Yesterday was my birthday. It was also the day that the new Godzilla came out. As a big fan of the big G, it was a no-brainer that I'd celebrate my birthday with the reintroduction of Godzilla to America, and what better way to see him than in IMAX 3D. I was not disappointed in the slightest.
I absolutely loved the new Godzilla, and I'm speaking as a real, true fan. I was indoctrinated into love for the big G from a young age. When I was in elementary and middle school I was all about Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. My favorite character? Tommy, aka The Green Ranger, and his Mech unit, the Dragonzord. In adolescence, I had a tv with satellite cable in my room and I'd stay up late watching the old Toho films on obscure cable channels. I watched a good amount of the Godzilla films themselves, as well as the Rodan and King Ghidorah films. My favorite monster of course came to be MechaGodzilla, especially once I realized the Dragonzord was a play on him. While not all Godzilla movies from Toho are created the same, they were a joy to watch. Besides my love of just watching big creatures beat each other up, I was also enthralled with how real they tried to make them, despite it being actors in suits stomping on model towns.
Yesterday morning I re-watched the original Gojira in preparing myself for the new film, as that is the movie it is trying to be like the most. While in some places it's heavy handed in it's acting and the message of the film is just shoved down your throat, it exceeds in capturing the mystery, wonder and devastation that comes from having a giant monster attack your town. Long shots of the city on fire and decimated fill the third act, and it's horrifying. More than anything however, Gojira (and I imagine Godzilla: King of the Monsters but I haven't seen that version) enforces the notion that Godzilla is a force of nature. In Gojira, Godzilla is an ancient creature from dinosaur times that was just hanging out at the bottom of the ocean when nuclear radiation affected him and made him into the force of destruction we see in the film. His creation as a monster is the fault of man, and when Dr. Serizawa uses his device to kill both him and Godzilla, it is not seen as a victory for mankind, but rather as the payment Japan had to pay for having used nuclear weapons.
In the new Godzilla, Bryan Cranston plays a supervisor of a nuclear plant who is seeing readings of activity that could endanger their plant, but no one will believe him. Eventually the plant explodes and is quarantined. We skip to 15 years later and Cranston is convinced whatever created the last explosion is back, he goes to explore and comes across the "villian" of the movie, the MUTO (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism) has a cocoon harvesting radiation from the plant, and when it hatches, it unleashes the monster on the world, hungry for radiation. Without spoiling the rest of the film, I'll just say that Godzilla is out there in the world, and he notices what the MUTO is doing and starts hunting him. The rest of the movie is Godzilla hunting the MUTO while the MUTO swims through the ocean going from one radiation source to another, while the government does their best to find their own solution to two giant monsters destroying the world.
I think saying anything more about the plot would take some of the fun out of it, but I really liked how they did the origins of the creatures. It fits in themeatically with Gojira while still being different in it's own right. The re-awakening of the creatures are still the fault of man. Our desire for ultimate power brought forth a being that could cause ultimate destruction, and whats more, feeds on our most devastating weapon, nuclear energy.
I really, really enjoyed this film as it wanted itself to play out, as a slow burn. Director Gareth Edwards took cues from Jaws in how he introduced and showed the monsters. It's at least over an hour before we actually see more than just a fin from Godzilla, and it's terrifying. For the majority of the film, we follow Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a Navy Lieutenant and his exploits trying to get back from Japan to San Francisco where his wife and child are amidst the monster attacks. This I think is the essential part of the movie that captures the true horrific atmosphere of the film. In the Toho franchise, while we see human stories intersecting with the monsters, it's often thrown aside to show large aerial shots of the fights between creatures. What this new Godzilla does best however is showing these monster fights from the human point of view. In the Toho films, often the buildings and landscape are just obstacles for the monsters to fall into or be thrown onto. In this film that is still very, very true, but from the monsters perspective. From the human perspective, every skyscraper destroyed is hundreds of lives lost. A foot crushing through a skytrain rail is hundreds of innocent people suddenly thrown to their doom. Godzilla merely moving through the water around ships means the possible destruction of whole naval ships or bridges because of his size.Their destruction has weight, and the destruction is absolutely horrific.
While I think the human plot and dialogue to be equally predictable, that didn't make it bad. What is being said and what is being done are not revolutionary things or ideas, but they are executed well and fit right at home in this kind of film. The score by Alexandre Desplat was absolutely gorgeous in how well it conveyed not only the feeling of terror, but also anxiousness and intensity. The recreation of the Godzilla roar and his sounds are both iconic and sound real. IMAX opened the film by playing the new Godzilla roar and it was both terrifying and exhilarating, my theater yelled and cheered. The cinematography was also delightful, and the fights are a joy to watch.
Overall, this film succeeded for me mostly because of what it decided to show me, when it decided it wanted to show that to me, and knowing what would and wouldn't make the film better. One of the "problems" with the Toho films is that the longer Godzilla and the monsters are on screen, the more you notice about how fake it is, how the men in the suits move, the suits being suits, the environment being scale models. I said "problems" because to me that is part of the charm of those films, but Gareth Edwards was not going for that, he was going for the most realistic take on the creature since Gojira, and the less of Godzilla you see, the more you can believe he's a real, breathing entity. For me, Godzilla felt totally real in this film, and part of that is because I didn't have ages to notice how fake it actually all is. Between the motion capture of Godzilla, his design, and how he was shown, I could believe for those two hours that Godzilla was real, and it was everything I ever wanted since seeing The Dragonzord rise from the sea to take down the baddies in Power Rangers.
If you're interested in seeing the new Godzilla film at all, by god go see it in theater, IMAX 3D if you can. I have full confidence that the home release will still be a wonderful film, but the feeling of seeing the big G on a 40 ft. tall screen was everything I had ever wanted for him.
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