Godzilla Knows Best

Poor old G. He's tired, kinda fat, and withered enough to not want to be bothered anymore. But once again the pesky humans have whipped themselves up a fresh, steaming batch of trouble, and the only thing that can solve it is the world's largest iguana.

Like Rocky Balboa, G looks like he's had a bit of work done in the latest Godzilla iteration. Bulkier than his 1998 self, which pranced through the streets of New York like Shirley MacLaine (another terrifying old dinosaur), this version remains a sad cry from the monster that stomped Tokyo to smithereens. Still, he's got sand, as they used to say. And when the old guy staggers into the ring like a vintage prizefighter, willing to go nine rounds for stupid humanity, you have to give a little cheer.

One has to wonder, though: are we really worth the fight? The biggest problem for Godzilla isn't the other monsters. Really, their motivations are quite simple; it's the humans and their endless cavalcade of bad decisions that cause the trouble. Nuclear power, global warming and their infernal constant messing with the natural order of all things are just the beginning.

Forgive me for sometimes feeling this way, but if I were Godzilla -- and who hasn't dreamed of that at one point in their life? -- I would squish humans like I do ants on the countertop, running around in crazy circles, trying to outmaneuver the almighty finger of God. But the latest Godzilla is a better person than me, it seems, and he tries to do the right thing. He may step on a few random folks, but that's the price you pay when monsters do your work for you.

To cut to the chase, is the new remake of Godzilla any good? Is it worth the schlep on the SkyTrain to the Cineplex, $17 for a ticket, another $20 for snacks, and the long wait to get home while track maintenance bogs the whole system down?

The answer is: it depends. There are a few moments that almost redeem this monstrosity into an entertaining movie. They do not a good movie make, however, but they're all you're going to get, so suck on that, along with your $20 popcorn. (Or you can simply wait for the 60th anniversary reissue of the original film, on its way from Rialto Pictures.)

Ho-hum, we're under siege

It's worth taking another look at the Japanese original, if only to remember the true origins of the monster. Director Ishiro Honda's original version of Godzilla, made in 1954, was a reaction to the horrors of nuclear weapons that went right down to the lizard's skin, designed to resemble the keloid scars of the survivors of a nuclear blast. Over the years Godzilla has gone back and forth between defender and destroyer, and in this most recent version benevolence has its way, to the detriment of the story.

Director Gareth Edwards knows his way around monsters, having made his debut with the film Monsters. The action begins at a nice clip, from the opening credit sequence which reads like a redacted CIA memo, to the vintage footage of nuclear testing in the Bikini Atoll. All is as it should be, and like a proper Gojira film, the story begins in Japan.

But things quickly begin to go awry, with a bunch of white folks barking orders and carrying on like they're the only people anyone should listen to. Bryan Cranston plays Joe Brody, a nuclear scientist who accidentally stumbles upon something huge at the nuclear power plant. Of course, no one wants to listen, and all holy hell breaks loose. His wife (Juliette Binoche) is killed in a core meltdown, and the entire incident is witnessed from afar by their young son Ford.

Jump forward 15 years, and little Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) has grown a thick neck and shoulders and made his own family. As a military bomb specialist, he is newly returned stateside from some undisclosed area of conflict and reunited with his own family, his deeply boring wife Elle (Elizabeth Olsen) and their adorably dull kid. It's hard to work up much feeling for this nuclear crew. They could be cutouts from a magazine, so little genuine personality do they evince. Every time Ford Brody appeared onscreen, I was tempted to take a nap.

Unsurprisingly, it comes down to a lone white hero-saving wife and child who passively wait to be rescued. The vapidity of this almost does the film in, especially as all of the principals appear to share one bland expression between them. The only person who is "freaking the fuck out!" is Joe Brody (played again by too-much-meth Bryan Cranston). No one else seems all that surprised by the fact that giant prehistoric beasts are pounding major American cities into powdered sugar. Occasionally in the midst of rampant destruction, I pondered the failure of American infrastructure. What kind of building codes are they adhering to down there? Office towers, highways and bridges crumble like pie crust at the slightest touch of the giant lizard's tail. But I digress.

Even though humans are beside the point in the film, they still insist on taking up the bulk of onscreen time. You could cheerfully slice away half of the film and lose absolutely nothing but inertia. Godzilla himself doesn't make an appearance until almost 30 minutes into the action. There's nothing wrong with delayed gratification; think about the extended buildup in Aliens, where the eponymous xenomorphs don't show up for the first third of the action. But the people in Godzilla are boring as hell.

