Old-School 'Godzilla' Meets New-School Relevance

 by Brett Parker

You really do let out a gleeful squeal the first time you see him.  The camera pans up over a skyscraper-sized reptilian body obscured by thunderous shadows while an unholy chorus wails over the soundtrack.  Once we reach the top of this scary sight, lightning strikes and we’re able to make out that the creature is Godzilla himself, and man oh man, is he ready to get down to business.  We’re certainly not talking about the confused-looking iguana from Roland Emmerich’s botched 1998 version, but the bad-ass, guy-in-a-rubber-suit mystique of Japanese fever dreams.  That demonic grin and ear-shattering roar we’ve come to maniacally cherish are both fully intact and you smile knowing that old-school monster ferociousness is ready to be served.

The success of Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla is based on the realization that we’ve really missed the “classical” big guy kicking the crap out of scaly foes while turning the world into his own sandbox of destruction.  It’s just too bad those pesky humans keep getting in the way of the camera.  The time-honored tradition of melodramatic humans being subjected to Godzilla’s wrath while themes of man-abusing-nature get tossed around are fully honored, all while being basked in the current trend of making everything gritty and gloomy.  While there isn’t too much here my inner-intellectual can really complain about, my inner-10-year-old really wishes the humans could just sit down so he could enjoy all the monster ass-kicking in peace.  Yet a popcorn thrill ride that satisfies both the college professor and kindergartner inside you is pretty much the definition of solid Hollywood filmmaking these days, so I should probably just calm down.  

The film opens as all Godzilla movies do, with mortified scientists scrambling around trying to warn everybody about alarming nuclear activity that appears to be harboring something gigantic and abnormal.  A nuclear expert named Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) is obsessed with searching a quarantined plant in Japan for answers to a mysterious incident that killed his wife, Sandra (Juliette Binoche).  His naval officer son, Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), tries to convince him to let it go, but Joe is convinced that something fishy is still going on within the site.  His suspicions turn out to be right, for scientists are harboring a giant monster in hibernation out of the public eye.  Before Joe can tell the world, haywire ensues and a colossal winged monster emerges from the site and goes off in search of what is believed to be another MUTO (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism) out in the world.

Government officials ponder how they can possibly contain and defeat two gargantuan mutant creatures intent on pure destruction.  They quickly realize that their only hope may be yet another oversized animal-beast that’s been kept hidden in secret for many years.  He’s been hiding out in the ocean for decades and has frantically been kept under-wraps by big government until the emergence of these new creatures cause him to leap into action.  They call him “Godzilla” and he sets out to directly confront the other two monsters wreaking havoc across the globe.  The humans scatter about and scheme desperately to protect themselves, for they know that when all these giant beasts clash with each other, they’ll lay a smack-down on the planet that has never been seen before in history.  

While the creatures in Godzilla are evoked with the latest in state-of-the-art CGI, their movements and behavior directly copy the hokey brawling so prominent at the dawn of this film series, and that turns out to be a popcorn blessing.  Edwards wonderfully marries the camera and effects to create alluring imagery (my favorite being a barely-conscious Ford being lured away from a nuclear blast by helicopter), but there’s no denying how the creatures are mimicking the cheesy monster movie mayhem of cinematic yesteryear.  While their movements are more agile, and Seamus McGarvey’s dark and grayish cinematography helps mask the silliness, these mutant wrestling matches deliver the jolly goods you’ve always treasured within these movies.  Godzilla’s climactic “finishing move” had me cheering out loud in the theater.

But it can’t just all be reptilian rumbles, for a Godzilla movie isn’t truly a Godzilla movie without worrisome humans around to remind us that this is all a cautionary warning about nature.  It’s a sad testament to man’s constant disrespect towards nature that a Godzilla picture has proven to be such an enduring formula, for this movie covers every ritualistic beat of the tradition--frantic scientists, booming musical score, epic metropolitan destruction---and feels as relevant today as it did in the 50’s.  Online conspiracy theorists are quick to remind us how government duplicity, incompetence, and arrogance is causing deep repercussions for our planet’s well-being and these modern day anxieties fit in perfectly with these creature-feature formalities.  Perhaps my  slight annoyance with panicky humans getting in the way of monster brutality provides the shrewdest critique of our modern world yet, for we all whine and moan about our right to live when eventually we’ll have to just get the hell out of nature’s way and let it play out the exact way it wants to.  

The actors on display prove dedicated to the stern, traumatized moods the tone demands of them, although you do find yourself wishing more silliness would creep into the membrane.  Most impressive of all is Bryan Cranston who damn near wrings out all the thespian anguish he can to deliver the most epically concerned of all concerned scientists.  The gifted Aaron Taylor-Johnson gives us a brooding and focused action figure, making you sort of yearn for the days when a quick-witted charmer was standard-issue in these kinds of proceedings.  Part of me thinks having Channing Tatum here in his 21 Jump Street glory would not only be a blast but speak bundles about how modern-day males would handle a global catastrophe.  It’s always nice to see Sally Hawkins and Elizabeth Olsen, but their roles are so beneath their skill sets that I wonder if they were secretly offended by the script.  Meanwhile, Ken Watanabe seems to enjoy his simple scientist role, probably because it’s a celebrated tradition in his country the way American actors play lawyers.  Call me crazy, but I always thought Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime would’ve been the ideal human to place in a Godzilla movie.  The most over-the-top human of all sharing the screen with the most over-the-top creature of all would’ve been such a bewildering hunk of Hollywood cheese that I’m genuinely surprised a 90’s studio head never concocted it.

With Godzilla and his debut film Monsters, it’s apparent that Edwards wants to explore a realistic spacial relationship between humans and giant creatures, and it’s a testament to his ideals that this is probably the closest to a “realistic” Godzilla flick we’ve ever gotten (maybe this is strongly felt cause it makes the grand implausibility of the 1998 Roland Emmerich version eat serious dust).  Yet somehow I still prefer Pacific Rim, the cheerful giant monster epic which built its world around an infectious Star Wars-like mythology and still ended up saying tons about nature and nationalism anyways.  The irony here is that for all the film’s dreary warnings about the crippling forces of nature, it dishes out a happy Hollywood ending filled with as much triumphant idealism as Top Gun.  As Godzilla takes his victorious final march out to sea, the film’s final message appears to be that no matter what happens, nature will come down on our side and everything is gonna turn out alright in the end.  It’s a smirking ending filled with cockeyed assuredness, the very thing the entire movie spent warning us about.