Mister Minutes' Cinema Circus

This might be a shocking statement coming from a white male movie reviewer on the internet, but I enjoy Lovecraftian horror. It gives me a very specific breed of fear: the fear of insignificance. The fear that my tiny life amounts to nothing in the grand scheme of an uncaring, indifferent Universe. Bloodborne and Dark Souls give me the same fear, and I love it. I also have an immense love for giant things: huge, looming skyscrapers; yawning, cavernous spaces; unfathomably large monsters of equally unfathomable age and grotesque beauty. “Megalophobia” is the fear of such giantness, but that fear is also why I love it. All of that is why I love the idea of Godzilla, but don’t enjoy the execution of Godzilla.

I love the monster designs, of course. Mothra is beautiful, Mechagodzilla is fun, and King Ghidorah is cool as hell. But all the kaiju battles ever filmed can’t recapture the point of the original 1954 Gojira film, nor can they understand its pathos. Gojira is an allegory for nuclear annihilation, and the monster himself is the bomb. He is an unstoppable, uncaring force of destruction, violence incarnate come to lay waste to Tokyo. The film was a window through which the wounded Japanese population could recontextualize the horror of the American war machine that had decimated Hiroshima and Nagasaki nine years earlier. In an act of despicable censorship, Gojira was gutted for American release; 20 minutes of film were cut, 30 more were added in, much of the original meaning and mentions of nuclear power were cut or twisted, and a new American protagonist was shoehorned in to hijack the Japanese perspective and anguish, and repackage it to be more palatable to the American public. It’s through this hijacking that he received both his more well-known name of “Godzilla” and the title “King of the Monsters” on American movie posters. It’s through this Americanization that Godzilla started on his current path as heavyweight champion of Japan and defender of humanity, and that path is precisely what I don’t enjoy about Godzilla.

I will refer to Gojira and Godzilla as two different characters in this essay, because they are. Gojira is the Japanese original, and Godzilla is his Americanized counterpart who has taken over in popular culture. Gojira is a nuclear bomb; he is also a natural disaster personified. His wake is a tsunami, his footsteps are an earthquake, his roar is thunder and his breath is lightning. By all accounts he is an uncaring, unfeeling, indifferent force of nature that destroys everything in his path. Yet Godzilla is the protector of humanity, rising out of the ocean to defeat Earth’s many foes while causing billions of yen worth of destruction and killing countless people in the process, and it’s this dichotomy, this savior complex we hold for Godzilla, that harms Gareth Edwards’ 2014 reboot.

Godzilla begins by breaking a fundamental rule of monster movies: don’t show too much of the monster too early. The opening credits are filled with Godzilla imagery, showing his back plates, his shape swimming in the water, and finally rising up onto a beach, intercut with atomic bomb testing footage. Yes, I know it’s a Godzilla movie and we all know what he looks like, but it robs the film of more interesting opportunities for visual introduction later. In contrast, the other American Godzilla, Roland Emmerich’s 1998 film (widely regarded by Godzilla fans a Bad Movie), has almost the exact same opening without playing its hand too early; that film even uses some of the same exact test footage as Edwards’ film, but doesn’t show a single image of Godzilla himself, instead intercutting bomb footage with clips of iguanas to tell the story of the titan lizard’s nuclear birth. This is actually a more respectful nod to the original film, since Edwards’ story omits this nuclear origin altogether - in 2014, Godzilla is a primordial creature, “born millions of years before the rise of man”, and the nuclear blasts shown in the opening were the US military’s “covert” attempt to kill him in the ‘40s.

Anyway, after the opening, we’re treated to an actually great setup for our main characters. Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) is in charge of a Japanese nuclear power plant. After detecting strange readings off the coast, the power plant suffers a breach and subsequently collapses, killing Brody’s wife. 15 years later, the plant and its surrounding town is fenced off in a quarantine zone, with the government calling the area too irradiated to enter. Brody’s young son Ford has grown into a Generic Military Man (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and seems to have lost contact with his father, though he is called to Japan to bail Joe out of jail after he snuck into the quarantine zone. We learn that in the intervening years, Joe has been hunting for answers, believing there was nothing natural about the disaster that killed his wife. This led Ford to dismiss him as a crackpot and lose touch, but he accompanies his father into the city anyway to retrieve some old floppy discs. However, after nabbing the discs, the two are arrested by government agents and for some reason taken to the old power plant instead of being thrown out. While there, the separated Brodies witness the birth of a gigantic creature that wreaks havoc, kills a bunch of people, and escapes into the night sky. Joe Brody is killed in the mayhem, leaving Ford to deal with the US military as it takes over the operation.

Now, despite the fact that they killed off the best character in the first quarter of the film, this could still be a genuinely great character setup for Ford. All his life he wrote off his father as delusional, a conspiracy theorist who couldn’t accept his wife’s death. Now he’s come face-to-face with an unbelievable creature that feeds on radiation and destroyed the power plant all those years ago. This could set up a great conflict within Ford: will he deny the truth of the monster, or take up his father’s fight and expose the Japanese government’s cover-up? How will he deal with the guilt of ignoring his father’s theories and creating a rift between them that lasted into Ford’s adulthood, only to lose him at the moment of their reunion? Will this push him to be a better husband and father when he finally returns to San Francisco?

