Godzilla

Gareth Edwards – 2014 – USA

  

Gareth Edwards does the impossible, it seems: 1) making a satisfying modern monster epic; 2) making a loving, knowledgeable tribute to Toho’s kaiju movies of yesteryear – (which were my bread and butter as a little kid); and 3) producing an almost scene-for-scene rejoinder and dismissal of Roland Emmerich’s justifiably despised 1998 Godzilla, which is so hated that it turned everyone off to wanting another Godzilla movie for a generation.  Everything that Emmerich did so sloppily – from annoying characters to cheesy special effects to the unrecognizable design of Godzilla himself – Edwards gets right.  This is Toho’s (and its resident auteur Ishiro Honda’s) Godzilla, not an Americanized re-imagining designed to fool audiences with no awareness of the original Godzilla (1954) and its many sequels.  The film correctly emulates the pace and format of the old films, (which certainly may have been the result of limited budgets at the time); by which I mean that about half the film goes by before we see Godzilla.  It’s all about the build-up; scientists concerned about strange seismic readings, world governments wrangling over what to do, the tsunami-inducing swells originating far out to sea.  It all means that Godzilla is coming!  As he also demonstrated in his fine film Monsters (2010), Edwards – unlike everyone else – seems to get that this kind of film isn’t by definition dependent on the loudness of explosions and weapons and crashing buildings.  What it’s about is pure awe at the immensity of a creature like Godzilla and the havoc he can wreak.  Several times, the soundtrack of roars and aircraft dies down and is replaced with abstract mood music, augmenting the characters’ feelings of being in the eye of a storm, potentially on the verge of being crushed and yet too awestruck to start running.  Godzilla isn’t just rampaging mindlessly this time around; he has a purpose; to dispose of two equally gargantuan monsters woken up (and fed) by nuclear radiation.  These two “MUTO’s” – (that’s Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms, FYI) – aren’t treated as villainous either; they’re simply animals dropped into the wrong time and place and trying to survive.  There is empathy for the monsters that Edwards is careful to create and that goes all the way back to the crucial ingredients of King Kong (1933).  In that film, and in all the best monster films since, the innocent, childlike impulse of the sympathetic audience is to quietly root for the misunderstood creatures even though they may be trampling millions of their fellow human beings.  Edwards achieves this even more effectively than Guillermo del Toro did in Pacific Rim (2013), which I previously thought was going to be the best kaiju-related movie for a long time.