Movie No. 7 of 2014 — Godzilla 3D
Gareth Edwards’ reboot of the Japanese pop-culture behemoth doesn’t quite revive the genre as one might have hoped.
In 2010, British visual effects artist Gareth Edwards released his first feature film, titled Monsters. Made with a budget of below $500,000, the film followed a beleaguered photojournalist as he escorts his employer’s daughter across alien-infested Mexican jungles back to the United States, eventually forging an earnest emotional bond with her. Edwards, along with four other crew members, shot the film across Central America in three weeks, with a script that was largely improvised.
Perhaps more impressively, Edwards did all the visual effects himself, using off-the-shelf software, locking himself in his bedroom for five months. Critics sat up and noticed; one even described Monsters as “Before Sunrise meets District 9".
Hollywood definitely took notice. Less than a year after Monsters was released, Edwards was already tapped to direct a reboot of Godzilla. Four years on, we are finally treated to his sophomore film.
And what a big difference a major Hollywood studio can make. Unlike Monsters, where Edwards worked with relative unknowns, the cast list is virtually composed of recognized dramatic actors: Bryan Cranston, Juliette Binoche, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen, Sally Hawkins, David Strathairn and Ken Watanabe. (It does make you wonder why they don’t cast B-grade blockbusters like Oscar-hungry period dramas.) Unfortunately (and in hindsight, unsurprisingly), the predictable human drama here leaves these actors little opportunity to shine. (An exception, however, can be found in scenes with Cranston and Binoche.) While the ensemble performance is good, it is forced to take a back-seat to the action-driven plot.
Bryan Cranston and Aaron Taylor-Johnson play father and son: the former a nuclear engineer, the latter a bomb-disposal officer with the US Army. As the son reluctantly allows the father to dig up a conspiracy-theory surrounding an event that had personal consequences for both of them, they stumble upon a (literally) enormous secret. From then on, the film zig-zags its way across the globe as Taylor-Johnson attempts to reunite with his wife and son while (computer-generated) destruction engulfs our screen.
The plot has a fair share of holes and deux ex machinas. The screenwriters did try to take a leaf from the pages of Ridley Scott’s original Alien film: withhold revealing your monster as long as you can. It works—when we finally get a proper sighting of Godzilla, it is rather glorious.
Rather than simply using a gods-eye view of the action that is the norm for the genre, Edwards likes to frames the large-scale urban destruction through something physical, be it a rain-streaked bus window, or a claustrophobic gas-mask visor, amongst other things. Much like what Alfonso Cuarón discovered in Children of Men and Gravity, It is an effective device that heightens the realism and the visual complexity. More importantly, it results in a (marginally) more immersive experience.
These small directorial decisions make clear Edwards’ aspirations. (He includes visual nods to Hitchcock and Spielberg, in the very same scene no less). Just like in Blonkamp’s District 9 and his own Monsters, he is more interested in the aftermath of a disaster than gazing at the disaster itself. On more than one occasion, he cuts away from vigourous action to a quieter scene, or to the post-destruction. The result of this is uncertain: we want to see Godzilla wield more damage, but we are reminded that there might be more important things to pay attention to.
The original Japanese Godzilla was a metaphor for the lasting effects of the atom bomb on a nation. The script remains aware of these post-WWII subtexts of nuclear war and atomic apocalypse, but it’s both unsubtle and inadequate, too little put forth in too obvious a fashion.
Then again, we paid to see a Godzilla movie, not a Godard film. We want to see a giant lizard smash up skyscrapers and aircraft carriers like a chubby toddler trampling over his toys. There’s no need for intelligent dialogue or well-fleshed characters, although that would have been very much welcome.
Godzilla 3D is a good reboot, but perhaps our expectations following what Edwards did with Monsters needed some tempering. (What a difference Hollywood makes.) One can only hope that, for his future films, Gareth Edwards remains original in ways that his fellow VFX-artists-turned-directors (like Neil Blonkamp) haven’t.