Oh. No, none of that happens. Ford looks irritated in a board room for one scene and then mentions his father only once, in a brief voicemail to his wife.

Joe receives no vindication, no reconciliation with his son, no recognition of being right. He flatlines in a helicopter and dies off-screen, taking the film’s emotional core with him. This leaves Ford a hollow, unmotivated character whose only purpose is to return to San Francisco. He could have become a much more interesting Erin Brockovich-esque activist campaigning to hold the government responsible for his parents’ deaths, but instead he becomes a very passive character in his own story, and here is where Godzilla begins its downturn for me. Up until this point, the film has centered around the Brody men and their search for meaning after Sandra Brody’s death: Joe wants to uncover the truth and expose the cover-up; Ford wants to distance himself from his father’s obsession and lead a normal life. After Joe’s death, however, Ford seems to lose all character motivation besides vaguely returning to his family. I say “vaguely” partly due to Ford’s lackluster writing and Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s lackluster performance. He doesn’t sound scared or desperate when he calls his wife on the phone; he sounds bored. His wife and child are little more than props, lifeless cutouts who exist simply to get Ford back to San Francisco for the finale. Ford should be fighting desperately to get back to his family, but instead he passively floats along, hitching up with the Army in Honolulu to get back to the mainland. And yes, the reason he joins up with the Army is to get back to San Francisco, but there’s something intriguing about his journey home: he never once mentions his family to anyone else. What I mean is, he never speaks of them with affection or longing to return home; he talks about it as a goal, with as much emotion as reciting an order given to him by an officer. He honestly seems bored by the whole adventure, even when he finally gets back to San Francisco.

Another plot thread we’re told to care about is that of Ford’s wife Elle and son Sam. Both of them are fucking boring and Elizabeth Olsen is wasted in this movie. This is a year before she would become a household name as Wanda Maximoff, so maybe Edwards just didn’t know what to do with her? She’s a good actress and I like her a lot in the MCU, but all she gets to do in this movie is scream and look upset. Her character basically dies halfway through because she doesn’t get to do anything besides wait for Ford. We actually see her helping people in the hospital until Ford calls her on the phone. After that phone call she immediately switches into Crying Waiting Wife Mode and loses all characterization. She doesn’t even show any emotion when she loads her kid onto a school bus to a shelter, knowing he’s going to be driving through a danger zone and she might never see him again.

So now we get to the finale. All “plots” converge in San Francisco: the MUTOs are preparing their brood nest, Godzilla comes to kick some ass, the military arrives with their warhead, and Ford is finally home to... not do a whole lot. This whole sequence is rather strange for a few reasons; some nitpicky — like, why is the female MUTO already heavily pregnant before even meeting the male? — and some extremely important. The main, strange takeaway from the finale sequence is that the fucking main character of the movie changes. See, the first three-quarters of the movie have been told very purposefully from the perspective of the human population. The movie purposely avoids showing a lot of direct monster carnage, instead usually showing the aftermath through news footage. That’s an interesting way to do it, but it’s also rather strange given Edwards’ most notable film, the one that got him the Godzilla gig in the first place: Monsters, the 2010 film that shows a world post-monster invasion, where people are trying to regain their normal lives while coping with the bloodthirsty creatures that have taken over the Central American jungle. Monsters is a very slow, purposeful film following two characters on a harrowing trek through creature country to get the female lead home. The monsters are rarely shown in full, relying instead on tension of the unknown, the possibility of a monster attack, to keep fear levels up. Godzilla seems to not really care about its human characters all that much, and when we finally get back to San Francisco, the movie does something truly bizarre: the POV stays with the human characters, but the movie itself has lost all interest in them. It seems to think that the human story is over, and now it’s Godzilla’s movie. Ford and Elle actually don’t talk again for the rest of the movie. They become background characters in their own film, while Godzilla muscles his way to center stage for an undeserved and clumsy savior story. The whole sequence is just baffling to me honestly, because it’s where the movie just seems to fall apart.

The cinematography in particular suffers a major hit. Gone are the awe-inspiring low-angle shots of the monsters, looking up from a human point of view to make you feel the immense size and power of these creatures. Instead the camera stays relatively straight, as if it doesn’t want to look upward. We see some very slight monster destruction from Ford and the Army’s perspective on the ground, but it usually happens on the edge of the frame, or in the direct background with no special emphasis. Aside from that, the camera is at Godzilla’s shoulder height, shooting straight-on, with no interesting angles or movement shots. One could almost say they were trying to emulate the filming of old Godzilla movies, shooting straight at two men in lizard suits, but that would be giving them too much credit. The whole finale fight just seems incredibly lazy, not well thought out or well filmed. There’s no badass fighting for kaiju fans to enjoy, either. The violence seems light and superficial, the male MUTO dies with no pomp or circumstance, and Godzilla is basically impervious to damage here. The movie suddenly decides, in this last act, to start portraying Godzilla as some sort of beleaguered antihero, a nameless cowboy sauntering into town to save the helpless populace from the bandits who’ve taken over. He has an uncanny human swagger and mannerisms in his facial expressions, which to me are off-putting and weird. He gets hit, and bitten, and clawed, but despite roaring in pain once or twice, he never loses speed or proficiency in his fighting. He has plot armor. Godzilla has fucking plot armor. It truly feels like the filmmakers were afraid to show Godzilla getting seriously hurt by the MUTOs or showing any kind of weakness.

