GODZILLA (US - 2014) Directed by Gareth Edwards. Written by Max Borenstein. Cast: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ken Watanabe, Bryan Cranston, David Strathairn, Elizabeth Olsen, Juliette Binoche, Sally Hawkins, Richard T. Jones, Victor Rasuk, Al Sapienza, Taylor Nichols, Carson Bolde, CJ Adams. (PG-13, 123 mins)
The second attempt at an American GODZILLA serves to commemorate the iconic monster's 60th anniversary as well as erase any lingering trauma left by Roland Emmerich's universally-despised 1998 GODZILLA. Emmerich's "Zilla" was so reviled by Godzilla purists that 2004's GODZILLA: FINAL WARS (thus far the final film in the official Toho franchise) brought Zilla onboard and, in one of the all-time great big-screen disses, had Godzilla kill it in a matter of seconds. Director Gareth Edwards previously helmed the overrated 2010 monster movie MONSTERS, which was unique in its minimalist approach but lacking overall even though it already has a devoted cult following. Edwards' affinity for Godzilla is obvious and he does a nice job of honoring its legacy as well as reshaping it for today's audiences. Edwards knows he has to eventually give the audience what it wants, but he utilizes the same kind of anticipatory buildup that young Steven Spielberg used on JAWS and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, letting the tension mount and making Godzilla's entrance--about an hour into the film--a truly impressive sight to be behold. This is the biggest and most imposing Godzilla has ever been onscreen, but in finding some common ground between his low-budget MONSTERS roots and this mega-budget GODZILLA, Edwards often seems to be working at cross purposes. It wasn't uncommon in the Toho productions of old for Godzilla's appearance to be delayed, and Edwards paces his film as such that even though Godzilla doesn't make his entrance until halfway through, it still works because it's just the way this story flows to that point. Edwards also takes a page out of Spielberg's JAWS playbook by not showing too much. There are very few full-on shots of Godzilla and even that isn't a problem. The biggest mistake Edwards makes is that Godzilla simply isn't in the film enough, and it's a film that frequently seems to relegate its namesake to a minor supporting character and could just as easily have been titled ATTACK OF THE MUTOS.
The "MUTO"'s are "Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms." Opening with a prologue set in 1999, Japanese scientist Dr. Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) and his colleague Dr. Graham (Sally Hawkins) are investigating a creature skeleton found in the Philippines with evidenced of hatched eggs. At the same time, a Japanese power plant explodes, and American supervisor Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) has been tracking strange seismic shifts. The explosion, which kills several scientists including Brody's wife (Juliette Binoche), is blamed on an earthquake and the entire area is quarantined due to intense radiation. 15 years later, Brody is a raving conspiracy theorist convinced that there's no radiation in the area and that the Japanese and American military are covering something up regarding the truth behind the explosion. Of course, he's right. His Navy explosive experts son Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) has to go to Japan to get his father out of jail and the two are eventually arrested for trespassing in the quarantined area. They're met by Serizawa and Graham, who are on the scene and recognize the same seismic patterns Brody was talking about 15 years earlier. It's then that the first MUTO, a winged arachnid-esque creature, appears. Serizawa deduces that it feeds on radiation and was trying to send a signal to a second MUTO that they trace to a nuclear waste site in the desert outside of Las Vegas. But the signal was also heard by another creature, an ancient god resting near the core of the earth. Known as "Godzilla," it has the power to restore balance to the natural order of things, and Serizawa is convinced that it will rise to fight the MUTOs, one of which is female and looking for a place to lay hundreds of eggs. From Japan to Hawaii to Vegas and finally to San Francisco, the monsters will wreak havoc and do battle, and oh yeah, Ford has to figure out how to get back to his wife (Elizabeth Olsen) and son (Carson Bolde) in San Francisco.
True to the Godzilla that most fans love, Edwards opts to make him a good guy here, despite his villainous, horrific kaiju origins in Ishiro Honda's 1954 classic. As those films went on and were aimed at younger and younger audiences, Godzilla eventually became a good guy who would even do victory dances after winning a kaiju battle. Godzilla is the hero here, but that doesn't mean he's any less furious. His final battle with the MUTOs culiminates in perhaps Godzilla's angriest moment in the last 60 years. It's a crowd-pleasing capper to the expected fight, but Edwards fumbles the ball a few times. I heard grumbling from the audience on a few occasions where a Godzilla/MUTO throwdown was about to happen and Edwards cuts back to whatever Ford is doing. It's one thing to subvert expectations and formula, but that's dangerously close to just being a contrarian dick. It's commendable that Edwards has no interest in turning this into a generic Michael Bay-style, quick-cut, shaky-cam, video-game, CGI blur--and the CGI on display throughout GODZILLA is top-notch and proof that it can look good when the filmmakers want it to--but why cut away from a kaiju battle? Edwards walks a fine line and mostly ends up on the right side with the film's effective pacing, less-is-more reveals, and some stunning visual effects, but when he ends up on the wrong side, it's glaring and deflating. The actors are fine, but no one cares about Ford, especially when Watanabe's Serizawa (a nice nod to the 1954 film for those in the know) is the far more interesting character (it's too bad Watanabe and Hawkins vanish for most of the last third of the film). Taylor-Johnson has little to do other than run from place to place and doesn't really have much to build on, though I suppose it's nice that Edwards and screenwriter Max Borenstein (with uncredited contributions by Frank Darabont) didn't turn him or Navy Admiral Stenz (David Strathairn) into the kind of slogan-spouting, flag-waving cartoons that most films of this sort would.
