So I saw Godzilla today.

I know that, since this is a Hollywood Movie, I shouldn’t really be thinking too much about it. But I’m still scratching my head, so I figured I’d say some things. It’s gonna be long and with a lot of background, so you might want to scroll down if you want to get to what I’d call my review of the new movie. But before I start, lemme just say that I enjoyed “Godzilla (2014)” and was entertained throughout the two or so hours it was on the screen. It was a well-made scifi(?) thriller.

PREAMBLE: SCIFI(?) THRILLERS

Science Fiction, as a thing separated from fantasy (or “science fantasy” like Star Wars) is something that’s very old, but there have always been two main schools of thought. On one hand, you have the fear of the unknown. The idea that we can uncover dangerous things as science marches forward. War of the Worlds, In the Mountains of Madness, any Michael Crichton book.

On the other hand, you have the stories where scientific ideas create a backdrop for a bigger range of human success or failures. Foundation, 2001, Star Trek.

The difference can be described as that between 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (which was basically proto-Godzilla)

These are stories for different audiences. There’s a reason why school copies of Jules Verne novels are often abridged, and why Star Trek isn’t a thing on TV anymore, and why Animal Planet now has stuff about bigfoot.

The slew of shitty B-movies in the 50’s and 60’s should clearly demonstrate where the money was. Attack of the big fuckin spider, the big fuckin ant, the big fuckin woman, the horde of goddamn mutated shrews. It was the cold war, and the world was experimenting with nuclear power and weapons, and it was our god-given duty as Americans to defend ourselves from whatever asshole monster was crawling out of research facilities and nuclear waste dumps on any given day of the week. People were afraid of the incredible power the two leading countries held, and people loved seeing the hypothetical unraveling of that power and knowing that a 25-38 year old American hero would be there to save the day from the bad thing. Godzilla was born from the same fear mindset, the same need to see humans conquer that fear, but I’ll get to that in a second.

What I think happened was, you had young people surrounded by this kind of thrill from scientific advancement and the big dangerous unknown, which got kids to be curious and educated and eventually more interested in stuff like Star Trek; they eventually had kids and exposed them to the things that excited their imagination. These kids, though, weren’t necessarily science-minded, they were just as likely to get pumped about regular Hollywood movies as anyone else. This is why any 40 or 50 year old uneducated person has still seen Star Wars and probably watched TNG for a while when it was new.

I promise this is about Godzilla, so bear with me. Continue this trend for a couple more generations, get to the early 2000’s where the nerds are turning off their TVs and staying on the internet, and you have a situation where there isn’t a huge market for the two different types of scifi movies. To produce the kind of over the top visuals that modern information-choked COD-playing viewers need, you need to make something that appeals to as many people as possible, to make millions on the first day at the box office. What’s come from that are movies that try to build a solid scientifically-informed backdrop around a conflict powered by that fear of what science can create. Usually, what you have is a failure to blend those ideas, hidden behind a series of explosions. Look at Star Trek: Into Darkness, Elysium, fuckin’ Transformers. They are movies that are marketed to people who are fans of an older property or of high-brow concepts, but their substance is that of run-of-the-mill Hollywood stuff with over-the-top action that never would be interested in the older property or have the care for the high-brow concepts.

Godzilla has the same thing going on. It is basically a retelling of the original Godzilla story told in a more scientific-sounding way. Except, the thing about these movies being a blend of two ideas is that the audience is still two different groups of people. And the point of these movies is to speak to both of those audiences. Sometimes, like with Jurassic Park, it does. But Godzilla does not work. It’s just another movie.

THE THING GOING ON IN THE ORIGINAL GODZILLA

It’s 1954, the world is in the middle of a nuclear arms race, and a lot of movies are about that. This movie came out a year ago about a giant dinosaur freed from icy hibernation by nuclear tests. The scientist at the beginning says “What the cumulative effects of all these atomic explosions and tests will be, only time will tell!” and Lee Van Cleef at the end rides a fucking roller coaster to get high enough to heroically shoot the Radioactive Isotope Thing into the Beast’s neck. We did science, found something nasty, and killed it. The Beast is something external and alien, and humanity triumphs over it.

But amid the arms race between America and Russia, the most important perspective was that of Japan. Everyone around at the time still remembered the nuclear attacks, and earlier in 1954 some fishermen got fried by a miscalculation during one of those American nuclear tests. Japan already knew what the culmination of those tests were, and to them, nuclear armament wasn’t a new and dangerous frontier of science. It was a fuckup.

Japanese filmmakers wanted to create a movie with the same visual style as The Beast (everyone around at the time knew the famous scene of it attacking the lighthouse) but for that monster to be a truer metaphor for the results of All Those Tests.

