Godzilla Vs The World

I'm torn, I really am! I wanted to give this a straight 10 across the board, but for one reason I didn't.

The start of the film is a bit... awkward. It jumps immediately into the battle of san francisco between Godzilla and the Muto's. There is no real explanation for A.J.'s inclusion (or the Scarlet Witch's) because there is no... nothing. I feel like something could have been done here, but I suspect for every inclusion to make that scene make sense... you will need another scene to make the added scene make sense. I do not know, this was my second fan edit I've reviewed.

What I do know, is beyond that beginning... the film is dramatically superior to G:KOTM. It just is. It skips most of the interminable human scenes, and only keeps those that make sense... give real context, and it some of Stranger Thing's girl (who isn't so bad, but her mother is a drag on the theatrical version, and... a giant idiot to boot). In this reworked version ST Mom is... less of a crazy person and more of an econut. Doing this "vaguely" for her son, the less explanation... the better, because it didn't make sense in the o.g. film.

Additionally, he reframes the narrative so that some things make more sense. In the original film, Chandler's character ... makes no sense and is also just an audience viewpoint. He doesn't DO anything. Here, by wisely placing some scenes ahead of others, Chandler's character goes from being a waste of space, to actually predicting what his ex-wife's eco-terror group will actually do. To boot, it makes the military undermine him and wisely uses all those scenes of the uniformed troops skeptic attitude against them.

They all die pretty much, because they laughed at him and didn't listen. If only they listened, they could have gotten to Ghidorah sooner. These small changes in scene placement, make a drastic improvement to the mostly perfunctory human storylines. In addition, they HELP pacing. No more does Godzilla just teleport (even with the help of hollow earth tunnels) around the Earth... but his journey actually takes some time... but remarkably it doesn't actually slow down the pace of the movie. In fact, it HIGHLIGHTS the big battles even more so.

With the inclusion of the opening scene, you effectively get 4 big battle scenes in 2 hours. That's better than what ANY of the Monsterverse films actually give in terms of battle to time ratio. Not only that, but the battles here... because of the cut human scenes - don't feel to drag on like they did in the original film.

With the visual edits (color gradation differences, from my eye - I am not exactly sure on what the editor did, I simply noticed the atomic breath was more... colorful but I suspect he adjusted the gamma or something so that I could see more of the KOTM battles, which were shrouded by too much confusion/darkness in the theatrical version) this is just enjoyable.

All in all, it makes you kind of go "what?" when you realize that this fan edit, is remarkably better than the original theatrical film, and it was all done by one person.

Final comment - it also removes the "what the f?" death of Dr Graham by Ghidorah, which creates a small hole as her character just disappears. This (unfortunately placed and executed) death served a point in the film to highlight Ghidorah's pettiness and evil and while I understand it's removal, it does introduce a ... plothole to some extent.

A much better version of the second Godzilla film. I felt like there could have been more of the first film introducing Godzilla and less of ATJ although it's been awhile since I've seen it and I don't know if that is even possible with the footage available. That being said, I'd much rather watch this than sit through both of the original films. At least now the second film is a lot more bearable.

I like the new opening. It's a simple critique but you could have cut a few shots early of Elle running from the destruction. Extended shots of her felt off, but not of the crowd she was in.

I like how you went from Emma pre-kitchen, to the Monarch hearing scene, back to post-kitchen,then into the Mothra "taming" scene. This was illuminating to see done.

Your edit's transitions all felt clean. I just can't stand all the jokes in this movie.

But, the way you re-arrange shots within in a scene, as well as entire scenes around other scenes, was intriguing to see done as an editor myself.

Godzilla fans having nothing to fear when coming to watch this version.

Surprisingly, a good edit. I honestly want to like both films, but they have too many bad qualities to formally recommend watching them separate. I thought the inclusion of the intro scene being the only scene from Godzilla (2014) was genius, and was actually the best part of this edit. There were a few little choppy moments of the video in this scene, but probably just from the render though.

After this scene comes KOTM. This part of the edit tries to help fix the boring human story of KOTM, but I just don't think anybody can accomplish that. If I had any criticism for the edit's version of KOTM it would be a few things.
1st, some of the characters were kind of just introduced without any knowledge of to who they were, mainly involving everybody in the whole main family.
2nd, and idk if this was the just the render or not, but somehow the cgi looked worse than I remembered. It was so bad that it distracted from the narrative. I don't blame the edit for this, because the cgi in the original movies were already bad enough.
3rd, some of the inserted fonts used seems a little cheap, and did not seem like it worked for a Godzilla movie.
Lastly, and this is just a suggestion, I would honestly remove more of the human stuff from the KOTM section, as it's just plain boring no matter how many times anybody tries to watch it. Trimming it down AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE to let the kaiju fights happen should be imperative.

Overall, this is definitely an improvement from the 2 individual movies, and I would recommend it. A tighter edit on the human story would definitely help though to make this a vastly greater experience for this franchise.

This is a great edit of some very flawed movies. I do miss some action scenes from Godzilla 2014 but I do appreciate the improvements made here. The people portion of the story is condensed which eliminates a lot of the portions that dragged in these movies. Totally enjoyable if massive destruction is your thing.