FULL BLEED: YOU CRY AND CRY BUT HE DOES NOT HEAR

I’d have posted this to my regular weblog, but WordPress is being stupid.

Spoilers for everything. No whining.

GODZILLA is a tough one. On paper, like say, superheroes, Godzilla is a no-brainer. The no-brainerest of them. He is a titan, a walking natural disaster, the reversal of human hubris and belief in a subjugated nature (particularly that in the harnessing of the atom and unleashing it against its fellow human in the form of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.) Godzilla is the shadow cast by the artificial daylight of the atom bomb. This is not hard.

Of course, this is the primal Godzilla, the first one, the black and white monstrosity that unleashed death in footsteps and atomic breath upon Japan in the dark horror of GOJIRA. Eventually, that force, like the atom, was tamed and trained and reshaped into a being that not only tolerated humanity, but became its protector in ever-more elaborate scenarios (MONSTER ZERO, DESTROY ALL MONSTERS and GODZILLA VERSUS THE SMOG MONSTER being personal favorites).

The pendulum swung in the opposite direction later, where Godzilla once again played the role of a terrestrial vengeance, the id of Gaia, punishing civilization for disrespect (and I’ll admit only partial familiarity with the turn-of-the-century Godzilla offerings, yes, I’ll turn in my membership card). But there’s room for interpretation, as with any iconic figure.

Which brings us to the most recent interpretation of Godzilla, courtesy Gareth Edwards, screenplay by David Goyer and from Legendary productions. I was familiar with Mr. Edwards feature debut, MONSTERS, which has its fingerprints all over GODZILLA. For the record, I thought MONSTERS was a pretty good movie that leaned on some structural devices which I have no tolerance for whatsoever (but I’m a notorious hardcase). Still, I enjoyed it, particularly in its portrayal of creatures that aren’t out to get humanity, but aren’t *not* out to get humanity at the same time. We’re bugs to them. Sure, we can get their attention with a rocket launcher, but once the ammo is spent, we’re back to barely making them notice we’re here.

That, of course, is the harshest insult that you can throw in the face of civilization. Indifference. It’s not even that we’re being punished for being naughty children and opening the Pandora’s box of nuclear power (which offers its own terminal reward, or at least did back when GODZILLA was first birthed.) But the creatures in MONSTERS aren’t even that…aware of us. We’re nothing. Our achievements, our technology, even our ability to stick our necks out for one another, all just so much background noise to them. MONSTERS went out of its way to present that side of the creatures, as well as to show what happens to the human world in the face of this new threat, that being the appearance of action: the construction of walls and warning signs and quarantine zones (some of which resurfaces in GODZILLA, but not enough.) MONSTERS did that well, but then so did PACIFIC RIM, which upped the ante in a number of ways.

Don’t worry. I won’t talk about PACIFIC RIM very long. Like I’ll stop after I say that whoever was working on GODZILLA probably got worried after the hot kaiju-on-robot action of the former hit screens last summer. Like THE INCREDIBLES before FANTASTIC FOUR, the bar just got raised in terms of audience expectation of what sort of action will get depicted on screen.

Maybe I’ll say a little more in that the monsters/kaiju of PACIFIC RIM were designed by intelligent and malicious creators to remove humanity from our little blue marble. They’re walking hit-men for civilization, but not out of the planet’s moral outrage at being exploited, rather because there’s new tenants that want humanity kicked out. The monster’s destructiveness is couched in terms of hurricanes/storms/natural disasters both implicitly and explicitly, just things to be endured. Things to be walled out and hidden from. They’ve gone from sudden and unthinkable horror to locational hazard, just that their location is global (at least until someone figures out that indeed the kaiju are the ushers of Armageddon, multiplying past a point of any hope of control.)

Sorry, totally derailed trains of thought as I went and used the monkey-wrench on a misbehaving printer from Epson from whom I will *not ever* buy another printer. Ever.

Okay, let’s get back to GODZILLA.

I’m trying to figure out where to start. Start with the bad or the good?

Aw hell, let’s go with the bad. The humans are the weak link in GODZILLA. With the exception of Bryan Cranston who offers himself up totally to the role, trotting us right out to the ragged edge of desperation and hope. His performance is stellar and painfully human, painfully relatable. He drives the first act of the movie, but man, that’s not enough. Particularly when the humans who are marched out after him are so flat. We’re supposed to care about them because we’re supposed to care about them and if that sounds circular, the movie presented it as twice that. It’s as if all the urgency and drama in the movie had been distilled into Cranston’s performance, leaving us with hair and skin in the other performers.