Godzilla was a dinosaur brought back to life by nuclear explosions and mutated by radiation. A creature so ancient that, just to get his point across, he left trilobites in his footprints. He was a walking holocaust, and turned Tokyo into a burning wasteland. The destruction he wrought was slow and deliberate. A paleontologist wanted to study him, but to the people in his path, he wasn’t just a big dinosaur looking for prey, he was an angry god bringing fated ruin. But most importantly, as a result of – and a metaphor for – nuclear attacks, that made him a fuckup. Our fuckup. And like Frankenstein’s monster, it’s a part of us, and we have to be responsible for it. There’s no true fanfare for the great American hero. When Godzilla is killed in the water by a bomb that turns oxygen into a slurry of corrosive death, the mood is somber, as the scientist is forced to kill the thing he just wanted to understand. Like Kong or Gwangi, there is sympathy.

The idea of Godzilla being “ours” is what lead to him being perceived as the lesser of two evils as he was pitted against other monsters, or even as a hero in his alliances with Mothra, Anguirus, and Jet Jaguar, policing the delinquent baddies of Monster Island.

THE THING GOING ON IN THIS GODZILLA

The first act of the plot basically goes like this:

Bryan Cranston works at a power plant in Japan, where he keeps getting weird readings that he’s worried about. He sends his wife deep down in the facility to investigate and round people up so he can have a meeting about it later. Something happens that causes the place to implode, Cranston’s wife dies, he’s evacuated, the area around his home is considered an irradiated quarantine zone, and he has to raise his son alone. Years later, his son is in the navy, has his own kid, and has to go deal with his dad who is now a weird conspiracy theorist who gets in trouble trying to break into the q-zone and get some data from his old house to uncover the truth about what happened. There’s a lot of super high-brow concepts thrown around like “Echolocation”. The kid has to go back to Japan and bail his dad out but Cranston talks him into sneaking in one last time. They realize nothing is irradiated. They get the data, the military shows up as soon as they step outside, and they are brought to a huge facility on the ruins of the old power plant for questioning, where theres a giant spooky glowing egg thing being studied. Cranston helps the scientists (let by Ken Watanabe) realize that the egg thing is gonna cause another disaster, but just as they try to kill it, the Cloverfield Monster comes out, but it has wings this time so they call it something else, Muto I think. It causes all of this devastation, stomping around fucking everything up and mortally wounding Cranston, while his kid is in the back of a police van or something, and flies off into the night.

Watanabe recruits the kid into helping him figure out what to do about Muto, and mentions that he’s the head of this organization that studies something called Godzilla.

RED FLAG NUMBER ONE: WAIT, THAT EGG WASN’T GODZILLA?

This is a movie billed as the same kind of thing as the new Planet of the Apes movies, or Marvel movies. A retelling of an origin story. What this movie tells you, after almost an hour of buildup, is that what you were sitting around watching unfold had nothing to do with Godzilla. We’ve had movies where the badguy isn’t shown in the marketing, like Iron Man 3 (spoilers! that dude wasnt the Mandarin!) but in the case of that movie, the misdirection is part of the plot. In this case, it’s just blue balls. And, an hour in, when they finally have Godzilla rise up out of the ocean to fight Muto in the Philippines, you barely get a look at him.

So what’s Godzilla, and where’s he been all this time? Well, according to Watanabe-san, he’s just this thing that’s always been around, and All Those Tests back in the 50’s were an attempt to KILL Godzilla, not the catalyst of his resurrection. He cuts right to the chase and says he’s a god of nature that enforces balance. Okay. So this isn’t a Godzilla origin movie after all. In fact, he has none.

RED FLAG NUMBER TWO: GODZILLA IS JUST KIND OF THIS THING

I like it when the marketing lies. But usually, in those cases, I want the movie to ALSO lie. There’s no tricks being played on the audience here. What you see is what you get, and you won’t get any explanation for Godzilla. Not even the people in the movie really know what to make of him, and most people just kind of watch him walk around for a while before shooting at him. Godzilla never purposefully attacks anyone other than the two Mutos, whose goal is basically to consume a bunch of radioactive shit and make babies. There’s even a scene near the end where he gazes thoughtfully at Cranston’s kid before going to sleep. Watanabe says constantly “he’s here to restore balance, let him kill the bug monsters” so if that’s his deal then it certainly fits his behavior. But let’s look at those two monsters for a minute. Watanabe describes a time on ancient earth where the earth was much more radioactive than today (partially true) and giant creatures that evolved to feed on the radiation. They go around finding nuclear missiles and eating them, and the big plan is to lure them with more nukes and then blow the shit out of them. They have an animal motivation and more or less realistic behavior, if you ignore the fact that there weren’t nuclear missiles for them to eat 100 million years ago, so the kind of predatory behavior wouldn’t make sense compared to something that just gathers a lot of sunlight or something. So then, is Godzilla THEIR predator? Watanabe thinks he is, but then you see that he doesn’t eat them afterwards, or do anything really other than kill them and leave. So, that Godzilla guy, what’s his deal?

