2024 isn't just the seventieth anniversary of the original Godzilla, it's also the tenth anniversary of the 2014 Godzilla, the film that brought Godzilla back from the dead. That may sound hyperbolic, but it really isn't; the Godzilla franchise was not in a good place before 2014, so it was the financial success of the 2014 film that not only put the King of the Monsters back on the map, but showed Toho that Godzilla could still be successful and beloved. As for me, I've talked about this film a million times at this point, probably more than any other film, not that that'll stop me from talking about it one more time on Godzilla's seventieth birthday. It's hardly a secret that I adore this film, but while it gets so much right and still holds up as a fantastic Godzilla movie after a decade, there is still some negativity towards this film, negativity which, as I'll spell out today, is severely misplaced.
Here's what you need to know; a decade ago, a nuclear disaster in Japan tore the Brody family apart, with Joe Brody spending years trying to prove that the meltdown that killed his wife was not what it seemed. But when Joe and his son, Ford return to the site in search of answers, they stumble into a terrifying truth. Something huge is about to be revealed, as forces far older and more powerful than anything they could possibly imagine emerge from the depths of the Earth, forces humanity is powerless to stop.
To understand why this film is so important, first we must get an understanding of where Godzilla was before it's release. This is a period in the Godzilla franchise I've talked about in the past, but it's relevant to this film, trust me. After the 1998 Godzilla crashed and burned, both creatively and financially, Toho saw fit to unretire Godzilla after 1995's Godzilla vs Destoroyah gave the monster a bitter-sweet on-screen death. Toho's revived Godzilla didn't last long however, as just five years and six films later, they were forced to retire Godzilla again when Godzilla: Final Wars bombed at the box office. The next decade was a dark age for Godzilla; while things were very slowly moving forward on a second attempt to make an American Godzilla, Toho weren't producing any Godzilla films, letting their world-famous franchise fade into obscurity. Yoshimitsu Banno, who had directed 1971's Godzilla vs. Hedorah, had secured the rights to make a new Godzilla film, and had been shopping the project around to various production studios, before Legendary Pictures got the rights to Godzilla in 2010, with Banno staying on as executive producer. This new American Godzilla, being developed at Legendary in collaboration with Toho, would stay a lot more faithful to classic Godzilla than it's 1998 counterpart had. Gareth Edwards, an independent director who made a name for himself with his 2010 film, Monsters, eventually signed on as director in 2011, while Warner Bros. would distribute and co-finance the film.
In 2012, a teaser for this new American Godzilla was shown at comic-con and eventually made it's way online, subsequently reawakening my obsession for the Big Guy that the pressures of growing up had forced into dormancy. The wait for the film's release was agonising as to me, this was more than just a film. I was finally going to see Godzilla on the big screen, something I never imagined could happen, yet there I was, furiously digging through online forums for anything about this film. I once again wanted the toys, only this time they weren't illusive and expensive, I could buy them from my local Toys-R-Us, much to the disgust of my then-girlfriend. And of course, my mother, realising just how special this moment was for me, booked IMAX tickets, though that was kept a secret from me until I figured it out for myself on the drive to the IMAX. Since that day back in 2014, a lot has changed in my life, though listing all the seismic shifts in my personal life over the past ten years isn't why we're here, one thing that has never changed is that this film gives me the fizz. I know it's not perfect, I've thought an awful lot about it's imperfections and how I would try to fix them. I can even partly understand why this film would be underwhelming to certain people who didn't have their expectations met, I would also like to add that for those people, the issue was never the film, but their expectations. There are issues with the 2014 film, but many critiques of the film don't expose these issues, rather, they expose a lack of understanding and appreciation for the Godzilla franchise. In many ways, this film is one of the most important in this franchise, as I shall now, in my typically long winded way, try to explain.
The film's opening is something I've gushed about many times, it's an opening sequence that sets the tone and sense of scale of the film beautifully. Alexandre Desplat's haunting and energetic Godzilla theme builds to it's sensational crescendo as archived footage of Operation Lucky Dragon, the US Army's attempt to kill Godzilla in 1954, plays. The sequence reaches it's peak in tandem with Desplat's score as Godzilla begins to emerge from the sea, instantly vanishing in the atomic Armageddon of a nuclear detonation. The blast wave from the bomb smashes into us, the audience, and as the film's title fades in from the blinding white flash, ash begins to fall and in the distance, people can be heard screaming in terror. Just how reflective of the rest of the film this intro sequence is is remarkable, especially when compared to the eerily similar intro sequence of the 1998 film, and how that intro sequence didn't represent the film it was in at all. Where this sequence really knocks it out of the park is how well it sets up Godzilla himself. In addition to being an acknowledgement of the real world event that inspired the original Godzilla, the Castle Bravo test of 1954, it establishes a lot of lore and history for this world, as well as some of this Godzilla's core character attributes without the need for exposition or playing the film's cards too early. All of the information we need to understand this world and this monster is presented to us here, through visuals alone, which is remarkable.
