Rodan - an ancient dinosaur starts to roam the earth committing atrocities at various scales. First it commits an individual murder, then it is a local monster which kills multiple people, interrupts the local economy and warrants mob justice, then it becomes a nation wide disaster which flattens entire cities.
One notable thing to me about Rodan was the way that various characters were so distinctly seperated according to their place in society. It was interesting to me that every character seemed to function perfectly according to their role to sucessfully defeat the monster. We had the miners, the military, the scientist, and the women and children. The miners showed basically no emotion except bravery, rage, and sometimes mild fear. They never disobey orders. They also all dress the same, including the hero character. This resulted in the impression that, especially in the scenes where Rodan is still in larval form, the fight was bugs against bugs, kind of like an army of ants trying to defeat a wasp. The military were essentially more powerful miners - miners with more authority and bigger weapons, less characterization. They also have a different objective than the miners, while the miners suffer underground to produce coal, the military does violence. At the head of the chain of authority we had the scientist, whose purpose is to strategize. The most interesting role to me though, was the role of the women and children, as it had a narrative function -- to elicit sympathy. Everyone who cried in the film happenned to be a woman. At the beginning of the movie, when the first shocking murder takes place, the wife and child of the victim scream and sob to show that the victim is a real person. The sister of the supposed murderer also displays emotion, to emphasize that it matters. This is the role that the female characters play, if not for the women, none of the characters would be sympathetic, because nobody would appear to care about death. Everybody executes their role perfectly. When Rodan threatens the city, the citizens flee to the busses in perfect timeliness. Then, I think, the scientist finds a way to kill Rodan with a volcano, which I enjoyed. After this happens, there is a strange atmospheric sadness, almost as though the movie is considering the gravity of ending Rodan's life.
The original King Kong is an enjoyable movie to watch because of its special effects, especially its stop motion, which I gather is what made it so enticing in the first place. Kong himself is characterized very clearly and charmingly in early stop motion, which seems partially accidential, as his movements and expressions are somewhat cartoonish, which seems as if it is a result of the dominant style of animation at the time. There are other things to gawk at besides King Kong, like similarly charmingly animated dinosaurs, and trickery heavy forest scenes where actors are constantly being swapped out with stop motion models. The film is also heavy with gender and race stereotypes and other 'unpleasantness' which is why the part of the film that really holds up, (I am able to pinpoint, even, the best scene specifically) is when Kong escapes his enclosure in New York and starts picking up subway cars. The end of the movie, which is when this is happening, feels unintentionally light, as it is when the annoying New Yorkers are getting their comeuppance and Kong is no longer gratuitously squishing people under his feet whom the movie seems to consider non-people.
Not going to write nything about godzilla because I didn't watch past the first few scenes we saw in class.
I really enjoy movies where terrible things happen! This is why I really enjoyed Earthquake. There are many scenes of people getting crushed by falling objects, falling off of buildings, suffocating to death, drowning, and crawling through small holes. Many people die! It must be said that the most intensely deathed parts of the movie are not given a lot of gravity, they just sort of happen, however, I've noticed that this is symptomatic of movies where terrible things happen. Mostly they tend to follow the main characters as mass death occurs around them, and the moments of real importance are when a known character dies. This is similar to what happens in life, but I consider it curious.
The acting in Earthquake is not fantastic, and it contains many strangely charicature-like moments on the part of the characters, but this does not bother me, in fact, I prefer it. I think this is related to what I said above, as I prefer my movies of this genre diagramatic, or 'a technological view' as Susan Sontag put it. These stock character archetypes are almost like the featureless man from an ikea furniture guide, or something, just a dummy for the things to happen to. That said, they still have enough characterization that I was interested in them, and cared about their fates.
I plan on adding this movie to my list of favorite movies that I consider to be in the same category, beside Threads (1984), The Mist (2007), and so on. I rate it 5 stars :) .
Another movie that I thoroughly enjoyed. Deluge is about a biblical sort of flood which, it seems, wipes out a great portion of America, leaving the surviving people on a series of small islands (which were once the peaks of mountains). Although this is a disaster movie, it has a real calmness to it, its dramatic climax doesn't have to do so much with the horror of disaster but with some interpersonal romantic negotiations. It does feature post apocalyptic rapist/looter type characters, but besides them (and they are soundly defeated) the flood feels more positive than negative. The disaster has a completely different texture than Earthquake, for example. Earthquake feels very dirty and weighted and dismal. Human bodies pile up under their own refuse, they die in horrific ways and on massive scales, and furthermore they die under rubble. Deluge does not feel like this at all; the water isn't crushing but freeing. Yes, it is frightening during the storm, but once the weather clears up the survivors simply awaken to a new world, the slate is wiped clean. This is probably related to to biblical nature of the disaster, and I found this view of disaster very interesting.