Do you think Godzilla needs a different milieu? Always in the big city, can’t maneuver his enormous bulk around the skyscrapers, constantly stepping in tourists (what’s that on your foot? Ewwww), ant-like soldiers trying to bring him down with toys … do you ever think, “maybe this guy could use a change of scenery?” But then, where would the whole Godzilla oeuvre be? You don’t amass trophies hanging out with Sasquatch. The Godzilla groupies don’t pay to see the Lizard King visiting distant relatives in the Galápagos. That’s not how you cash in.
Speaking of cashing in, everybody’s favorite milquetoast druglord is finally getting his due for our love of “Breaking Bad.” And what has Bryan Cranston parlayed his newfound household nameness into? Why he’s the boy who cried “Monster” in the new Godzilla. And then he dies before Jim Morrison even shows up. Turns out there was a monster. Maybe we should have believed him.
Cranston’s unforgiveable sin is leaving the movie for G.I. Kick-Ass (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). Kick-Ass gets leave to visit his father in Japan only to discover crazy wolf-crying dad turned out to be not-so-crazy. An insect roughly the size of Fenway Park emerges from the ground in order that we give him a cool villain name – the film went with “M.U.T.O.” (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism), which strikes me as a cousin of R.O.U.S. from Princess Bride. No matter, the Japanese Mr. MUTO here has come to get bizz-ay as there’s a Mrs. MUTO in North America awaitin’ some massive terrestrial lovin’. This, of course, is very bad, as MUTOs can’t sneeze without destroying small villages. “But don’t worry!” the film becons, “Nature believes in balance” – here comes Godzilla to save the day. Is this the kind of thing nature does? What does nature care if it has one big predator? Nature never really seemed to care before, did it? Seems to me, nature is only too happy to let an alpha predator go medieval on the world’s ass for a few millennia. But hey, I’m no scientist.
The point of this round of megamonsterism is that nature cannot be confined. OK, fantastic – you gotcher theme right out there. Thing is, that doesn’t really lend itself to great action, now does it? We’re still fighting giant monsters with pop guns. I’m sorry, we haven’t got anything better? The army is
absolutely useless in this film – no plausible strategy or effective ammo anywhere around. And you’re making us follow an army guy around for two hours. This is stupid. Really stupid.
And in the grand tradition of cinemegamonsterism, it takes forever to get the big lugs on screen, and when they finally do show up, the battles are brief and unsatisfying. Yippee.
To contrast boring humans, the Godzilla franchise always leans on anthropomorphism. Godzilla is a big lizard and yet, we can only relate to him if we assign human motivation. Here, of course, Godzilla turns heroic by fighting the MUTOs. That’s it? That’s your purpose? MUTOs show up and you destroy San Francisco to make sure there are no miniMUTOs, then what? Vacation home? You’ve earned it, big fella.
I grew up with Godzilla as my go-to superhero. Hence, I really wanted to love this film. Huge IMAX screen. Got my 3D glasses on … the opening credits were outstanding – set against 50s n-test footage, dossier information randomly appeared on screen just so the “classified” part to be whited out first reveals the name of actor/actress or production person. That’s clever. After that, we had another Pacific Rim. I know many of you liked Pacific Rim, so I’ll stop there. If you liked that bullshit, you’ll probably like this bullshit, too.
♪With a purposeless screenplay and a terrible plot
Audience totally into this – NOT
Cynical producers ran out of steam
With archive kitsch, who needs a dream?
Uh oh, there are humans talking
Making us fear dinosaur walking
Oh, no, two hours left to go
Go go Godzilla
Oh, no, this acting totally blows
Show ‘em Godzilla♫
Rated PG-13, 123 Minutes
D: Gareth Edwards
W: Max Borenstein
Genre: Monster Mash
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Transformer-philes
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: People who like it when there’s more character development in humans than C.G.I. puppets
♪ Parody inspired by “Godzilla”
