Last night I saw the much anticipated Godzilla, the new film from Monsters's director Gareth Edwards. I got on the hype train for this movie pretty early. After seeing the design, the serious take on the subject matter, hearing the sound design for the roar, and getting Bryan Cranston I was beyond careful optimism, I was ready for this movie to be great. Could anything live up to this hype, did I enjoy it?
Yes. For the most part. I enjoyed the experience of seeing this movie and I want to watch it again but it is far from being a perfect film, and far from being the ultimate Godzilla movie. The movie had about a serious a tone as you can when the subject is giant monsters. This was not intended to be a remake of the 1954 original, it was a new story with new twists and takes on the mythology. I really appreciated the attention to detail, having a design that was updated but still true to the spirit of Godzilla, keeping the roar the same, and having him look and act like the big monster we love. They did a fantastic job of making him feel huge and powerful. The sense of scale was very well done. I enjoyed what they did with the back story: with the nuclear testing of the American military actually being attempts to destroy Godzilla, and keeping with part of the original canon for the origin being prehistoric animals from time where there was more radiation. The movie acknowledges that it doesn't own Godzilla and that he has his own established mythology. Between the nods to the old movies and a few other unspecific things I thought it felt like he was on loan, we were borrowing him for this movie. It was at once respectful, but also might have been a contributing factor to my primary gripe on the movie: there wasn't enough Godzilla. It was almost as if they were afraid to use him, or they could only get him on contract for a couple days of shooting. I'm clearly the only person who felt that there wasn't quite a enough Godzilla, but then again there are a lot of his movies were you dont see him as much as you want. But it really doesn't feel like he is the focus of the movie, he is kind of relegated to the just being the deus ex machina that destroys the evil monsters at the end. Godzilla has functioned this way before in some of the Toho movies, so its not that far from the source material. However in his first return to the big screen in ten years I wanted a little more. Like I really want more, I want sequels dammit. This was almost a proof of concept, that Americans could make a decent Godzilla movie and that the format can survive in the modern movie market.
The film really focuses on the human drama, but not in the "oh the humanity! terrible cost of life! blatant metaphor for natural disasters possibly caused by human environmental damage" etc. I was expecting that from the trailers, but most of the movie is about the protagonist trying to keep his family safe and get to them during all this craziness. And I think maybe there was something about a bomb? I dunno. The next biggest failing was that the human element in the movie was still not how the people relate to Godzilla, its how they relate to the problems caused by the other monsters. I wanted something to tie the protagonist directly to Godzilla. The only character that really had any kind of relationship with Godzilla was the Japanese scientist played by Ken Watanabe. They really should have explored that relationship more, he just kind of happens to know about Godzilla although they don't really go into detail about it. What I really wanted to have was a strong human antagonist who is idiot politician/military guy who mishandles the situation and tries to blow up Godzilla at the cost of peoples lives, or maybe is making money off the disaster somehow, and gets yelled at by Bryan Cranston a bunch until finally dickhead gets caught in the path of Godzilla, preferably by taking a breath weapon to the private jet. That never happened, and I really wanted something like that.
For all the things we didn't get, we got a lot. We got bad science, we got decent music, we got some hamfisted environmentalism. We did get a monster we can call Godzilla. He was big, he broke stuff, he fought monsters, he roared at things, he shot breath weapons, he walked into the ocean at the end and all that stuff was pretty amazing. We definitely got a Godzilla movie and I'm satisfied calling it that. I just want more now.
Compared to Pacific Rim
It's going to be impossible not to compare this movie to last summer's kaiju movie. Pacific Rim had a lot more freedom being that it was only inspired by kaiju monsters and super robots and did not have to live up to any specific expectations or established canon. PR had a lot more action and a lighter tone, and really that is how these movies need to be to survive. The vast majority of the Godzilla movies were goofy and fun, and hopefully and future installments will start to encapsulate more of that atmosphere. It is hard for me to say which of the movies is better, but I had a more thrilling experience seeing Godzilla in the theater, while looking down the road I can see myself throwing the Pacific Rim bluray on more often.
Compared to Monsters
The plot device of "people trying to move through a disaster area with big monsters in it" feels very familiar to Gareth Edward's other movie, Monsters. That one was well received with critics from what I can remember but did not make a big impact on viewers and I think it had a pretty limited release. I was not thrilled with Monsters when I saw it, for basically the same arguments I have about this Godzilla movie: too much personal drama (especially unrelated to the monsters) not enough monsters. I understand his choices, he wants to leave you in suspense and have a huge reveal for finally seeing the beasts, and he wants to give you a connection to the protagonist, you want them to get home safe and root for them along the way. Except you don't really. You want to root for the monster, that's why you see these movies. You want to see destruction, you want to see action, you want to see man triumph over nature, or aliens, or see nature triumph over man's follies, or one of those few metaphors you can draw from this genre. You want to see something epic, you come for spectacle. There was some spectacle from Godzilla, I think the best way to connect to the audience with the human character drama is to have people who are as just as passionate about the monster as the audience is. They did this to good effect in Godzilla 2000 I think.
Compared to other Godzilla movies
Oh, this is hard. Well clearly this movie blows the piece of shit from 1998 away. I don't think I have to do too much elaboration there. If we were to compare this to the last Godzilla movie made, 2004's ridiculous shark jumping Godzilla Final Wars, this one is way more serious in tone and easily a better movie. Final Wars was a silly romp and half with plenty of odd things and bad cg piled on top of decent but not amazing miniature and rubber suit work. I like Final Wars, but its real dumb. I think this was a fresh restarting point for the series 10 years later. This movie is kind of a lot like the 1985 one I feel, for its more serious tone after about a decade of silence following a period of very silly Godzilla movies. Although I am not convinced serious equals better. The silliness is part of the attraction of Godzilla movies, the trick is finding the balance between making him badass, but still allowing yourself to have fun because, after all this is a movie about giant monsters. I think this movie was really close to finding that balance, closer than they have been in a while. I felt that the movies from the millennium series were just a little bit too goofy and outrageous. Now the best serious Godzilla movie is still the original, and I think it is still probably the best one. It is still on a different page entirely with the tone it has. The movie exists in a very important place in history, just ten years after the fire bombing of Tokyo and the two atomic bombings, because of all that it is the one that is truly terrifying. I don't think that feeling of panic and terror can really be replicated now and I'm not sure it should be. I think where we are socially now, with strong memories of seeing lots of devastating news footage of disasters like 9-11, the tsunami's, hurricanes etc, this was a time where they could have gone harder towards exploiting that concept, but I think the pulled back. I think that was the right call. It would have been a very hard thing to do: to conjure up those memories and emotions of real panic, devastation and loss in a movie with a giant lizard fighting giant bugs and it not kind of be offensive.
Overall.
Its kind of frustrating that the movie was so good in some spots, but it just wasn't quite amazing altogether. But then again I am a nitpicking nerd. The movie is definitely worth going to see, I think it works if you are discerning G-fan or just casually aware of his existence. More than anything I feel this justifies bringing the genre back as a staple, and I hope more giant monster movies come out of it, Godzilla or otherwise. Personally I would be very pleased if the super hero movie thing that has been going on for the past decade would be replaced by giant monsters as the go-to summer action movie device. If your are going to make a bloated, plot-less, cgi-laden summer action blockbuster it might as well involve giant monsters instead of dudes in capes. Seriously, with what they did with Godzilla, can imagine what they could do with Mothra or Ghidorah?
