[GoldenXtreme]

I went to a used bookstore a while back and did the natural thing: got a bunch of cheap DVDs for tokusatsu-adjacent monster movies.

King Kong (2005): This one surprised me because I feel like I should have been the exact right age when this film came out to be keenly aware of its existence, but had no idea it was a thing until I saw like 10 or so copies on the shelf. It was a surprisingly faithful adaptation of the originals in a lot of ways and I enjoyed it overall, but the whole thing was over three hours for some godforsaken reason. Action setpiece after action setpiece, all drawn out as long as possible. Everything has to be as melodramatic as possible! It was fun, but needed editing so badly. It also decided that it needed to be very faithful to the original, even when it came to really dated racist elements, which was really questionable.

I also got the first three Monsterverse films. Each one got progressively stupider and worse, which also made each subsequent one more entertaining. Godzilla (2014) was a semi-serious film, pretty much a traditional Godzilla story if it was stripped of any coherent social commentary. It is unfortunately also one of those Hollywood movies that has a bunch of overly dark scenes where I can barely see. Kong: Skull Island pretty much just operated on rule of cool weeb logic. Then finally, Godzilla: King of the Monsters went full-on idiot-mode with a monster battle royale, silly dialoge, nuclear bombs being *great* actually (don't worry about that shockwave everyone was caught in), a plot I can only assume is supposed to be some sort of wish fulfillment fantasy for divorced dads, and an ending where it turns out Godzilla will just fix all of humanity's issues if they let him. I wouldn't call any of these good, but they seemed to get better at being action slop each time.