Godzilla Isn't a Train Wreck, But It Sure Is Boring

Despite some impressive CG and genuinely pleasurable moments, Godzilla too often feels determined to pull you away from interesting things in order to show you... less interesting things.
Image courtesy Warner Bros.
Image courtesy Warner Bros.

Godzilla always has been a strange beast. Born from the ashes of post-WWII Japan, it was a slumbering monster awakened by nuclear tests—a threat to Japan but also the reaction to that threat, and a metaphor both for the looming specter of nuclear warfare and the national trauma it caused.

Over the years, however, Godzilla changed dramatically, transforming first from menace to savior, and later to mascot and ultimately cinematic legend. Now, after we've almost forgotten the extremely unfortunate 1998 attempt, director Gareth Edwards finally has brought a remake of the classic Japanese film to American shores. And while it certainly is a respectful film, one deeply aware of the history of its franchise, it's not a particularly interesting one.

The highlight of the film, surprising nobody, is Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston as Joe Brody, a scientist-turned-Godzilla-truther, along with the severely underutilized Juliette Binoche as his wife. If you've see the preview, you've heard Cranston's grim, half-screamed warning, “It's going to send us back to the Stone Age!” If only the rest of the film were so gripping. Alas, the focus quickly shifts from Joe to his son Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), the far less interesting Ken Doll deemed a handsomer and more suitable companion for our journey.

It's a very American change as well; although the Japanese Godzilla films tended to be about the citizenry's unified response to disaster, the U.S. version transposes the role of humanity into a far more singular and ubiquitously square-jawed savior: the great American hero, handsome Lt. Brody. Without spoiling too much of the story, he's a Navy bomb specialist currently on leave, motivated to stop the monsters partly by sad events in his past. He also ends up trying to save his own endangered family (of course), which is made of Pretty Blonde Wife and Adorable Child, neither of whom are memorable enough for their names to matter. Although they ostensibly form the emotional core of the movie and Edwards spends a lot of time cutting away to them, they feel more like tropes than people, a familiar “motivation” spell invoked by yet another movie magician chanting the same words as countless people before him.

All of this might be forgivable if the movie delivered on the slam-bang monster battles everybody came to see. But despite some impressive CG that evokes a couple of genuinely pleasurable boo-ya moments, Godzilla too often feels determined to pull you away from interesting things in order to show you... less interesting things. At first, this seems like an attempt at coyness, the same sort of tactical modesty we saw in the previews where we glimpsed naught but an ankle or wrist of fair Godzilla.

However, at a certain point in every seduction, the clothes have to come off. And yet even well into the film—and long after we've seen the full, scaly monty—the camera remains strangely prudish about the action everyone came to see, pulling away just as it's about to get interesting.

Case in point: The first big monster fight. The non-Godzilla monsters in the film are called M.U.T.O.s (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms). When one starts wreaking havoc in a major U.S. city, there's a dramatic moment when a very large, familiar foot seems to stand in its way. That's when we finally pan up to our first full shot of Godzilla in all his massive, roaring glory, preparing to kick some gangly M.U.T.O. butt. “Yeah!” you want shout from your seat, “It's on!” Of course, this is when the movie cuts away.

Many viewers may initially think the following scene—where the fight rages mostly offscreen on a news program watched by Adorable Child—is merely interstitial, and we will soon enough cut back to the Rampage-style destruction. Nope! Battle over. Although this cut was lauded as “audacious” filmmaking by another website, I have a different word for it: Boring.

It's worth noting that like many of the later Godzilla movies, the titular monster in Edwards' remake is not actually a villain; rather, he's a part of the natural order, a force that arises to restore balance by destroying the two M.U.T.O.s. Much like Joker once suggested about Batman, their relationship isn't just adversarial, it's symbiotic. This Godzilla is the equal and opposite reaction to the M.U.T.O.s, just as as surely as the original Godzilla once was to the specter of nuclear power.

Unlike the original film, however, it's far less clear what Godzilla or his foes are supposed to represent. Although there are scenes that evoke the massive 2011 tsunami—and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster that followed—any clear or meaningful analogy (Japan's ultimate embrace of nuclear energy? global warming?) gets swept under the larger, more nebulous umbrella of “natural balance.”

The gangly four-legged M.U.T.O.s that Godzilla is tasked with "balancing" are a bit reminiscent of the monster from Cloverfield. That film that came to mind several times during Godzilla, not only as its predecessor as American kaiju film, but as one that was similarly obsessed with not actually looking at its monster. Although this horror tactic was extremely effective for its “found-footage” premise and focus on the street-level carnage, in Godzilla it proves merely frustrating. Even during the big finale, when the film should be delivering the sort of battleship-swinging action that made Pacific Rim so bombastic and thrilling, we keep zooming back to the tedious, seemingly foregone conclusion of young Lt. Brody's subplot.

Indeed, I couldn't stop thinking about Pacific Rim either, the far more recent film by kaiju superfan Guillermo del Toro that is as surely a product of Godzilla history as this reboot. But while del Toro's spiritual successor remained deeply aware of its tropes and the pleasures of the genre, it was determined to build on them—to treat them as toys in the box, not somber, weighty icons. The first 10 minutes of Pacific Rim are a metafictional supertour through kaiju cinematic history, from its devastating origins to its commercialization. Then, after it finishes looking backward, it looks forward and says, “What next?” Godzilla never gets around to asking that question.

We often wish that we could experience the media of our youth not as they actually were, but as we remember them: all the joy and pleasure we once felt, reformulated to fit the more sophisticated tastes of who we are today. Where Pacific Rim was so bright and badass that it felt as big as those memories, Godzilla is a more dutiful—but distinctly American—blockbuster: eager to genuflect to its elders, but unable to channel the pathos, weirdness or glory that made us love them in the first place.