Monster movie

Got to see Godzilla: King of the Monsters the other day. I’ve mixed feelings about it. I liked the first recent Godzilla film – it had its flaws but there was a detached quality that resonated with me. Some have – rightly – complained that the leads were anonymous, but that seemed appropriate when the real lead is a creature hundreds of feet high. Kong: Skull Island was a revelation. Pure pulp that sought to riff on Apocalypse Now and somehow was successful in doing so. It’s not a great film, but it is enjoyable and better than it had any right to be.

And so we come to Godzilla: King of the Monsters. The reviews weren’t hugely promising and the reality? A friend described it as visually spectacular but heartless and by the numbers.

The cast was despite a wide range of excellent actors, hardly serviceable. Was that the guy from Silicon Valley playing the same role as the guy in Silicon Valley? Why yes, yes it was. Was that Bradley Whitford from West Wing playing effectively the same role as he played in West Wing (or Brooklyn 99). Yes, likewise. Was that an Academy nominated actor being thrown under the bus, or the monster? Sure was.

Yet line readings were… at times glum. The problem being that most of them were either over invested to the point of mania or simply not invested enough. Perhaps part of this was a function of the titular lead. Is it any wonder the human characters come off as underpowered?

Monsters laying waste to cities is oddly cathartic, but apart from stomping on people by accident the interactions tend to be second order effects, cars and buses thrown into the air as they pass by only to fall on hapless bystanders. Whereas in Kong: Skull Island there were the large creatures and then smaller versions of a scale more directly threatening to humans. Similarly with the devastation wrought by the monsters. It was all a little confined with remarkably few long shots, at least on TV news coverage of events around the globe.

Wed that to a plot that literally made no sense much of the time, antagonists who lacked any clear motivation, supposedly sympathetic characters who intuited too much and an attrition rate amongst them that while high was probably not high enough to be realistic given what was happening around them and flawed is a polite word for what we see.

This from Hollywood Reporter – filled with spoilers so be warned – captures the issues with the film neatly.

And yet, and yet. There was also something likeable in its chaotic nature. A lesser film than either of its predecessors, but one that at times showed a remarkable visual flair and in its clunkiness seemed more honest to the source material than might have been expected.

Speaking of which this is pretty good about the odd aspect Godzilla as a character.

No matter how playful or haunting his movies have been over the decades, this duality—Godzilla as both a terrifying metaphor for mankind’s hubris and a protector capable of almost cosmic benevolence—has always been at the heart of the character.

It’s that that lifts Godzilla. Or, as it notes in this piece:

Gojira—which lost the Japanese Movie Association award for best picture that year to Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai—is an urgent, earnest film, a profoundly unsettling window into national trauma.

That clear message intrinsic to the films, from the off – one where the atom bombings of 1945 are replayed in a curious way. But one aspect of Godzilla is the underlying message that as with nuclear weapons these monsters are to be endured, that they cannot, or not all, be destroyed once they are in the world (again). Moreover there’s the real sense that although Godzilla, or Kong, may be somewhat benevolent, that cannot be depended upon. Their powers are too great and are representative of other creatures that care not a bit for humanity, if they notice it at all.

Perhaps that’s what I like most about the films, for all their sometimes silliness, for all the cack-handedness of Godzilla: King of the Monsters, the sense that unlike so many other fictions there’s a real sense of the cosmic insignificance of humanity and how contingent our purchase on an infinite universe actually is.

Next stop Godzilla Vs. Kong.