This is as good a time as any to return to my actual point of this review, and my major point of contention with Godzilla as a franchise: I do not like the characterization of Godzilla as a noble defender of humanity. In the beginning of this review I talked about the original Gojira being a metaphor for the atomic bomb. In my opinion, that’s what Godzilla should be: a force of nature, an unfeeling entity with no regard for humanity. Because, what reason would he have to care about us anyway? We’re ants to him, both in size and power. I truly do not understand why the MUTOs are treated with fear and retaliation, but Godzilla himself is treated with a spiritual reverence by Dr. Serizawa, and cheered for by the survivors at the end of the movie. Godzilla has shown no respect for human life, and for all intents and purposes he only kills the MUTOs to defend his turf. Earth is his stomping ground, especially the Pacific Ocean where all three monsters were first discovered. He doesn’t care about humans at all, but the movie goes out of its way to compare him to Ford, trying to draw parallels between their heroism.

There are two incredibly stupid moments that illustrate this: the first is a scene in which Godzilla collapses to the ground, right next to Ford. For a moment, our two “heroes” look each other in the eye. There’s a strange and undeserved sense of understanding between them, and no sign of fear in Ford. The second comes when Ford finally achieves the Army’s goal to get a nuclear warhead on a boat, with the hope of luring the female MUTO and Godzilla into the bay to be killed by the blast. This has been the Army’s plan for most of the movie; it’s a solid enough last-ditch effort to protect their families and their world from these rampaging monsters who have killed thousands, but the movie, again, refuses to give its main characters any sense of success — and that would be fine if it were an intentionally nihilistic moment, like when the female MUTO ate the first warhead. That was a major setback, and created more tension by throwing a wrench in the plan. But no, Godzilla just kills her before the plan has a chance to work, thereby negating all their hard work to put the plan into fruition and basically making Ford’s efforts worthless, all so Godzilla can get the final kill. Ford and Godzilla then both collapse, Godzilla under the pressure of being such a gosh-darn great guy, and Ford under the realization that nothing he did matters and he is now going to die. It’s this shot of the two of them falling simultaneously that feels so incredibly unearned and dissonant. The human effort to save their world has been ripped away from them unceremoniously, and Godzilla gets all the glory and recognition. In the final scene, where survivors are being reunited in the stadium, there’s a shot of a gigantic jumbotron screen showing footage of Godzilla with the caption “KING OF THE MONSTERS - SAVIOR OF OUR CITY?” This just feels disgustingly masturbatory on the film’s part; Godzilla was as much a part of the destruction as the MUTOs and the humans should logically be horrified by his mere existence. This screen calling him a savior is directed at Us the Audience, not the characters within the film. It’s the movie itself saying “Isn’t Godzilla fucking RAD?”, when the big lizard has done nothing to earn that besides killing intruders in his hunting ground. It also feels like a pretty big slap in the face to Ford and the Army, who risked their lives to protect their world, only for the world to portray the monster as the real hero.

So that’s the end of the movie, and with all that being said, I must once again bring up Matthew Broderick's 1998 film as being the superior American Godzilla movie. I’ll try to keep this short, but in director Roland Emmerich’s version, the titular lizard is treated as an animal, an unstoppable, insurmountable force trying to take over New York City as its own personal breeding ground. The film manages to give Godzilla ample screen time while also giving its human characters depth, humor, and - y’know, something to do. The human characters make plans to combat the creature; they experience failure and setback but keep trying, and in the end prevail. It doesn’t sideline its actors to make the monster into a hero; in fact, this Godzilla is the only threat, with no other monsters to fight. Gojira, Godzilla ‘98, and Shin Godzilla are the only ones I know of that are just humanity vs. Godzilla, and in my opinion that’s what Godzilla should be. You can throw in other monsters for flavor, sure, but the main conflict should be about humanity fighting for its survival, not relying on an equally destructive entity to protect them. Earthquakes don’t suddenly rise up to protect Florida from hurricanes.

Gareth Edwards wanted to do a gritty, realistic reboot, a Godzilla for the modern era, but instead got lost in a legacy of kaiju battles and audience expectation, and thus what is ostensibly a remake of Gojira becomes just another installment in a long line of monster brawl movies with no consequence. It gets a 4/10 for me for failing to do anything new. Go watch Shin Godzilla or Pacific Rim instead.