I'm sorry it's been a while since my last blog post. I've started a new job recently and as it involves staring at a computer screen all day I've not been as keen to spend my evenings doing the same. I've got a couple of other film reviews I want to write (The Raid 2, Seven Samurai and maybe About Time) but for now here's a review of Gareth Edwards' Godzilla.
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Monster movies are a tough genre to pull off if you aim for
anything more than trashy fun. Too much of the monster and a lot of your
audience will complain that they got bored of seeing CGI destruction without
enough of a human element to anchor the plot. Too little of the monster and you
risk disappointing the committed fans of whatever creature you’re using while
also not providing enough action for those who want to see cities levelled and
epic action.
It’s a tough balance to strike and Gareth Edwards clearly
struggles with it throughout his version of Godzilla, released last week. It is
perhaps the toughest of the classic monster movies to pull off because there is
a rich back catalogue and passionate fans that have strong expectations of what
a Godzilla movie should entail.
However to many cinema goers Godzilla is a bit
of a joke, images of a man in a cheap monster suit stamping on cardboard cities
in their mind. Then there’s the pretty damn awful 1998 Roland Emmerich version,
the memory of which is hardly going to have helped convince people they should
give this film a chance.
To be clear from the start, this film is better than Emmerich’s,
but that barely counts as praise. And to be honest with you, praise is going to
be a little thin on the ground for this film overall.
I wanted to love this film; a big budget blockbuster from a
man who did so much with very little was an enticing prospect. Gareth Edward’s
first film, Monsters, was a master class in what can be done on a limited
budget if you have the skill and imagination. The story of two strangers
attempting to make it across a quarantine zone decades after an “invasion” by
an Alien race that arrived by accident and were herd animals with no intent to
conquer the planet, the film understood two crucial things about making great
action sci-fi.
Firstly, you have to care about the characters, they have to be
your way into the story even if it ends up having a much wider scope than just
them. Secondly that sometimes limiting the amount of time the monster spends on
screen makes the moments they are much more powerful (this would not go down
well with the hardcore monster fan necessarily, but I reckon most average ones
would agree).
So the choice of director got me interested and the cast
announcements had me truly excited. Bryan Cranston, Elizabeth Olsen, Ken
Watanabe, Juliette Binoche, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Sally Hawkins is a really
strong cast for the genre. They made me hopeful that this would be a
blockbuster with heart and depth, packed with engaging performances.
Finally the trailers promised action set pieces full of
drama and suspense, especially the sequence of marines skydiving through the
clouds towards a devastated city.
It was all so promising but sadly it added up to far too
little.
Edwards is undoubtedly a talented director and I look
forward to whatever he does next, but this film struggled for tone throughout,
seemingly uncertain about what kind of a movie it wanted to be. Others have
commented on this being a post-Nolan’s Batman monster movie, too focussed on
being dark and forgetting that films about monsters and men clashing over
cities needs a sense of fun as well. It’s definitely true that the film could
have done with a bit more humour, a few knowing nods towards the inherently
daft concept or the ineffectiveness of mankind’s efforts to stop Godzilla would
have livened up the mood as the film moved into the final act.
However I think it could have worked as a darker, grittier
take (as over-played as that approach is at the moment) if the characterisation
had been stronger and the plot tighter. There’s a lot to like about the opening
third of the film as the origins and previous sightings of Godzilla are
explored, first through an excellent title sequence that uses archive footage
of nuclear tests and redacted documents, then by setting up Bryan Cranston’s
scientist Joe Brody as someone unravelling a conspiracy. If they’d ran with
that atmosphere for longer the film could have been much stronger, making full
use of the stellar cast to bring us a monster movie that looks as much at the
impact on real humans, their courage and their personal tragedies.
Instead act two devolves into being the army vs. monsters,
with an ever growing scale of collateral damage. Taylor-Johnson is a good young
actor (take a look at Nowhere Boy or Kick Ass) but he ends up with a role that
could have played by any reasonably athletic, good looking actor. He plays Joe’s
U.S marine son, Ford and It’s such a limited role that his performance ends up
dull and almost wooden at times. He’s wasted, as is Ken Watanabe who is used to
wander on screen at 20 minute intervals to utter superficially deep statements
about man’s relationship with nature.
Those two could have been used so much better, but the
character that annoyed me most was Elizabeth Olsen’s Elle Brody. She’s such a
promising young actress, one of the most exciting out there, starting to break
into big roles after her performances in Martha Marcy May Marlene and Liberal
Arts. Edwards just uses her as a generic wife/crying woman and that’s a damn
shame. To make her such a one dimensional character is a waste of a good
actress and another example of the lack of depth in the central characters that
ends up spoiling this film.
You can make a fun and stupid monster movie and no one will
hold a lack of complex characters against you, but if you aim for serious and
intense, you have to provide someone the audience will care about, someone to
make you feel the peril. The perfect movie for me would probably be some
delicate balance of the two, but I’d happily of settled for a Godzilla movie
that was one or the other.
Instead we got a movie that took itself too seriously to be
great fun, but delivered such lukewarm characterisation and a generic plot that
I couldn’t engage with the drama.
Despite how this review reads, I don’t actually think
Godzilla was a BAD film, it was just such a disappointing one given its
promise. As mentioned above the first
third works well and has some engaging character beats, they’re just abandoned
too soon after to build to anything. There are also some excellent action
sequences, fully justifying its IMAX release and demonstrating the devastating
power of Godzilla whenever he hits land (he spends an awful lot of the film
swimming, which I’m not sure anyone really paid to see). The skydiving sequence
from the trailer is visually stunning in full, even if the plot justification for
it seems a little vague. In fact my only criticism of the action itself is that
we see too much of it in the trailer; too many of what should have been
shocking, stand out moments already felt familiar if you’d seen any of the
several trailers released in the lead up to the film.
It’ll be interesting to watch it again on DVD in a few
months, both to see whether the action loses its punchy feel on the small screen
and whether I enjoy it more for having already had my expectations lowered.
For now it joins the list of films that, while decent, could
have been so much more.
A few inconsistencies, but I'm not sure that really took away from it all since the whole movie was just about as tense as you could get with a disaster flick. Good review Arthur.
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