Spoilers ahead!
Pacific Rim. Star Trek: Into Darkness. Godzilla. Poor San Francisco can’t seem to catch a break come blockbuster season. The lure of icons such as the Golden Gate Bridge and Chinatown (and their distance from 9/11’s New York) inevitably beckon destruction-oriented filmmakers to its western shores. This time, Godzilla director Gareth Edwards has crafted one of the most visually stimulating and unabashedly iconic action films of the decade, largely through repeated juxtapositions of scale and an avoidance of familial tropes. As far as cinematic wonder goes, more than Pacific Rim, more than any of the recent crop of superhero films, Godzilla is this young generation’s Jurassic Park. And it is far, far better.
After an ominous opening scene in the Philippines the film cuts to Bryan Cranston’s idyllic Japanese home. Among the first words we hear from him is the name “Takashi” (a nod to Gojira’s Takashi Shimura). It is 15 years in the past. Both Cranston and his wife, played by Juliette Binoche, are engineers, and Cranston is arguing on the phone with a co-worker at the nuclear power plant. There have been recent unaccountable seismic tremors. Inevitably, disaster strikes. While Cranston survives, Binoche does not. Their final, poignant exchange is the first and last emotional buoy offered by the film.
In the present, Cranston and his estranged son Ford (played by Kick-Ass’s Aaron Taylor-Johnson) return to the now-quarantined location that fractured their family. The underground tremors have started again, and the cause they discover that night is the first of two towering MUTOs, “Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms,” this one fitted with wings.
Counter to popular opinion, I found Cranston’s early death to be one of Edwards’s shrewdest decisions, because by far the most atypical — and highly productive– aspect of this blockbuster is its near-total disregard for family. To put it in other words, no one really gets to have one. First Cranston watches his wife die. Then Cranston’s son watches him die. Ford, now an orphaned Navy lieutenant whose specialty is disarming bombs, essentially navigates the film alone. While several of his lines involve an obligatory mouthing of the words “my family,” referring to a wife and son, we get all of five minutes of screentime with the three of them sharing the same frame. They are a distant hope in the movie rather than a constant, screeching, helpless, about-to-die-and-must-be-defended presence.
As a viewer, the above is a kindness, but it also means our hero needn’t spend the majority of his time awkwardly trying to win or protect anyone of emotional value; for two hours, he is simply trying not to die. There is no need to “get the girl”; Ford is already married. He needn’t win his father’s approval; his father wins his and then perishes. For all intents and purposes, Godzilla is two things: the hero and the monsters. It invests emotional resonance almost exclusively in its harrowing action and suspense, and it is understandable why this may not be enough for many. I’ve previously touched upon the difference in action of blockbusters devoid of romance (e.g., G.I. Joe: Retaliation, White House Down). Briefly, it provides fewer action-unspecific opportunities for the audience to cringe (recent Spock/Uhura dialogue) or dismiss the film outright due to “a lack of chemistry.” It untethers the action of the film from the failings of skeletal characters, who are in Godzilla unfortunately abundant.
By far the film’s biggest failing is its dismissiveness of supporting characters. Ken Watanabe, here playing the Resident Asian, is reduced to a series of inane sound bites and furrowed brows. That Ford, our cookie-cutter American hero, temporarily adopts a Dominican Bucky does nothing to ease the discomfort of viewing a San Francisco somehow lacking in people of color.
However, while Ford is a product of the military, in Godzilla he is not a propagandized vehicle for the military. He stands alone, unattached to the brothership of kin or a military unit. There are guns, of course — pointless, pointless guns — but the film lacks the overt thrust of previous years’ draft-baiting behemoths; it makes people shooting at the unfamiliar look both useless and boring.
What the film does well is thrill unarmed. Men lie supine on elevated train tracks as a MUTO observes them from below. We watch others leap out of planes and into the statistical improbability of their survival. In short, there is an emphasis on the power of individual scenes rather than narrative sequences. Paired with tremendous sound design, these moments are nothing short of poetic. Shots of a train derailing and sailing into black waters, for example, are closer in nuance to Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping than any number of Godzilla’s cinematic peers.
Which is to say the following: sound saves this film. (As does humor. What else can one make of the dystopian-“When Doves Cry” music video outtake of one MUTO courting another with a long-stemmed hydrogen bomb?) Akira Ifukube’s Gojira score is one of the most widely revered auralscapes in the arena of monster films, which makes Alexandre Desplat’s triumph as Godzilla’s composer 60 years later all the more jawdropping. Counter to my complaints last December about the homogenous low-end belching of recent action scores, Desplat employs diverse, frequently non-Western instruments and motifs from start to finish. On the technical end, there are countless aural rack focuses between the sound effects of mayhem and the subtle devastations of the score. While the majority of the conversation regarding juxtaposition of scale has been of a visual nature, the aural interplay of diagetic catastrophe and nondiagetic grace is its own cinematic achievement, particularly in a genre so ensconced in turgid walls of noise.
No argument for or against this film can avoid the topic of destruction. Its last half hour is dedicated almost exclusively to the anticipated fight between Godzilla and the two MUTOs. Amid fires and the rippling sheets of falling buildings, Godzilla appears to viewers as a sentinel of impenetrable ash. The difference between this final battle and the Kryptonian-on-Kryptonian demolition-braun of Man of Steel is in the absence of millions running for their lives. San Francisco’s victims are prepared, desperate for their shelters to make it through the night. Do any of these people believe a nuclear bomb can destroy monsters that feed on radiation? Probably not, and neither does the audience.