From just this brief sequence, we already know that Godzilla is massive, with his spines rising out of the water like mountains on the ocean's surface. We know that he is old, already being fully grown and instantly recognisable as Godzilla before Castle Bravo, and we can go further still, as the sequence also features drawings and diagrams of dinosaurs and ancient, mythical monsters, as well as Charles Darwin's book, On The Origin of Species, implying that Godzilla is a product of evolution, and that there is truth behind the ancient monsters of myth and legend. We also know that he is practically indestructible, surviving being at ground zero of a nuclear detonation. We can dig further here too, with the intro establishing that the US Government has known about Godzilla for more than sixty years, but has kept his existence a secret from the public, framing their attempts to kill him as atomic tests, all while a secret government agency; Monarch, has been quietly studying the creature and possibly others like him for decades. Everything about Godzilla should be impossible; nothing can be so old, so massive, and able to shrug off getting nuked. Something as huge as the fact that monsters exist could never be kept from the public for so long, but here he is, being presented as so firmly rooted in real world science and history that he becomes real; just another part of this world that we already know so much about, just from this tiny sequence.
Something else that this sequence masterfully does is put the god back into Godzilla, after his 1998 counterpart got taken down with missiles, this Godzilla wakes up, gets nuked, then goes back to sleep. This Godzilla shrugs off not just the pinnacle of humanity's destructive potential, but also humanity's crowning achievement in science and engineering, he didn't care that we threw the biggest bomb we had ever built at him. Having unleashed the power of the atom, humanity thinks of itself as the rulers of Earth, but there is nothing humanity can do against this creature, he is simply beyond us, beyond our ability to understand or control, and far beyond our ability to fight, he has a power that humanity can only ever wish it had, he's truly a living god. We'll get back to Godzilla a bit further in, but there's more film to talk about first. The film starts proper in 1999 with Monarch head, Dr Serizawa and his assistant, Dr Graham on a very Jurassic Park-esque helicopter ride through the jungles of the Philippines. Serizawa quietly inspects a pocket watch before they touch down at a mining site where something incredible has been found. Believing they'd found a Uranium deposit, the miners accidentally dug into the tomb of a massive creature. Inside, they find evidence that something inside the tomb was alive; a spore or egg, perfectly preserved amongst the fossilised bones, along side a similar structure that seems to have recently broken open, with whatever was inside it having burrowed its way out to sea.
Far away at the Janjira nuclear power plant, Joe Brody is growing increasingly worried about bizarre seismic activity that seems to be getting closer to the plant. The situation quickly gets out of control when the plant is rocked by an earthquake which breaches the reactor. I think a majority of the complaints made about this film come from how it handles it's human characters, specifically how it handles Joe Brody. When we meet Joe, he's so concerned about the strange tremors near the plant that he forgets it's his birthday, having to be reminded by his loving and supportive wife, Sandra. It only takes minutes for his entire life to fall apart when he is forced to shut the containment shield with Sandra still on the other side. As the shield closes, he gets one final chance to see his wife, who asks him to take care of their son before the door seals shut, trapping her forever with the failed reactor, while Joe watches through the tiny porthole window, completely powerless to save her. Right from the start, we have a strong emotional investment in Joe, and by extension, his crusade for the truth as at it's core, it's his crusade for peace. He feels responsible for Sandra's death, he wants to know why the reactor failed, not for the sake of finding the truth, but to find an explanation for why his wife died, and to free himself of the guilt of unknowingly sending her to her death. Couple this with the performance of Bryan Cranston and you have a magnetic character whose journey we want to see to it's completion. But half an hour later when he dies, and with no one else for us to become emotionally invested in, all of that investment in the human story evaporates.
We start out with this amazing and compelling character that we like, only for him to get taken away and replaced with an emotionally cold and stoic soldier. Ford Brody is not a bad character, contrary to what some may say; whereas Joe let the grief and guilt of losing Sandra drive him insane, Ford has refused to follow his father into despair, instead relentlessly pushing forward and trying to protect what he still has. As the film's events unfold, he is forced to choose between his family and his duty, after losing his mother and father, he pushes ahead with his mission because of his desire to protect what's left of his family from the monsters. But with all that being said, when compared to Joe, Ford's just kind of wooden, and while it's not exactly a fair comparison, it does make the film feel emotionally hollow in it's second and third acts. In addition to the Brody's, we have a host of genre archetypes to round out the cast, army guys and scientists who follow the action and try to find solutions to the monster problem. But while characters like Dr Serizawa and Admiral Stenz are great additions to this Godzilla movie line up, they, like Ford and his wife, Elle, are little more than cogs in this film's machinery, functions of a story that is greater than the sum of it's parts. Something that you could see as a problem is the relative lack of agency the characters have; they are not active characters who drive the events of the story, in fact, outside of a handful of circumstances, they have no real impact on the story. This is nothing new to the Godzilla franchise, though it's understandable that someone unfamiliar with said franchise would be unimpressed that the human characters don't really matter, I, however, don't see it as a problem, I think it was the point.
