Godzilla films are special to me. I saw my first one 36 years ago, Godzilla Vs The Sea Monster, on UHF56 out of Boston, one Saturday morning on Creature Double Feature. Since that day Godzilla has inhabited a significant portion of my fandom. I have been waiting since that day to see just what Hollywood could really do with the big guy, and I will say that Gareth Edwards and the cast and crew of Godzilla have brought something to the table that reaches my expectations in some ways, and falls short in others.
I'll start with what bothered me the most; I don't understand the choices made with the human side of this film.
Why kill Joe? It means literally nothing to Ford, and nothing to the audience. It doesn't imbue Ford with any emotion at all, not anger, not sadness, nothing. "Oh well, back to San Fran, I guess."
The movies spent 30 minutes connecting the audience to Joe, investing in Joe's needs, wants and reasons, and then we're dumped off on Ford, the human plank. I mean, the film starts with Joe essentially damning his own wife to a horrible death, and his redemption comes through having a couple data discs in a bag? Joe should have been given the opportunity to redeem his years of madness, allowed to move past "I'm right!" into "I can help!" That is called a character arc.
By removing Joe from the film, it takes away the only human foundation the film has built to that point, and it collapses.
How awesome would it have been to see Joe and Serizawa together as the Voice Of Science, with Ford on the inside with the ear of the military? Except the military won't listen, until the end, when they're all proven to be right. That would have been THREE character arcs!
But, I guess we shouldn't expect Gareth to understand that, considering his first film is really nothing more than an A to B road trip with monsters hanging around the joint. Yes, a gorgeously put together, excellently presented road trip, but nothing more. We have no right to expect anything more this time around, I guess.
And just what the hell is up with the Japanese kid on the monorail? Is this meant to show us how heroic Ford is? Or maybe how good he is at catching things? It doesn't raise the stakes, it doesn't add drama and it means nothing to the narrative. The whole sequence is an air bubble in a chocolate bar.
Amazingly, as bad as the choices made by the filmmakers are in regards to the human element, they certainly nailed the monsters.
The MUTOs are easily the greatest new addition to the menagerie of Godzilla foes in 40 years. I had seen the toy designs a few weeks ago, and I wasn't really impressed, and then the first couple shots of Wing Muto really do resemble the Cloverfield creature. That said, once I got a good look at them, the design came into its own and suddenly I need those unimpressive toys to go next to all my Bandai vinyl kaiju.
The way the MUTOs behave is even more of a surprise. These aren't mindless, city-smashing monsters, no supernatural forces at work, no hidden aliens pulling the strings, these are genuine animals. They aren't doing anything but swimming, eating and making little MUTOs, to paraphrase another film about a giant monstrous animal. This is so refreshing, and it makes the MUTOs feel real, and dangerous.
Of course, the real star of the show is Godzilla. I've read a lot lately about how this is a return to his roots, where he is scary again, and this isn't the good-guy-Godzilla of the 1970's. Really? That isn't what I saw.
"But Apex, he kills all those people with the tsunami and let us not forget the Golden Gate Bridge!" To that I will simply point at Gamera, and the collateral damage and death he causes throughout his films and yet remains "friend to all children."
If you look closely, in this film Godzilla doesn't implicitly attack anyone or anything but the MUTOs. He is one-minded in his quest to destroy them. He's not flaming entire divisions of military personel, or pushing landmarks over, or laying waste to city centers. For crying out loud, he swims UNDER the aircraft carrier and yet seems to swim fins up everywhere else! He gets in, gets it done, and gets out. At the end he looks directly at Serizawa (Tell your sister you were right...) and swims away.
This is not a villain. This is not a return to the nuclear allegory of 1954, and I don't care. He's AWESOME, in the original, biblical sense of the word. He is the check and balance, the sword of mother nature, and the lesson learned here is that we better figure out what the hell we're doing, because mother nature could point that sword at us!
The design is great, but is also very old. This isn't revolution, rather evolution, and that may have been the smartest choice the filmmakers made for the entire film.
Except the feet. Those f*cking feet. What were they thinking? Thank God we only see them once and when we see them we don't see the rest of him. Don't know what I'm on about? Go look at the toys. You'll see what I mean.
It may sound like I didn't enjoy this film, but in truth I loved it. I've seen it twice so far, and I'll see it a couple more times before it leaves the cinemas. As a Blockbuster Summer Movie it has it's problems, and as a fanboy of these films I was always going to bitch about them, but as an entry into this franchise, as a Godzilla Film, it's fantastic.
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