Godzilla

What was promised the most, namely a new look at that notorious destroyer of skyscrapers, ultimately never came. The human factor brings a lot of unnecessary subplots and surprisingly transparent clichés, while the scientific background hides an elusive mass of rapid-fire technical jargon. And it is in vain that Gareth Edwards painstakingly conceals the monster in all its glory, so much so that I was literally exhausted from the eternal waiting and postponement even before the main attractions arrived. Given how high this was aiming, the letdown at the beginning of the closing credits was painfully sobering. The numerous explicitly nerve-racking scenes (the tunnel) thus manage to salvage at least some kind of experience only occasionally. (14/05/2014)

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% (16/05/2014)

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%] (13/05/2014)

Indie directors shouldn’t get into commercial blockbusters, so I wouldn’t look forward to it only to be disappointed. There’s enough action, I believe, but it’s not exciting, which is a far bigger problem than if there was not enough action. The most interesting characters are removed in the first act, and for the remainder of the film, everyone stands staring like a moron, or either think up some bullshit (the bomb here is used in the same weird way as in the last Batman from Nolan) or try to arouse the emotions of the viewer (unsuccessfully). If they had “forgotten” about the story and just let the monsters beat the crap out of each other, it would’ve been better. But they didn’t and the result is painful several times. Visually it’s great, as expected, I would love to print out some frames and hang them on the wall, but when things move it’s really bland. And what pissed me off the most was that the unidimensional protagonist always shows up by chance exactly where the monster is heading. Were the Japanese Godzilla from the past the same? If that is the case, the bullshit has remained bullshit. And I don’t like bullshit. (15/05/2014)

Watching a blockbuster that is heavily schematic (the family archetype of soldier-sibling, the chessboard of supporting characters) while in many ways scrupulously circumventing genre stereotypes (the edited monster fights!), all the while building up space with precise camerawork and unnerving music, is simply a pure joy that is amplified several times over in the final battle to the required epic scope. Or it's been a long time since a destruction genre film made me so happy by actually being a conversational drama. PS: It will probably not be possible to beat the visual highlight of skydiving this year. (28/08/2014)