Post-mortem: "Godzilla"
I didn't like the movie.
One week after the advance screening, $70 million in box office so far, and nearly unanimous negative drumming by the film critics, my thoughts on Godzilla are about to come forth. But I'm going to go about this in a different way than the way I originally intended to: I'm not going to do so much of a film review; instead, let me try something else. Perhaps I can describe it as a dissection of the film's intentions, or what I had hoped to have seen. But calling this a film review isn't accurate. There's enough reviews out there to keep you busy reading for an hour.
Long and short of it is, I didn't enjoy this movie.
I have a weird view of this movie at the moment. In the past five days I've kept a close eye on the media's reaction to the film and read the reviews in the papers, on TV, and the many emails sent by readers who wanted to speak their minds about the film (there'll be more Godzilla audience reviews, but not tonight. Too much laundry to do, if you know what I mean.) And in the midst of all those mostly negative appraisals of the film, I went to see it Thursday night with a friend of mine. Things didn't look so good when the theater was only half-filled when the lights dimmed.
What I did like:
The opening credits. Godzilla's tail creating ancillary damage. Some of the CGI. Some of David Arnold's score. Jean Reno's character. And, for the most part, Godzilla's new look was alright by me.
What I didn't like:
Oh, what I didn't like...
There's just two words that best sum up what I didn't like about Godzilla, and those words weren't thought up by myself. Some of you have already figured out that there's three other writers who contribute film pages to CA using pseudonyms: 'Widgett', 'Deadpool' and 'Ace'. Great guys. Never met 'em in my life but I'd trust these guys with the keys to this place. I'll have to when I take my honeymoon, so I better start thinking about buying that Zip drive backup real soon...
Anyway, back on topic. 'Widgett' was emailing me what he thought of the picture (soon to be posted on the Godzilla review page...but not tonight, Gracie. That damn laundry, I tell ya. You can read it on Widge's review of Godzilla now, though. The site Yahoo! doesn't want you to see -- really, so Widge tells me.) Anyway, it's safe to say Widge-man had an extreme negative reaction upon viewing the film, and while we were exchanging emails discussing the film, Widge comes up with the two words that sum up what this year's Godzilla is all about to me:
Immortal fish. There's a scene where Our Heroes find the nest of G-man, the place where he/she/it brought the fish the military had thoughtfully provided. And to establish that, yes, this was the place where the fish were at, we get to see them lying on the ground. Including one that's still alive, flopping back and forth after all this time out of the water (not to mention surviving being regurgitated by Godzilla.)
That's the film, distilled down into two words -- immortal fish. If you can buy that, you'll buy this film.
Am I going way overboard here? No, I don't think so -- follow my line of thought out, then decide if you want to use the nail gun on me. Anything else you might have disliked about this movie was personal -- the music, the camera work, having Godzilla partially misted by the rain, the acting, the FX, the story, whatever...but the scene with the immortal fish struck home with me. It was at that point I realized there were two ways I could go with this film: enjoy it for what it is, or don't. But if your brain isn't housed inside a jaded filmgoer like myself, and you walked out of the theater enjoying what you saw, that's fine too. Unfortunately for the Sony crew, the jaded brain also happens to be hooked up to the 'net.
Without ever having met Dean Devlin or Roland Emmerich, I think they'd probably be cool guys to talk shop with, discuss the nuances of science fiction films, or how cool McTiernan's Die Hard was the first time you experienced it. But this isn't about whether or not the people who made Godzilla had their hearts in the right place, or if we as a community approaching the twenty first century don't need to take a break from constantly bashing something we don't like. I think the stakes are far more serious.
It's about style over substance. "Size does matter," the film's tagline reads, suggesting the scale of the budget, the year-long build-up to opening day, the (not-so) hidden new design of the new Godzilla, all these things and the other marketable elements are now considered the most important factors to how you'll perceive this film. Size doesn't matter: story matters. Whether or not Titanic made the most money of any film in the history of cinema doesn't matter twenty years from now, and the same holds true for the lower-than-expected Memorial Day box office figures for Godzilla. What matters when you come right down to it is if you buy the story. And we're not just talking 'A-happens to B, which causes C to happen to D' and so on; we're talking the whole storytelling effect the picture has on you. Acting is a part of it, sure. So is the rest of the package, including your script (the marketing is like adding ketchup to your burger -- nice, but not necessary if the burger is already that good.) But there can be a moment when an invisible line is crossed between buying the concept (one where a giant mutated lizard stomps on the big apple) and instead you realize that you're simply watching a movie projected on a screen. Those immortal fish are the start of the downfall of the movie. Add to those fish the helicopter pilots who forget they can fly up out of Godzilla's reach, or submarine commanders who don't confirm a kill, or any number of two dozen other dumb character decisions and suddenly that magic bubble the movie creators had hoped to create, the one where you buy what's happening on the screen, that all falls apart. Then you start to notice the rest of the mistakes: bad acting from the principals; filler scenes that are supposed to make you feel pathos for the characters but instead make you wish that the monster hadn't dissapeared; gaps of logic where you start wondering how something that big could just dissapear, or how something that big could lay its eggs inside of a domed building less than half its size; and so on.
In my opinion, Twister isn't a great movie. I've yet to find one person who gave a damn about the reconciliation between Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton's characters. Ask most people about Twister and they'll say "Cool flying cow, man!" But even though it had its score of implausible moments (don't get me started), it didn't go too far over that line. Yeah, the people who chase storms for a career will tell you Our Heroes in Twister would've had their skin peeled off their bodies had a real F5 descended overtop of them but you don't care at that moment. You've bought it because enough of the previous material you've seen meshes with your view of the world and how it operates. If you had been subjected to enough dumb moments in the preceding hour and a half like Cary Elwes' character, the Competing Twister Scientist in his black van driving headlong into a twister that you know will kill him, you'd have given up long ago on the film.
Each of us have a moment or time when we see the 'immortal fish' for what they are: sloppy storytelling. Audiences are willing to forgive and forget a lot of things most of the time, but something tells me Godzilla will have a more difficult of a time succeeding this summer than what a lot of us thought mere weeks ago. If you dislike the movie, you have your own reason, your own 'immortal fish' factor. Whatever that reason, that's why we each have our own favorite shows and worst-of-all-time stinkers. For me, Godzilla is a miss, and I wish it was otherwise. Maybe you'll enjoy it better than I did.
Dean, Roland, Sony people, next time do this: spend more time having Godzilla stomp stuff. Don't worry so much about character arcs, the human condition or spelling out the plot to the audience. Sometimes the appeal of mass entertainment is to just see a big guy in a foam rubber suit step on model buildings, or wrestle with a three-headed space dragon. Really, sometimes that's just it.
Patrick Sauriol
Creator, Chief Content Writer & Director
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