*** SPOILERS ***
Godzilla is a strange beast in that the character is beloved, for it is a classic pop culture icon known throughout the world, as in Superman levels of penetration into the culture and yet only a tiny fraction of the people that instantly recognise the character have ever seen his films. You could ask an 80 year old granny, you could ask a 6 year old child, and you could ask them on nearly any continent on earth and they would know who Godzilla is, but have they ever seen a single film? Those that have seen the films generally considered them to be B-Movies. Even diehard fans accept the fact that the movies have always kinda sucked. That does not mean they're not films people like, even love, but I do not think that any serious filmgoers can sit there and tell me that the Godzilla films are amazing stories or incredibly well made films, beyond the original.
I have always been a huge Godzilla fan and have watched the movies a ton of times when I was small and again as an adult. It was that exposure, particularly as a child that I think is the key to my experience with this new film.
When you are a kid you do not see the men in suits running around a glorified train set. You see Godzilla. You see a wild monster crushing cities but you also see that particular Japanese aesthetic, in their modern storytelling where mankind is completely out of control of the events around them. I kind of fatalism of endurance where the is no response to the disaster, a disaster more often than not we have caused ourselves. We are ineffectual and unimportant, the only option is to hide, to hope and to survive from a roll of a die. We are nearly superfluous, you can imagine the stories of these films carrying on without us, despite our pathetic and wretched meddling that ultimately leads to nought. It is Godzilla that saves the day, as inevitable as the dawn. But Godzilla's is selfish in a way, like us his concern is for his planet. Our planet. A beast that fights for Earth, not humanity, not for morality, not for gain and who is unable to be controlled. Yet as we live on Earth he is kinda the good guy, one we rely on as we live on Earth too. This focus moved Godzilla slowly from a hideous bad guy to what I consider as a representation of Gia itself. A force of nature, Earth personified, and who could in their right mind not want to cheer for the Earth itself.
These are powerful ideas for a kid and this film more than any before it is showing us the monsters as we imagined them. I never saw a guy in a suit with visible strings holding up 3 sock puppet heads. I saw a golden dragon. This movie shows us the monsters as they lived in our imagination, not as they lived on celluloid. This film is about how Godzilla is perceived, more than about what it actually has been.
It is also an American production and it loses some of those deep-rooted cultural concepts about our place as a human race in relation to the planet itself. In an effort to make the story more "realistic" the Gods themselves are reduced to dumb animals, easily commanded by a magic box. A switch to make them rage, a switch to make them docile, a switch to call them, to drive them away. Having humans attempt to control Godzilla and his ilk is not a bad thing in itself, in fact, it is a common theme through the series, but ultimately I feel that it should always fail utterly and be ultimately unimportant.
Godzilla for me is at its best in the way western film audiences were introduced to him in the last 2015 film by that Monsters guy. They should basically not even notice us. This is what made that scene Godzilla vs King Ghidorah in '91 so powerful for Godzilla fans, as Godzilla stood there and looked directly at the dude, feelings of acknowledgement and understanding pass through the audience at the gravity of the idea that Godzilla was noticing us at all let alone singling him out for retribution. This scene worked so well as it was so unusual. In this film, the monsters all act more like King Kong. They are letting people touch them, bending down to snort on them Jurassic Park style and chasing little girls who can somehow outrun them. For how I personally relate to Godzilla, there seems to be what I consider a definite misunderstanding of the writers and director about some pretty basic concepts of what Godzilla is all about, concepts that the 2014 film, flawed as it was, nailed.
Even so, I immensely enjoyed this film. The film looks fantastic. Some of the shots could be screen capped from the Blu-Ray, printed out and hang on my wall. I mean it is absolutely gorgeous and if you are after giant monster battles, this film has you covered. The action is fantastic. I loved it. There was a lot of chatter from the trailers about the film looking dark, but I call bullshit on that. The film is extremely easy to read, even during the ground level, humans dodging exploding cars and toppling buildings I never felt like my eye was lost on the screen or that the action was obscured from view. The film is loud though. Do not go to this film if you have a headache. It is basically 2 hours of screaming monsters.
I also liked how they delved deep into the lore of the beasts. While I am a huge advocate of not explaining shit in films, nothing sucks more than crappy pseudoscience and technobabble, which this film has a decent share of. Still, it is things like Monster Zero causing hurricanes all around him from beating his wings and his electric charge or Rodan rising from a volcano and how ancient man translated these sights and how the monsters themselves are part of human collective consciousness, filtered into our legends. I thought a lot of that was really cool. I felt this film really pushed the lore and I loved that.
That is not to say the film is not fucking dumb.
The biggest nitpick I have is that apparently water pressure is not a thing, but I can forgive a submarine form just cruising about at the bottom of the ocean or a helicopter flying in a tornado. Having hero characters conveniently picked up by some kind of transport that comes from nowhere as they need to be at the next scenes location or even the killing off of the Japanese scientist's female assistant, just to replace her with the exact same character, this time Chinese to allow the sale of the film in the Chinese market are just things that niggle me but are not deal breakers. If you make a 200million dollar film that is trying to do so much there are concessions you have to make, to make it at all.
There are also the increasingly common pacing problems that event cinema is having. With so much going on there is no time for the story to "boil". Mothra wakes up and spends all of 10 mins in the film before it cocoons itself. Rodan is born and fighting before it even takes flight form the Volcano. Everything feels rushed, we as an audience need time to see the monsters and understand what they can do. Seeing Godzilla sucker punch Rodan isn't as cool unless we have seen Rodan be a badass himself. These monsters need actual arcs. I think they could take some lessons from martial arts cinema.
This leads me to the biggest problem I have with this film. The monsters are just that. Monsters. These films over the years have produced definite and realised characters for these creatures. When you see a King Kong film, there is no doubt about his personality. You see it in his actions and expressions. The monsters in this film, despite some legit attempts, fail to have any feeling of character. We as an audience want to love these guys, to emotionally bond to them, even the bad guys but what we get are just creatures. Look at Aliens. Just tiny moments of showing intelligence and that scene with the Queen issuing direct commands and understanding Ripley's threat gave those monsters such depth and the ability for the audience to connect to them. This film needed those kinds of moments and it just doesn't have them.
Also, this films lacks the conviction to have an actual bad guy. In an age of understanding, it is no longer acceptable to just have a crazy scientist dude nearly cause Armageddon. The audience is deprived of the classic and always satisfyingly cathartic experience of the bad guy getting her comeuppance, as it is obfuscated in touchy feely bullshit. The eco terrorist and the doctor should really have been one character, and she shouldn't have a redemptive arc of any kind, imo. Why is a film asking me to identify with a woman that has literally murdered millions? Fuck that. Have her stepped on my Monster Zero or a building fall on her or something.
All in all this film is one I really enjoyed and I have already seen it twice at the cinema. Once with friends and once alone in iMax. I may even see it again as my brother wants to go see it. Even so, I am not going to sit here and tell you it is a great film. It is great because it is a Godzilla film, it isn't a great film. Even with all the monster action, the final fight is concluded in a super fast sequence that feels a little anticlimactic after such epic and awesome fighting. In Dragonball Z they don't suddenly end it once everyone is juiced up. That is when the real battle begins. This film, for all its good work, fails to tap into that mythic feeling that I so desperately wanted it to have.
And that mugffin magic briefcase thing was fucking retarded.
