I had the chance to check out a premiere screening of Godzilla in advance of its wide release Friday. I was pretty excited for this movie, which kicks off the summer blockbuster viewing season for me (I still haven't gotten around to checking out The Amazing Spider-Man 2).
I should lead with the fact that I love Godzilla. Or rather the fact that I love the idea of Godzilla. The Lizard King has one of the best origin stories of all time. His entire creation is a parable for the dangers of humans using nuclear energy for weapons after Hiroshima in 1945. This always added depth of character to a monster that never speaks and destroys cities that allowed me to simply respect the creation of the character, as well as showing exactly what Godzilla mean to Japanese culture.
The image I have of Godzilla has always been one of a "monster" that wears a grey hat. He's terrible because he tears down cities, but he also fights off other monsters that threaten us as well. This duality kind of represents the good/evil that nuclear energy can provide to humans, and how we have to be responsible with it.
That's always been one of my favourite themes in the Godzilla franchise, and it's one of the reasons I hated the 1998 version so much. Godzilla was the only real monster in that one, trying to have some baby Zillas in New York. It took away from that depth.
(A few spoilers for the 2014 Godzilla from here on out. Although, it's a Godzilla movie, so there's not much to spoil).
This version of the movie did better in that department. The nuclear testing and the dangers of nuclear weapons played a big part in the movie, and Godzilla also got to fight a couple giant bugs. It balanced out the movie and gave it a little bit of weight.
That's a good thing, because this version of Godzilla is lighter, and campier than I was expecting. Every monster movie trope was hit: The father separated from his wife and young son, the lost little asian boy that doesn't say a word, military HALO jumps — they were all in there.
While I wasn't expecting that, I didn't hate it. This movie knows what it is. It's a mega-blockbuster where people are coming to see a giant monster smash up some well known landmarks. It's gonna have some cliches. And that's totally fine.
Godzilla does have some serious action in it. The roar is great. It's phenomenal. The single most important thing about the Godzilla you show on screen is the roar, and this one was spot one. Buildings get smashed, nukes get stolen, helicopters blow up — it's a summer action movie with a high budget, so you'll be fine.
I thought the characters and the main plot that was followed was pretty weak. When (spoiler) Bryan Cranston's character's wife dies seven minutes into the movie, I didn't care. I'd barely gotten to know who these people were, never mind feel anything for them emotionally. The same was true when Cranston himself dies not much later, I just didn't care at all. And I felt nothing about whether or not our main character (whose name I can't even remember now, just to prove my point) would ever find his family.
That's fine, though, because the movie is called Godzilla. It's not about our main characters. It's about the monster, and also about all of human kind.
At one point, our token wise Japanese doctor says "man is often foolish for thinking her can control nature, when it fact it's the other way around", or something of the sorts. Godzilla not only works as a decent parable for nuclear war in a day and age when North Korea is just lurking in the shadows, but also as an image for what we're doing to the planet. The scene at the end of the movie, where all of San Francisco's citizens are seeking their families, is darkly familiar. We see it every few months, after a tsunami in Japan or a hurricane in New Orleans. We're currently destroying our planet because we refuse to believe that we're not in control. And the planet's starting to fight back.
So I went through a few phases with this movie. I was expecting it to be dark, and when it wasn't and I though it was campy, I was disappointed at first. But after watching the credits role and thinking about it for a while, I realized that the movie knows exactly what it is, and it captures that summer-movie fun while still adding a good amount of depth.