Like the original Godzilla from 1954, this film has layers upon layers to dig into, there are deep thematic elements at play in Godzilla 2014 that really make it stand out from other monster movies. Godzilla isn't just a big lizard in this film, like the best of the series, he is representative of something bigger, and while the details of what he represents are very different from his Japanese counterpart, the spirit of those classic films is very much still here. In both films, Godzilla is a god; a being whose nature is so far removed from ours, and whose size and power so completely eclipses ours, that we have no answer to it. But while the original Godzilla was a wrathful monster, indiscriminately delivering punishment upon the human race, this Godzilla fills a more protective role in the world, restoring the balance when it's threatened by destructive forces, be they human or monster. While the 1954 Godzilla is a physical representation of the cruelty of war and the terrible power of the atom, this Godzilla is a physical representation of the uncontrollability of nature, an unstoppable force that's apathetic to the chaos and destruction it causes, and that cannot be contained or defeated, no matter how hard we try. Through the film's visuals, Godzilla's true scale is perfectly portrayed, inspiring a sense of awe and majesty that other monster movies struggle to capture. Aspects of his design also feed into this Godzilla being an embodiment of nature's wrath, with his skin being rocky in texture and the colour of basalt, his spines resembling jagged rock formations, and his posture and body structure being a lot more animalistic than previous suit incarnations.
But unlike the 1998 film, this Godzilla still looks and sounds like Godzilla, as like with the more thematic elements of the film, the people making it understood and respected the franchise, trying to do it justice instead of reinventing it for a new audience. By comparison, there is less to be said about the MUTO's, Godzilla's opponents in the film, though like Godzilla himself, there is something to be said about how they serve the film's themes. The MUTO's are depicted in this film as the natural consequence of humanity's hubris; a force of chaos unleashed onto the world by humans who believed they were in control. Like Godzilla, they are nature's uncontrollability manifest, but while Godzilla brings order and balance, the MUTO's bring chaos and destruction, they're driven by their need to reproduce, and don't care about the cost of their proliferation on the wider world. They are the greed and the ignorance of humanity, endlessly consuming without considering the impact of their actions on the environment, while Godzilla is positioned as nature's answer to the imbalance they create. But the film's theme of human arrogance never comes across as heavy-handed; the MUTO's are never presented as purely villainous, and even have a sympathetic edge to them in some moments, while the humans themselves are never depicted as being intentionally cruel to the planet, something plenty of other films with environmentalist messaging are more than happy to do.
Like the MUTO's, humanity is ultimately just a victim of it's own nature, and in the grand scheme of the natural order, we are no more significant than the many bugs and lizards that crawl beneath our feet, in the same way we crawl beneath the feet of the gods. On top of having strong thematic significance, they are pretty cool monsters too, being bizarre bug-like creatures that can generate electro-magnetic pulses and feed on radiation. While they're not as exciting or memorable as many of the classic Toho monsters like Rodan and Ghidorah, they, like the film's human characters, are serviceable components of this film's story and themes. That's a lot of talk about themes and messages, but if the film failed to back it up, the film would fail. To many, the film did fail; it didn't deliver the kind of kaiju action they expected from a Godzilla film, proving to be too subversive for their tastes, which is a complaint I understand, even if I don't agree with it. As well as the complaints about the film's human characters, one major issue a lot of people had with this film was how it uses Godzilla, or rather, how it doesn't. At numerous points, it looks like the film is gearing up for an epic action sequence with the monsters, only for it to cut to the next scene before the action can start. The worst offender in this regard is Honolulu, where Godzilla makes his first epic appearance. The scene is a masterclass in building suspense, relentlessly mounting the tension and the danger as the MUTO causes chaos at the airport while something enormous approaches from the ocean.