I can't think of another film where I was less interested in the people at the centre of the action. Even boring old Brad Pitt in World War Z was slightly more interesting than Ford Brody, the most generic human to ever walk the earth. Faced with certain annihilation in the dripping jaws of a giant monster, what does our Ford do but offer up a blank stare? He could be at Costco looking at air mattresses for all the excitement he exerts. But it matters not: as the folks around me in the theatre indicated, by their scattered claps and wordless exhortations, they were there to see only one thing: Godzilla destroy.

Godzilla, the father

He destroys alright, but it takes an awful lot of plot to get there. In this version, a team of scientific types, Dr. Ishiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) and Graham (Sally Hawkins), are on the trail of some oversized gnats (Mosura). Like Godzilla, the Mosura are creatures from another epoch, a time when the Earth was a far more radioactive place. They have been biding their time, sucking at the teat of downed nuclear power stations, waiting for their moment to rise and sex it up.

The Mosura are a mating pair, a flying male and a larger, Earth-bound female sporting a large squirmy egg sack. Sexy! Mama has a clutch of babies that she wants to birth, and nothing is going to get in the way of that biological imperative. Just as I was happily anticipating a revealing demonstration of insect lovemaking techniques, high above the towers of San Francisco Godzilla the father shows up. Sigh... there are no mounting sequences or sex organs the size of subway trains in action.

Godzilla, you could say, is the ultimate prophylactic, determined to stop the Mosura from getting it on even if he has to flatten San Francisco to do it. In this he's like an enormous, 1950's dad: stodgy, uptight and rubbery, Godzilla knows best. He roars and smacks the sexy monsters right in the kisser, or maybe the stinger. It's hard to tell sometimes.

It always comes down to sex and death, it seems. In this, Edward's film is a feat of magpie thievery, pulling shiny bits and pieces from a host of other films, like Aliens, Pacific Rim, even The Host. The birth, death and slime motif that characterized so much of H. R. Giger's artwork in the Alien franchise shows up here as well, in dripping columns of egg sacks. But unlike Aliens, where the humans were as interesting as the monster, there is no one to care about in Godzilla. The humans mope along, like they're being forced to play. They don't even swear. If you were face to face with an 100-foot lizard, wouldn't you be tempted to drop at least a few f-bombs? It makes you long for someone to relate to. Where is Private William Hudson when you need him?

There are no Hudsons or Hicks or Vasquezes here. All we get are boring do-gooders, but maybe that's the point. No one much remembers that Raymond Burr was inserted into the remake of the first Godzilla film, to make it more palatable for American release. No one remembers the human drama that attended the first film either: side plots about arranged marriages and doomed love affairs. So it will be here, with the tired subplot device of missing fathers: Ford Brody, abandoned by his own father, must reclaim his son to bring things full circle, helped along by the ultimate giant Daddy. None of that has much impact. The only thing that truly endures is the monster himself.

The grand glory

This is how the film redeems itself, sort of. It's nice to see the old guy. When he finally shows up and does battle, the entire point of the film is hammered home. This is what it's all about: smashing, grand destruction, monster-on-monster, a spectacle of old, bang, pow, big, bigger and biggest. The crowd came to life when the final battle sequence finally took hold. It's what we paid good money to see -- giant monsters beating the shit out of each other.

What does that say about us? Best not to think on that too long, lest the tiny bits of pleasure to be had in the film get sucked away.

Scale is really the subject of Godzilla, as it has been for most of the tent-pole summer releases. Disasters can't come small anymore; they must blot out the sky and rain destruction on a biblical scale. The problem is that if you've seen one end-of-the-world scenario, you've seen them all. Whether it's tsunamis, nuclear meltdowns, or rain like a Vancouver weekend, it all looks the same after a while. A few moments of genuine invention, even novelty, go a very long way.

That said, I leave you with two truly thrilling scenes. In one, the U.S. military is trying to transport a nuclear missile via train to the West Coast, to be used as a carrot to tease the Mosura away from densely populated areas. (Remember that they eat radioactive materials.) But the giant creatures have other ideas in mind, as they creep and stalk the stupid humans in a silent dance of predator and prey.

"There it is," I thought. The feeling I'd been waiting for, the moment that pulls one out of oneself and into the screen. Escape, pure sweet escape. It does not last, unfortunately, the film returning to the slog of bad decisions and weary exposition.

The other moment of genuine joy is the final scene, where the grand glory of Godzilla is revealed in all his screaming peacock majesty. Scattered applause attended this triumphant end, then all was silence and shuffling feet. Our rough, paternal beast, his hour (or two, in this case) had come at last, and now he was free to return to his armchair, shake out his newspaper and complain about the stock market.