Despite an engaging display of hand-to-hand monster combat (hey, it’s harder than it looks), Godzilla’s lack of motive for saving humanity comes across as poor writing gone worse, the inevitable oversight in plot symptomatic of so many CGI erections (every action film has one). After Godzilla saves the city and lumbers back into the sea, any frustration with Ford as a character playing a human — rather than the other way around — is replaced with frustration over Godzilla used as a deus ex machina in his own film. Endings aren’t easy, but laziness with a titular character is just begging for criticism, especially after coming so far.
I liked that ending! But possibly because it (and much of the film) reminded me of the Godzilla-the-hero films I saw as a child.
“by far the most atypical — and highly productive– aspect of this blockbuster is its near-total disregard for family. To put it in other words, no one really gets to have one.” At points Ford seems almost wholly uninterested in his family – he joins up with the missions to stop the creatures out of a vague sense of “save the city, save my wife and child”, but doesn’t seem overly concerned with letting them know what he’s up to or how they might feel about it. I thought your observations here chimed with David Erhlich’s review http://thedissolve.com/features/exposition/566-godzilla-the-first-post-human-blockbuster/, which from the headline I thought would be reaching, but was in fact quite persuasive.
“it makes people shooting at the unfamiliar look both useless and boring” And scary – almost every shot of military aggression is foregrounded by civilians as terrified of artillery as by the creatures.
“… an engaging display of hand-to-hand monster combat (hey, it’s harder than it looks)” I’ll say; the tendency of most film critics is to either ignore or disparage action cinema, as if quality of cinematography and choreography doesn’t vary wildly (“it looks like a videogame” – never true, always meaningless). The fact that GODZILLA manages to pull back and show you legibly-staged (grumbles about the old nighttime trick aside) and exciting fights, without ever sacrificing the painstakingly-earned sense of scale, is remarkable.
“That Ford, our cookie-cutter American hero, temporarily adopts a Dominican Bucky does nothing to ease the discomfort of viewing a San Francisco somehow lacking in people of color.” – I was similarly uneasy about shots of Japanese scientists being ground into paste being framed in a way that suggested it didn’t matter, as long as Cranston remained unstomped. Ford’s short-lived Ethnic Buddy compounds the queasy sense of “hooray, the white guy made it!”
Great review!
I agree with James. The ending was basically the saving grace for the movie. I was really impressed with the film’s ability to balance the “seriousness” of destruction and mayhem with the campiness of giant wrasslin’ monsters (two of which are horny).
The movie is best when it focuses on the monsters and is very weak when it focuses on Ford or his family. Personally, I think the movie would have been better without a human lead, but rather a bunch of human vignettes around the narrative of the monster itself – go back to the classic, the scientists watch and theorize, the military ineffectually tries to stop the monsters and fails (or makes things worse – as in this iteration), the people scream and run. Did it really need to be Ford in the Hawaii airport saving the kid? Did it really need to be Ford on the trestle bridge? Did it really need to be Ford trying to disarm the bomb (which despite being his expertise, he fails at + I could not forgive the choice of lampshading the lead’s inability to die by contravening the very intentional mention that “there is no extracting plan!” by risking a helicopter crew to extract him!)? Those could have been three different characters. Similarly, the scene on the Golden Gate with the school bus: Did it matter than Ford’s kid was on that bus? Isn’t a bus full of children precious enough to create tension without bending the plot just to put him in jeopardy?
It was also criminal how the surprisingly talented Elizabeth Olsen was given nothing to do. She is a medical professional and she doesn’t even get to save someone’s life!
Godzilla is the star. As a representative of the destructive potential of human technological advances (like atomic power), he/she carries all the humanity we need for the film to cohere.
I do agree, however, that the score was stunning.
Oh I forgot: In other words, I want a Godzilla movie a la “The Towering Inferno” – an ensemble piece the fire (in this case the monster) is the focus.
I thought the film was a bit dull and did nothing to bring out the character of the title monster. I thought it a tremendous waste to continue on with the been there, done that, monsters equal natural disaster trope, and not go for a more clever route. I mean, edwards had 28 films to look at and draw from, most of which are terribly corny and apologetically silly, and he chooses to tone that down. His Godzilla is just an animal fighting other animals, sort of a King Kong thing more than Godzilla. I would like to see something like a more self aware 70’s style take on the character, something where Godzilla showing up is so banal and every day that people just sort of accept it and children play with his toys, yelling goodbye to him as he wades back into the sea after the defeat of whatever monster has appeared. I think something like that could awaken the franchise and re-energize it, not by injecting it with hurricane katrina style footage and dead wives. Godzilla is fun, why can’t americans make a fun film that doesn’t just repeat other blockbusters?
*unapologetically
“I agree with James.” – An HU comment thread first!
I agree with Osvaldo in that Ford’s continued presence is a Hollywood-isation of the traditional relationship between Godzilla and the human cast, and that he could easily be replaced by multiple characters without any loss. I’m not sure it would have been any better, aside from the statistically likely presence of actors more appealing actors than Johnson (who is acted off the screen by Olsen in scenes where the script gives her nothing and him everything).
Pulling the exact same trick as Pacific Rim, where the dead-eyed lead whose death you’re secretly cheering receives an illogical last-second rescue was definitely a big bummer, though.
Oh, and yes the sound design is phenomenal, and the main reason I saw it a second time.
Sam – I think expectation is a big factor here; I wasn’t expecting anything remotely as monster-focussed and unapologetically silly as what we got, so I was pleasantly surprised.