Godzilla! Godzilla . . .! Again?
1956. A warm summer night. My
brother, me and my sister dressed in out pajamas scrunched into the backseat of
my dad’s ’54 Ford, squishing each other as we push and shove trying the to get
the best view we could from our tiny backseat balcony. Yeah, the drive-in movie family outing!
And what were we getting ready to see? Godzilla: King of the Monsters. And sure
enough, he WAS the king of ALL monsters. Biggest damn thing I had ever seen in
a movie. And mean? Killing with his “atomic” breath any living thing that got
in his way, destroying buildings with a swish of his enormous tail, squashing
tanks, swatting planes out of the sky! Yeah, baby, one horrifying, big ass MONSTER!
Jump ahead about fifty-eight years
and my eight year old self is really psyched to see a remake of Godzilla that
little gem of a horror film that terrorized my dreams every night without fail!
And my adult self gets a ticket, a medium popcorn and LARGE ice tea, and the
best seat at the Warren ANNNNND . . . and . . . okay . . . the movie was . . . okay, but
not really a remake of the first film. More like a conglomeration of the
franchise that emerged AFTER the first movie. In those films Godzilla is less
rampaging monster and more bumbling anti-hero. Sure, he still destroys a lot
of stuff, but it’s all for a good cause, all of it to defeat the REALLY bad
monster that threatens the poor antlike humans. He's a kinder Godzilla, one you
could take home to mom and Sunday dinner. Yeah, he would probably destroy the house .
. . but only by accident. And that’s
part of my problem with this movie. Well, that and the fact that G is hardly in
the movie at all! That’s right! A movie called Godzilla and Godzilla is not the head honcho monster. This flick should have been titled: MUTO!
(with a guest appearance by GODZILLA!) Everything about the advertising for
Godzilla is misleading. Godzilla is a supporting character, not the main
character. And Bryan Cranston who is
featured in EVERY trailer? Not the human lead! He’s just a blip on the
monster movie radar, a bit of bloody goo on the bottom of MUTO's deformed foot! The trailers, the posters, all of it promises something
that we, the audience, didn’t get . . . a remake of Godzilla. I understand the
marketing strategy, not revealing what the film is really about. Let the
audience experience the movie “for the first time.” Spielberg used the
technique all the time by not showing us much in trailers or posters, making us
wonder what we were going to see . . . but he didn’t mislead us. He didn’t advertise E. T. and then
show us . . . SURPRISE! It’s Schindler's List.
The good news about Godzilla 2014
is that it does effectively recreate the “feel” of the Godzilla movies of my
youth. Godzilla 2014 moves and fights just like the original, only a tad bit
cooler and cleaner. It still seems like a human rampaging around in a
“suitmation” suit! 21st century tech, you got to love it. And the
dialogue in the movie is just as clunky and awkward as the dubbed versions we
got in America, and how about that acting? It’s just as awful as it was in the
original! Well, maybe a bit worse. The problem with the acting in this movie is that the
actors just don’t seemed to relate to
the story or any of the other actors they are playing a scene with. Yes, they
weep, cry, shake their fists in anger, “Damn, you MUTO!” But it seems fake,
disconnected from the reality of the world of the movie.
So, did I hate this film? No, in
fact I admire it a bit. I think it was an honest, sincere attempt to recreate
a style of movie making that is long gone. It DID have the feel of a 50’s
B-movie horror film but with better special effects. However, not sure it had
the soul of those wonderful films of my youth. It was very high tech, of course, but it
felt like the whole production team was just phoning it in. There has to be an
intuitive understanding of the material if you want its soul to emerge. Not
sure that Godzilla 2014 got passed the glitter and flash that most big budget action films
settle for in this 21st century. That’s a pity. The original,
Godzilla: King of the Monsters, for all its faults had a soul that was bigger than its budget. And
that’s what’s missing in this expensive remake . . . a soul.
rrw o5-19-14
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