Godzilla
Director: Gareth
Edwards
Stars: Aaron
Tayler-Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen, Bryan Cranston
I’m not normally one for creature features, and that still
holds fairly true after watching this new Godzilla
flick. Gareth Edwards’ film follows the story of Ford Brody (Tayler-Johnson), a
U.S. Navy soldier and explosive ordnance disposal specialist. As soon as he
returns to his family after a tour of duty, he is immediately called to Japan
to bail his crackpot nuclear engineer dad (Cranston) out of jail. Once the two
are reunited, they search an abandoned nuclear power plant where they uncover a
massive operation doing research on something
(hint: it’s probably a monster). Here’s the plot twist: it IS a monster, and as
soon as that one appears, two more come out of the woodwork. They fly, they
swim, they fight. BOOM. Godzilla movie.
The acting in Godzilla
is spot on, and the casting is superb. Going into this movie, however, a friend
of mine told me to watch out for all the strong female characters in the film.
As the credits rolled, I couldn’t find a single
strong female character at all—except maybe the one female monster that
Godzilla fights. Other than that, the women in this movie appear to be quite
useless: Dr. Serizawa (Watanabe) has a female research assistant whose role is
absolutely pointless, and she only wanders in his wake to look shocked,
apparently. I was really hoping that Ford’s wife, Elle, was going to pick up
the slack in this department, but she was incredibly disappointing. Her only
purpose throughout the film was to worry and cry about Ford while not doing
anything herself. Again, great acting and great casting, but it might have been
the fault of the writing on this one.
Speaking of writing flaws, let’s talk about the military’s
plan to lure out and kill the monsters. It’s almost halfway through the movie
when we discover that Godzilla and his two monstrous adversaries feed off of
radiation, whether it comes from sapping energy from a nuclear power plant or
from guzzling barrels of radioactive waste. The baddie-monsters are on top of
any nuclear power source like flies on a gut wagon, so what’s the military’s
response? “Well, we’ve got all these nukes just sitting around…” One guy
exclaimed that the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan near the end of WWII were
“just firecrackers” compared to the nukes we have now, explicitly noting that
nuclear weapons today aren’t measured in kilotons
anymore, but megatons. So…let me get
this straight. The monsters nom-nom on radiation, such as, oh, I don’t know, a bunch of nuclear weapons…and you want
to use nuclear weapons against them. Why not just put the world’s nuclear
arsenal out on a table with some twenty foot tall candles and let the baddies
have a nice romantic dinner with a main course of radiation? This seems like a
major plot hole.
The real solution to this mess was suggested by Dr. Serizawa
early on: humans, just sit down, shut up, and let the grown-ups handle this
(and by grown-ups, I mean the 100’ tall radiation monsters). Serizawa says that
we should just let Godzilla take care of the other monsters and get the hell
out of the way, which is basically what works.
As Godzilla goes on the hunt to restore balance to the world by killing the
other monsters, the Navy follows Godzilla as he swims the breadth of the
Pacific Ocean—watching all those battleships and destroyers form up on the
massive radiation-fueled reptile gave me flashbacks to the old Weekly World
News tabloids where Bat-Boy joined the war on terror. Where the old Godzilla
movies used the beast as a warning against the destructive power of nuclear
energy and nuclear armament, this new Godzilla
flick promotes the idea of human hubris: throughout the movie, humans are
scurrying around making plans (and spectacularly
failing at those plans) when the only thing that can stop a monster is another monster.
Thinking of the structure of the movie, the first two-thirds
of the movie were rather dull, and the plot only picked up when the monsters
started going at each other in the last chunk of the film. Again, the lack of
strong female characters was incredibly disappointing, especially because the
beginning two-thirds of the movie were all character-driven with human
characters. By having a few more interesting characters, it could have been a
much better movie. Another review I glanced at said that there wasn’t much
action in this movie for being labeled as an action movie, and I wholeheartedly
agree.
If a Godzilla II
were to come out, would I go see it? Maybe, maybe not. Godzilla wasn’t a bad movie, by any stretch of the imagination, and
the special effects alone were worth paying for the ticket. I even watched this
movie in 3D, and that’s something I rarely do, since most 3D movies throw
things at the audience, and that seems rather gimmicky to me. In the case of Godzilla, however, the 3D felt very
natural—it never once pulled my attention away from the story with a stupid
shot of something flying at my face. Overall, Godzilla was okay, but I don’t think I’ll be rushing to buy a copy
of it later down the road.
No comments:
Post a Comment