Godzilla

The screenplay builds on the clash of civilization with nature and is clearly based on the assumption that humanity is a relic of the past. How else can you explain that the characters are stenciled, sometimes speak like they have ingested psychotropic substances, and have no meaningful dramatic arcs? Only the most shabby vicissitudes of all remain - dad has to find his family. The rest is quickly zipped into bags and dismissed by a few approximate sentences. There is no realism, deeper psychology and provocative work with familiar motives (perhaps only death / generally serious stylization are unusually frequent guests here). The second covert (apparently) misanthropic element is the actions of human command, which he plans with the ingenuity of the Stone Age, and if anyone sees a deeper meaning in his actions, please let me know, preferably in writing and with drawings. So what we have left is Godzilla vs. MUTO + an ant human perspective, which can fragment the monster clash, cover it in time or inadvertently see it in all its gigantic majesty. People are simply not here to act and be interesting in and of themselves, but to be able to watch, and the film can be saturated with their views. Here, Gareth Edwards and his crew demonstrate that sometimes it is simply enough to supply nutritious food for the eyes and ears, and the effect still appears in the middle of a dysfunctional human story. Intoxicated by the scale of the monster, its clever aestheticization and framing in photogenic compositions is the meaning of Godzilla as a whole, which is slower and more majestic than usual. Similar to a couple of well-timed scenes and the old school thunder of Alexandre Desplat in the orchestra pit. The monsters from the depths have exactly the ballbusting vibration I expected from Pacific Rim. I finally get it in edible form a year later. We can speculate whether next year someone will deliver what was expected of Godzilla for a change. [75%] (05/13/2014)

It couldn't have gone better and Edwards delivered what he promised. He artfully walks the line between paying homage to his beloved Spielberg (so that, like Spielberg in Jaws, he entices us with mere hints for much of the runtime) and paying homage to all 29 of Toho's giant lizard movies and the four Godzilla generations that began in 1954 and closed up shop with great aplomb in 2004. Especially with the last two – the alternate reality series and the following new generation series – the new Godzilla has a lot of similarities in characters and narrative style. I laugh at some of the criticisms of the wise-cracking teens here, who at most have seen Emmerich’s movie and marvel (quite rightly, of course) that Godzilla shoots flames, swallows nukes and has legs like an elephant; that’s how they show their ignorance. I applaud Edwards for doing the almost impossible – finding a balance between classic Hollywood and the Japanese poetics of the Godzilla franchise, where everything was, is and hopefully will be possible. PS: The actors here, as with the Japanese originals, are essentially redundant, and the resolution of their family ties is also no different from their Japanese brethren, so it's pointless to fret over it. (05/15/2014)

SPOILERS AHEAD. Godzilla is like playing a video game made up exclusively of cutscenes. The characters are there more or less only so that through their eyes we can marvel at the monsters, which the film tries to obscure much less than in Jurassic Park, for example. The film acknowledges that people are important for it primarily as means of focalisation, so that, for example, we don’t see a fight that was not witnessed by any humans or, at the very least, by a main or supporting character (even though the “earthbound” human perspective here is not maintained as consistently as in Battle Los Angeles). The characters are repeatedly deprived of their agency (the impossibility to rescue one’s wife trapped in the exclusion zone) or it is made explicitly clear that they cannot do much against the monster and they won’t be able to coordinate their actions anyway. The real power belongs to nature and instinct, not to rationally behaving humans (regardless of whether they represent the military or science, or stand apart from established institutions), who are turned into a mere negligible part of an uncontrollable ecosystem (the only time I have felt similar helplessness from an American film was at the end of The Incredible Shrinking Man). People don’t have control over either the present or the future (their plans don’t work out for them); they can only learn from the past, which is an idea that is subordinated to the spiralling dramaturgy of the narrative with clearly indicated parallels between the situation in which Brody senior finds himself at the beginning and the situation in which Brody junior finds himself later. By constantly passivising the human protagonists and the predictability of the one-dimensional characters (the film is built on the most banal gender-based allocation of roles: a woman is a caring nurse, a man is a protective soldier), the Oedipal formula with an absentee father is sidelined in favour of the remarkable transformation of Godzilla, which bears the hallmarks of a villain (indestructibility, terrifying appearance), yet functions as a positive hero in the narrative (because it is the only one that can restore order). Using human characters to causally connect the individual scenes, the plot is developed in such a way that we end up siding with the monster, which is what whole film is about. How else should it be with a monster movie? Before I forget…the film also has brilliant sound effects (after all, using echolocation to track the monsters is one of the motifs of the narrative) and very convincing visual effects (i.e. I believe that a giant lizard could really look and move like that), while also offering breathtaking scenes as if from an art film, impressive only in how they look and how imagery and sound are harmonised within them (the night jump). The bar for other summer blockbusters has been set monstrously high. 85% (05/16/2014)

Unfortunately, it’s impossible to avoid comparisons to the previous Godzilla movie. I’m not reviewing the movies as such, but rather the times when I saw them. I think I would give both movies the same review today, but the first American Godzilla will forever remain the better movie for me because I didn’t have to stand in line at the video store to see this one and it wasn’t talked about so much, either. Also, I was younger and I didn’t really notice all the stupid stuff that Emmerich squeezed into his movie. I simply took it for a fact that everything was supposed to be so monumental and I sort of enjoyed the whole thing. Here I take it for a fact that Gareth Edwards finally managed to make a Godzilla movie that a Japanese person wouldn’t complain about. I also like that the story actually contains a whole different world, which is something I’m actually glad about. Emmerich’s Godzilla was a brutal piece of nonsense and had nothing in common with the original Godzilla. I also like the way Edwards approached the digital effects. Despite the fact that with a movie like this it might actually have been a bad idea. He did the same thing he did in Monsters and I‘m not sure a lot of people will like it. I don’t think this underground approach really works for Godzilla. Night action scenes where I could barely see anything really pissed me off. On the other hand, they still have their magic, which is why I’m going to stick with a three-star review. (10/29/2014)