(This is of course ignoring everything else tiring and pedantic about Hagueseth's entire juvenile persona.)

(I'll reiterate that were it not for those elements, AoE would be the only Bayverse movie I mostly have a good time with too, but maaaaan. Anyway, someone could write an essay on the way the series adopts antifascist rhetoric while propping up militarism and fascism at basically every turn.)

Does this even mean Bingo Sports Prime, otherwise an unlikely pick for Top 5 in 2025? Probably. There are so many TFs out there that celebrate fiction I like (or am even just ambivalent to) rather than fiction that does active harm. Back to being a Bayverse-free household.

It winds up having mostly nothing to say about nuclear weapons, but then the one thing it does say winds up being, "Eh, but they're not thaaaat bad."

The film did not need to invoke a nuclear weapon to have it harmlessly detonate no matter the script justifications. It's hard to do something that feels more offensive to the source material than that.

I'm pretty sure anyone who's played them could give you a general rundown of basic MK story. I have literally no idea what any Street Fighter game is about besides punching colorful national stereotypes.

One thing that struck me about liking it more than its more mechanically polished rival (in English-language regions only; Japan could not care less about MK) in Street Fighter is how much more I grasp the (dumb fun) lore of MK vs. the latter, despite casually playing chunks of both.

My other favorite Optimus quote: "Let Paramount buy Warner Brothers with Kushner-Saudi blood money"

I cri everytime

My favorite Optimus Prime quote: "I have no opinion on the sovereignty of nations or the right of people to express themselves if it helps me screen in China"

The resolution in 2014 involves a nuclear weapon detonating relatively harmlessly in the middle of a city, which is about the most offensive thing they could have done

KOTM is the most watchable of the Legendary films to me as it kind of barely eeks out some themes and has a fun spectacle moment or two + character dynamics kind of-sort of (like, on the level of a lesser Heisei Toho G movie), but the bar for me with the whole series is in the gutter

But yeah, it's an instructional film in how not to structure a script, as it really is shocking that it removes its sole character with any definition or agency after the first act

Don't even get me started on the invocation of nuclear weapons in the Legendary films, a subject on which they have nothing to say but believe Must Be There as a Godzilla Thing, creating scenarios far worse than not touching on them at all

Doesn't really have a character, isn't about anything thematically, oh, but it's fun, right? Oh, not really? But hey, he Got Godzilla Right™️

I feel relatively alone in kaiju fandom in finding Godzilla 2014 nearly unwatchable for being a 2-plus-hour spectacle blockbuster without a real character after the 30 minute mark. All ten minutes of the effects scenes are good, but that script...

Paramount been known to take a buck from and act as a propaganda vehicle for a dictatorship to get that shlock made.

Seriously considering selling off all my AoE figures, many of which I quite like, because this shit just riles me.