backlash of Godzilla's globe-trotting nuclear training montage in GxK. Nobody would care that the attempted takeover of the surface world was stopped; multiple nuclear facilities were breached, Rome was decimated (partially Scylla's fault, true), Egypt got thrashed, some of the most important human structures ever built (the pyramids at Giza) were leveled, and Rio was completely populated when all hell broke loose during that four titan free-for-all.

The body count must have been insane.

I love the way Monarch handled the PTSD of the survivors of G-Day, and how it doesn't really matter to those whose families were ripped apart that the world was being saved at the time, they still watched their loved ones being crushed by a howling god of destruction having a turf war with another unstoppable nightmare abomination. I want to see how the humans in the MonsterVerse respond to being held hostage by walking natural disasters, I want to see how they turn Apex technology into Titan hunting tech that actually poses a threat.

We all want the Kaiju to win, but I'd like to see them put on the run for a bit as the humans band together and try to take their world back. That tension that was briefly mentioned in KoTM was never really resolved, just never talked about again.

Just a thought.

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One thing I am living for in these Monsterverse movies is their complete shamelessness about making Mothzilla canon. Like, so many movies these days want to de-emphasize romance like it's too embarrassing to escape containment from the genre of romance/chick flicks and Legendary went and said, "Here's a giant bug and a giant lizard. They're married. No, we're not kidding. They're not 'just really good friends'. They're in love, bitch."

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Giant lizard is so very homesick 🥲🥺😔

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Watching Kong swinging Suko around to beat the absolute shit out of the other monkey titans was peak cinema. No scene in any Kaiju film can top that, and I will die on this hill. 😂😂😂😂😂😂

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Godzilla X Kong: How it Should Have Gone

GxK is definitely a step above it's predecessor. Actually, it's several hundred steps, if I say so myself. Aside from improving on every aspect that felt lacking before, it also gave us the glorious return of everyone's favorite Queen of the monsters (well, it almost didn't, but that taught me the value of test audiences). HOWEVER, just like everything about Godzilla in this film and the last, I felt that his and Mothra's reunion was a little too rushed. I had a feeling it would be that way well before I saw the film, so I said to myself "if you want something done right, do it yourself.

And so, I did. And I threw in some good Mothzilla angst for good measure. And frankly, I'm darned proud of it. Anyone who wants to give it a dub is welcome to do so (with proper crediting, of course)!

Here's hoping that Adam Wingard decides to finally put the monkey away for more than five minutes and give Big G's character a chance to shine in a way that doesn't involve fighting in the next movie (no offense to Kong at all, but I think his really good story is told, it's done).

So, who wants to hear my pitch for a "Godzilla X Mothra" story?! Haha, just kidding. Unless...

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Godzilla X Kong is unironically great, and every moment of the film was like reliving the simple, childlike joy of my favorite kaiju marathons as a kid.

Does the movie have "issues"? Oh yeah. Is the film some incredible contribution to human artistic achievement? Lol, probably not...but it reminded me of that time in my life when watching Godzilla suplex a motherfucker was enough to set me right for a whole week.

10/10, will see again.

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I'll admit that I wasn't initially thrilled by the new pink Godzilla, but the more I look at it, the more I really like it. The obvious Godzilla 2000 inspiration is a nice touch, and the thagomizer on the tail is a really cool little addition. The whole vibe is spikier, more draconic, and it gives an already unique design for the Big G a good little revamp.

I'm also totally thrilled to see how silly and insane this movie gets. Will I find ways to complain that the massive tonal shift from Godzilla 2014 to Godzilla X Kong is perhaps a little too much? Sure! But I'm not gonna lie and pretend I'm not excited to watch Wingard just completely let the monsters dominate the film.

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Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden may not be a perfect game, but it scratches an itch I've felt ever since first playing through The Witcher 3. The combat may not be as polished and enemy variety may be sorely lacking, but getting to feel like a professional ghost hunter in colonial America (a time when, if vengeful ghosts were a real thing, there would be PLENTY of them about) has a vibe to it that calls back to first tracking the gryphon as Geralt.

To some people, being reminded of one game whilst playing another makes the game at hand feel derivative or "less than", but I think colonial America is a time period rife with potential for supernatural fiction, and Banishers has done a fine job of getting me into that world.

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Godzilla Minus One (2023), dir. Takashi Yamazaki

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Ghosts of New Eden and the Occult in Colonial America:

While playing Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden, I was tickled when one of the first people you meet describes himself and his father as demonologists. That might seem out of place in colonial America, given the nature of the religious milieu at the time, but occultism was all over the place in the colonies.

Despite the belief that magical practice was Satanic in nature, fortune telling, palm reading and particularly astrology were very common practices, and even alchemists could be found in some places. Wealthy people often kept books on magic and demonology in their personal libraries, and one governor of Connecticut had a copy of Cornelius Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy and some of John Dee's books in his collection. Even the family of Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, practiced types of folk magic.

But how could people in a society built on what we would call extreme Christianity practice these arts? Well, faith never stopped anyone in Continental Europe, so many of those traditions carried over, but it was probably also the distance from standard religious ritual as seen in Catholicism that allowed folk magic to fill that void to some degree (the channel Esoterica on YouTube dives into this quite nicely). Even many monotheists today have spiritual beliefs and practices that aren't properly sanctioned by their religious texts or authorities, so it shouldn't come as a shock that people have, and always will, forge their own spirituality regardless of the "rules".

Just another reason that the setting of Banishers really tickles me.