As it approaches, Serizawa rushes up the the flight deck, convinced that it's Godzilla, and through his binoculars, he watches three massive rows of spines slicing through the water towards them. As it dives under the carrier, it pushes up a massive bow wave that comes ashore alongside it, flooding the city and washing away countless people. As people seek refuge from the tsunami on the roofs of buildings, they witness the impossibly massive creature making its way out of the sea and towards the airport, apathetic to the soldiers unloading their rifles into it. When a helicopter attacking the MUTO is knocked out of the sky by the creature, it sets off a chain reaction of destruction. The people gathered in the terminal watch in complete terror as explosions rip through the airport, until their screaming is silenced by the boom of an impossibly massive footstep, the camera pans up the body of the creature, finally revealing Godzilla in all his glory, with the scene ending on his earth-shattering roar. This entire sequence is pure gold, beautifully building the suspense for that climactic moment where we finally see Godzilla, only for the film to cut to the next scene right before the fight begins. In the past, I've attempted to rationalise this bait and switch, but these days, I honestly feel that it was a mistake to cut away from this fight, and I think that like if they hadn't killed Joe Brody in the first act, another of the main complaints made about this film would have never been made.
What I think largely makes up for the film's constant teasing is it's pacing, which is fantastic. The film takes a bit of time to get going again after the Janjira meltdown, but once the MUTO escapes, the film gets going again and never stops. From the MUTO escape all the way up to the final battle in San Francisco, Godzilla is a rollercoaster ride, never stopping or slowing, constantly cranking up the heat as this monster apocalypse continues to get worse and worse. Once Godzilla makes his entrance at the half way mark, he is a constant presence throughout the film. This more than makes up for his relative lack of screen time in my opinion, as even without him being on screen, the film never forgets that he's the main attraction, which only makes those moments where he does appear all the more magical. There's the flawlessly executed Honolulu sequence where he is revealed, and from that point on, the film regularly drops little bits of Godzilla action throughout, until it inevitably comes time for the final showdown in San Fransisco. Even after ten years, this finale is fantastic, cranking the stakes to all new extremes as Godzilla fights for the future of Earth while the humans race against time to extract a live nuke from the city. Everything the film had been building comes to a head here, and ten years and four more films later, this finale still has some of the hardest action and most awesome moments in the entire Monsterverse. Nothing will ever beat that moment in this film where Godzilla uses his atomic breath for the first time, I vividly remember how I felt when I saw that in the IMAX ten years ago, it was the coolest thing I had ever seen and depending on what mood I'm in, it still is.
Everything gets wrapped up perfectly in the film's ending which, while very different to the original film's ending, reminds me of it in a few key ways. As the film opens with a family getting torn apart, so it ends with a family being put back together as with the threat gone, Ford, Elle and Sam can finally be reunited. Sure, the evil monsters are dead and order has been restored, but the world can never truly return to the way it once was now. Godzilla has fundamentally changed the way we see the world, humanity, in its attempts to play god, has awakened monsters beyond our most terrifying nightmares, and if we don't learn from our mistakes and rediscover our respect for the natural order, we will only continue to create these monsters. The difference this time is that when the monsters come, Earth has a defence mechanism against them, a god that will wake up when he's needed to make things right, and when he comes, it's best that we know our place and get out of the way. This film's ending calls humanity's dominance over Earth into question, begging the question of where we truly are on the food chain. In doing so, it brings the film's environmentalist and anti-humanist themes full circle, without coming across as heavy handed or preachy, like everything else in this wonderful film, it's done with restraint, subtlety and respect, both for it's audience and it's source material, while also making the film feel complete. While it's certainly not as profound or effective as the original film's ending, it, nonetheless, brings home this film's message in a satisfying way.
Let Them Fight
After America's first attempt to adapt Godzilla took the god out of him, the 2014 film comes across as a labour of love for this franchise, from people who understood the importance of this monster, and wanted to restore him to his rightful place as the King of the Monsters. Yet while the film isn't a masterpiece by any means, they absolutely succeeded in their goal of bringing Godzilla back to life. There are problems here that people are right to criticise, but I find it very unfair to criticise this film for it's handling of Godzilla as in all honesty, there are few films in this franchise that do him even half the justice that this one does. In spite of his lack of screen time, Godzilla's presence dominates this film, and while it takes the monster in a new and, at the time, unique direction, it never forgets that it's Godzilla; it never tries to reinvent this titan of film, nor does it forget why he is so important or so popular. It takes it's simple, by-the-numbers premise of giant monsters attacking cities, and uses it to tell a story that deals with humanity's place in the world, one filled with existential themes and ideas that elevate this otherwise simple monster movie into something a lot more special, all while being a really well paced and beautifully made film that still remains the peak of the Monsterverse, even all these years later. Very few films understand their task as well as this one, and fewer still can pull it off, but Godzilla is truly something else, there's a magic to it for me that hasn't faded in a decade and probably never will, I adore it, and it is an absolute must watch.
No comments:
Post a Comment