That’s unfair. Ken Watanabe as Dr. Serizawa had moments of the same sort of drive and obsession that Cranston showed us at the beginning, but he is not given the space to breathe in the script. Nor is Sally Hawkins as Dr. Graham. If the story had been allowed to dovetail from Cranston to Serizawa/Graham, perhaps there might have been room to work. As it stands, however, the story that we’re given is flat and thin as a butterfly wing and by the numbers without tension. I can look at this as a conscious choice, to emphasize the reality of the monsters with the humans just orbiting about them like so much implosion debris, in which case, yay, mission accomplished!

But then you have to consider the mission that you were on, right?

I’ve seen reviews that reflect this sort of existential-lite read of GODZILLA, where it’s just a portrayal of human futility in the face of oncoming mortality and blah blah blah (which in itself strikes me as a huge misread of what the existentialists were after and more like nihilism.) If I want nihilism (and I don’t) I know where to find it.

I’ve also seen reads where GODZILLA is trying to have its cake and eat it too, eschewing the traditional blockbuster plot and trying to turn things inside out, making it a people movie where there just happens to be a monster in it. Yeah, I suppose, maybe. But then what kind of movie does that leave us with?

Ultimately, these dodge the nature of the sorts of engagement that I’m usually after. Like Eno says, art isn’t an object, but a trigger for experience. You can look at a beautiful something, and maybe it needs only be beautiful/horrible/whichever. Maybe that’s enough. Goodness knows I’ve watched enough things that only were made because the nature of the movie would get butts into seats on a Saturday night.

GODZILLA, I think, really wanted to be a good movie. It wanted to use the big grey lizard as allegory because that’s what good movies do, right? They have a life beyond the surface, beneath it, filled with richness and complexity. But I don’t always ask my movies to be good. I do ask them to be entertaining.

Was GODZILLA entertaining? At times, but man, did it ever make you work for them. There’s something to be said for that, for not blowing the atomic breath out in Godzilla’s first ten seconds on screen. In that, it certainly succeeded. But to carry you to that, you have to do a lot more than say “well, I’m already here so I may as well ride it out” while these characters give us no sense of tension and no real story because the only story is to get from point A to point B, fail and fail and fail and then get reunited with family.

Which should be a great moment. It should be, dammit. We’ve watched Godzilla and the almost-character-less MUTOs fight it out in downtown San Francisco (yes, of course kaiju have characters). And it’s beautiful, Hieronymus Bosch hellscapes lit by William Turner, all in motion. It’s gorgeous, if not faulting to the grimdark color palette far too much for me (contrasted with PACIFIC RIM’S big fight in Shanghai’s Technicolor nightmare explosion). It’s beautiful.

It’s emotionally blank. There’s no tension. There’s no urgency. Not once Cranston’s conspiracy-chasing scientist gets into the quarantine zone surrounding the nuclear reactor accident that killed his wife and left part of Japan a disaster area (a good set piece that was used and then discarded when there was more meat on those bones—ordinarily forgivable if you give me meat in other places, but this didn’t). GODZILLA pointed at urgency, pointed at panic, but also went out of its way to undermine itself all throughout the middle part of the movie, when humanity was first coming to grip with square-cube-law-defying dinosaurs and insects coming to life.

Pointed at, but didn’t deliver. Through no fault of the special effects artists involved. I’m sure no expense was spared in depicting every scale and twitch of muscle. But if the monsters are in service of a story that is for lack of a kinder word, dull, then there’s no helping it. If you want to write a story about human futility, then goddammit go for the throat. Don’t chicken out because it’s going to kill the box office. If you’re serving up the end of the world, then let’s see it. Let’s live it through the characters. Prove it. Armageddons are easy these days. It just doesn’t have that thrill anymore. Needs a stronger kick.

So no, GODZILLA wasn’t a good movie. There were the makings for it, but it didn’t gel.

However, it showed us some new things. One of GODZILLA’s great successes was working with scale, at least in relation to raw size of humans to kaiju. There was a true sense of the titanic, beyond overcranked cameras and collapsing buildings. This is a hard thing to pull off, harder than you’d think without just doing the same old thing over and over.

And as said before, it’s beautiful in places, and honestly wasn’t as disaster-tastic as I was afraid it’d be from the trailers. But I’m not sure the creators of the film could find a unified vision of what they wanted it to be. Is Godzilla a villain? No. Is he the hero? I guess? As much as a tornado can be one. Are humans chumps? Sorta. Do they band together to pull victory from the jaws of defeat? Hell no. Where is the movie that was being shown in the trailer? Beats me.

I dunno. It’s a frustrating movie. There’s a lot of potential to work with, but to do that, you have to embrace the story that you’re trying to tell, and the story here is that there’s a monster and he fights some other monsters and people are just in the way and on screen for far too much, not doing enough to justify their presences there.

Indifference. The ultimate insult hurled back.