GODZILLA: Big Bad Ballet

Director: Gareth Edwards
Writers: Max Borenstein and Dave Callaham
Cast: Bryan Cranston, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ken Watanabe, Elizabeth Olsen, Sally Hawkins
Runtime: 123 mins.
2014

I am not especially familiar with the Godzilla mythos.  Before this film, the only Godzilla movie I'd had the misfortune to see was the 1998 Roland Emmerich version, starring a big CGI iguana and featuring the deft tagline: "Size Does Matter".  The bar was set low.

For many others, however, the bar was rather high.  Godzilla is a titanic figure in Japanese pop culture, and at this point has to be considered a piece of Americana as well.  People have been craving a quality Hollywood treatment of the creature for years, one that isn't hampered by a special effects capacity that doesn't surpass "man in a rubber suit," and one that does not resemble 1998's Godzilla in any way, shape, or form.

This is what they've been waiting for.

I don't see much point in mincing words here, or prolonging this review unnecessarily--Godzilla succeeds because its action is big, dark, engaging, smart, and beautiful.  Gareth Edwards can shoot the hell out of destruction, but he's savvy enough not to play his cards too early.  What that means is the first ninety or so minutes of this film are kind of chunky and dull at spots (we'll get to that later), but the last half hour more than makes up for it with a massive dance of destruction.

I don't use the term "dance" lightly.  The cinematography and composition of the action shots struck me as almost balletic.  This isn't Transformers-style explosion porn.  This isn't the directionless disorientation of Cloverfield.  It's not even Man of Steel's unfeeling wanton destruction.  The furthest thing from it.  When a building is demolished in Godzilla, you feel it in your bones.  It inspires horror, and awe.  We cringe at the deaths of bystanders who get less than a second of screentime, whereas the aforementioned Man of Steel managed to make us absolutely apathetic to the rubble-centric plight of Perry White and whatever other bland side characters were in his entourage at the time.

This scene is remarkable for how little I cared.

The difference between the two movies doesn't really have to do with special effects or tone.  They were both trying to be dark and spectacular while still vaguely orienting themselves towards realism.  The difference is all in the cinematography and how engaging Godzilla's action beats manage to be.  You don't just get money shot after money shot of wreckage thrown in your face.  You get a strange dark figure emerging from the misty sky--a man in a parachute, you discern--just as the camera pans to a building that gets blasted with his jet.  You get shots of Godzilla weaving between and beneath enormous battleships, tiny people rocked about by the ensuing wave, running across the boat to try to catch another glimpse of the creature.  You get an awe-inspiring skydiving sequence amongst red smoke and stormclouds, soldiers falling straight into Lovecraftian nightmare imagery.  Shots pan, hold, tension rises.  Objects carom into the frame in a majestic orchestration of chaos.  Subtle little set-ups/pay-offs pervade this film, and this sort of thing is the lifeblood of strong, meaningful action.  Director Gareth Edwards--who began his career as a visual effects specialist before his breakthrough film Monsters a few years back--crafts his shots for maximum effectiveness.  Backed by Alexandre Desplat's tingling score, and an incredible overpowering sound design, the action comes together like a Swiss watch.  It works.  It grips you, and it haunts.

That is why, in my estimation, this film is a rousing and memorable success.  The rest of the movie?  Not that great.  The characters are dead weight, and they bog down the early parts that are not so action-oriented.  Bryan Cranston is the highlight in an otherwise uninspiring cast, and his role is mercilessly slight.  Our protagonist, Ford Brody, is played by a disappointingly wooden Aaron Taylor-Johnson.  Although the movie does a pretty decent job of giving his character purpose while still maintaining the necessary sense of powerlessness in the face of nature, the below-mediocre boilerplate dialogue certainly does nothing to help him out.  Same goes for the rest of the cast, who give fine performances I guess, but they just aren't given anything to do.  Elizabeth Olsen snags the choice role of attractive-young-wife-who-gets-to-wait-around-for-her-husband-and-cry-about-it.  Even big name Ken Watanabe is reduced to wandering around the film in a daze, usually with his mouth slightly open, as if he has taken a dump and it is perpetually in his pants.  I kid, but it's actually kind of incredible--and entertaining--how little this character emotes.  He's supposed to be the expert on all this, and everyone around him has to coax him into saying anything about what's going on.  The one nice thing I will say about the script is that Watanabe's character--Dr. Ishiro Serizawa--provides an interesting thematic angle to a USA-centric film.  Whereas the military officers are all about accumulation of force and exploring all possible options in a typically Western mentality (nuke that sucker!), Dr. Serizawa provides a more nuanced Eastern perspective on the whole ordeal, culminating in his chilling line:

"Let them fight."

Oh yeah, Godzilla isn't the only monster in this movie.  Spoiler alert.

Despite all that character mediocrity, the core of the film remains intact.  In fact, compared to a solid monster flick like Pacific Rim, which had (marginally) more intriguing and fleshed-out characters, Godzilla manages to be a lot more compelling.  How is that?  Aren't characters in conflict the central tenet of strong storytelling, and shouldn't Godzilla's lame duck characters detract from the smashy smashy?  The glorious result is that they don't, really--you just sort of sit through their scenes and wait for the good stuff.  Maybe that's because the real characters in this film are Godzilla, his opponents, and the city of San Francisco.  And that is a conflict well worth watching in this spectacular representation of everyone's favorite gigantic thing.

3.5 / 5  BLOBS