GODZILLA HAS NO DISCERNIBLE MOTIVATION

Sometimes he’s just a pissed off mutated lizard destroying shit in his path, sometimes he’s a hero who wants to kick Gigan out of his territory, and in the shitty 1998 movie he was trying to eat a lot of fish, but you always had an idea of why Godzilla does what he’s doing. I cannot for the life of me figure out why Godzilla was doing anything in this movie. He wasn’t a predator, because he didn’t eat the Mutos. He wasn’t angry or threatened, because he didnt attack anything else other than out of self defense. He even deliberately avoided the aircraft carrier Watanabe was on. What a nice guy! But why is he nice? Does he care about humanity? Does he hate the bug guys? If the bug things evolved naturally, why is Godzilla tasked by nature to “restore the balance” by attacking two of them (when by the amount of eggs there used to be thousands) rather than attacking humanity, who objectively would have fucked up more ecosystems than two bugs that would just have been eating rocks or something originally. Watanabe would have you believe that Godzilla is literally a god of nature enacting justice, but the details don’t really add up.

When you take away his origin story, his motivations, and make him this passive force of nature that is benevolent to humans for no reason, it’s a good way to kill a metaphor.

CARING ABOUT PEOPLE IN MOVIES NOT ABOUT PEOPLE

Remember Jurassic Park? Transformers? How about Super 8?

The thing about those movies is that you’re expected to give a shit about the motivations and struggles of the humans pitted against some big monster or series of explosions. Some movies have more success than others. I liked Dr. Malcom dealing with his kid in The Lost World, and the banter of the kids in Super 8, but the main character of the Transformers movies is infamous. The people in those movies were not funny, inspiring, or anything other than a waste of time, when people paid to see Optimus Prime.

The thing about the serial Godzilla movies before is that you are NEVER expected to really care about the people in it beyond the way you would for cartoon characters. All you have to do is root for them as they get through their weird drama, work to save themselves from Destroyah and set up a situation where Godzilla can take him out.

The only character in this movie with any dimension is Cranston, and he dies pretty quick, and you could probably just attribute it to him being an amazing actor. I didn’t care about Cranston’s Kid or Cranston’s Kid’s Family. I didn’t care about Watanabe. And that’s all I can really remember who had a name. So of course people are going to be bitter that you get maybe 20 minutes of footage with Godzilla in it and a bunch of boring human drama in a movie that has already told them they aren’t getting what they paid for.

A WORD ON CINEMATOGRAPHY, ICONOGRAPHY, AND “THE LAST 20 MINUTES”

A good movie is going to have unforgettable scenes. Tuco shooting from the tub, Pennywise in the gutter, the ape-men dancing around the Monolith. Did this movie have any?

What comes to mind is the scene from the trailer. Cranston’s kid jumps out of a plane, they are all falling into this hellstorm of what was once California as the same Requiem song from 2001 plays. What made that scene work was the song. But can you call it original when the song already has pop culture ties to another movie? And can you call it good when that scene was clearly, in true Hollywood fashion, made for a trailer? The scene I thought was the best was actually when Godzilla first appears and they shoot the flares up to illuminate him, and it’s all done in one shot, even though they do the dirty trick of pulling the camera away when you want to see him.

A good giant monster movie is going to have clever fight scenes. Everyone is gonna remember when Mechagodzilla ripped Anguirus’s jaw off, and when Godzilla later magnetized himself on a bunch of power lines to draw Mechagodzilla toward him and kick his ass.

On the subject of old Godzilla stuff, what always stood out to me was the sound. Every monster had a distinctive noise. In this movie, I guess as a way of making them more realistic, all of the monster sound like creaky wooden boats. But, in a decision i thought was UNrealistic, all of the fight scenes are strangely muffled. The sound that stood out to me was the strange piano when Godzilla appeared over Japantown.

But when I say fight scenes, I mean, fight scene. The final twenty minutes of the film. The biggest infamy of Godzilla (2014 Film) is that the monsters don’t clearly fight until almost the end where Cranston’s Kid parachutes into hellstorm SF. It’s almost like the movie is assuming you already know what it looks like and don’t care.

But, does Godzilla pull off some amazing thing like he did with Mechagodzilla? Not really…he gets thrown around actually, until Cranston’s kid torches the eggs to distract the bug guys. Then Godzilla gets up and we finally see the Atomic Breath, exactly twice, but both times, I clenched my fists and said YES! Godzilla holding the female Muto’s mouth open and laser beaming her insides was satisfying enough to make the whole thing worth it.

LINGERING QUESTION: WHO IS THIS MOVIE MARKETED FOR?

Are average moviegoers going to care about this movie? Theres enough explosions that I’d say probably. But are they going to remember it? The cinematography wasn’t original enough to burn into my mind, and the humans weren’t engaging, so I’d say no.

Are Godzilla fans going to care about this movie? It doesn’t really focus on Godzilla or anything about him that made him Godzilla, so no, absolutely not.

This is just another scifi movie trying to appeal to two groups of people and not really speaking to either. Another great example is Star Trek: Into Darkness. It’s an entertaining couple of hours, but most people aren’t gonna get most of the references, and actual fans will see that the references basically have no meaning. Godzilla has no meaning. The people have no meaning. The soul is gone.

FINAL WORD

Go buy Pacific Rim instead.