It's got some major flaws (the climactic battle is sometimes too dark and murky-looking for its own good), but overall, GODZILLA is a fun time, especially in the almost quaintly old-school way that it's made. The suspense is allowed to build, the action sequences are coherent, the CGI is done with care, and the monsters are genuinely frightening. It's as much a tribute to Spielberg as it is to Godzilla. This is once again a situation--OCULUS was another recent one--where it's a surprise that a film is made in an almost defiantly old-fashioned way and manages to stick out from the crowd simply for looking more like a movie instead of a video game. I like Edwards' Spielbergian mindset. It shows he's studied the classics, he knows what works, and he knows what doesn't need fixed. We've seen it enough times that we're maybe a little numb to its magic, but remember the first time you saw JAWS or JURASSIC PARK? Remember that feeling? Edwards goes for that here and sometimes pulls it off. Sometimes he doesn't and makes some questionable decisions that have the best intentions but seem to stem from him wanting to go too far in the opposite direction. No one needs a feature-length WWE battle, but at the same time, cutting away from kaiju throwdowns is a risky move that provoked audible frustration in the crowd. Edwards gets enough right that this is a good GODZILLA, but his missteps prevent it from being a great one. Yes, it's a classic compared to Emmerich's botch job, and while every dollar is up there on the screen and it looks fantastic, I'm still partial to the guys running around in monster suits while demolishing scale models of Tokyo.
Directed by Guillermo del Toro. Written by Travis Beacham and Guillermo del Toro. Cast: Charlie Hunnam, Idris Elba, Rinko Kikuchi, Charlie Day, Ron Perlman, Clifton Collins, Jr., Burn Gorman, Max Martini, Rob Kazinsky, Santiago Segura, Brad William Henke, Robin Thomas. (PG-13, 131 mins)
While squarely in the confines of "huge summer blockbuster," fantasy auteur Guillermo del Toro makes a concerted effort to put PACIFIC RIM in the realm of his distinct cinematic universe. The colors, the production and costume design, the creatures...all have that vivid del Toro feel, but when it's all over, it's still just another example the same kind of gargantuan big-screen destruction porn you'd find in any random summer multiplex colossus, with the similar fast, video-gamey editing (though not to the extreme degree) that causes your eyes to glaze over like most of the second half of MAN OF STEEL and almost all of STAR TREK: INTO DARKNESS. PACIFIC RIM gets a nice boost from the heart and soul put into it by del Toro, who dedicates the film to monster masters Ray Harryhausen and Ishiro Honda, but it also stands as an example of the struggle filmmakers like del Toro face when they're given $200 million to spend on pet projects: del Toro gets enough of "del Toro" in there to keep the fans who've followed him in the 20 years since CRONOS from crying "Sellout!", but once the CGI overload kicks into high gear in the second half, I dunno...I just kinda checked out.
In the near future, alien creatures known as kaiju burrowed up from beneath the Earth and attacked major world cities. The governments of the world set aside their differences to work together, building giant robots called jaegers, controlled by the body movements and thoughts of two military pilots stationed in the head, their minds melded by a process called "drifting," to attack and defeat them before they reach the shorelines. Within five years, the jaegers are a triumphant force, with jaeger pilots being treated like global rock stars, but the evolving kaiju begin to anticipate their actions. The jaeger program's decline starts when cocky ace pilot Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam) loses his co-pilot/older brother in a battle. Seven years pass, and Raleigh, living on his own and picking up construction jobs, is called back to service by his jaeger commander Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba) for one last hurrah before the faltering program is terminated by the UN: working with dweeby, motor-mouthed comic relief scientist Dr. Geiszler (Charlie Day), Pentecost has a plan to nuke the breach between the center of the earth and the tunnel burrowed by the kaiju. Things get complicated when Geiszler attempts to "drift" with part of a still-living kaiju brain, enabling him to get a first-hand look at the kaiju memories where he finds out their true origin and purpose.
I have to admit that in the weeks leading up to PACIFIC RIM's release, I wasn't enthused. It looked too much like a mega-budget take on Stuart Gordon's 1990 cult classic ROBOT JOX. But...so far, so good. The script by del Toro and Travis Beacham (the 2010 remake of CLASH OF THE TITANS) displays much imagination and wit in the early-going, and that continues with the introduction of Hunnam's SONS OF ANARCHY nemesis and frequent del Toro star Ron Perlman (CRONOS, HELLBOY) as a black-market kaiju remains dealer named Hannibal Chau. Chau conducts his shady business in a Hong Kong red-light district called The Bone Slums, constructed around the skeletal remains of a long-dead kaiju. These are very creative, inspired, and distinct del Toro touches (the look and color scheme of The Bone Yards had me wishing more of the film took place there). But once the "nuke the breach" plot is set in motion, del Toro hands the film off to the CGI teams for one showdown after another. Some of them have very cool touches (Raleigh "drifts" with Rinko Kikuchi's Mako Mori in his old jaeger Gipsy Danger, which finishes off one kaiju by wielding a ship from the Hong Kong harbor likes it's a sword), but PACIFIC ROOM ultimately devolves into complete clichés (any chance Raleigh and a rival jaeger pilot will reach a mutual understanding of one another?). The last 30 minutes of the film is little but clanking noise, whether it's the sounds of constant destruction or the characters yelling every predictable line of dialogue, which usually has someone bellowing "Let's do this!" or "Let's finish this!" The actors do a good job, particularly Elba, effectively conveying a stern feeling of no-nonsense authority and putting his personal troubles on the backburner for the sake of humanity. Perlman is a lot of fun, completely stealing the few scenes he's in, with his first appearance an hour in actually getting applause from the audience.
At its core, PACIFIC RIM is a B-movie. But with no expenses spared, it loses some of the feeling of the classic kaiju films that inspired it. It works best when del Toro is free to be del Toro, but once he starts fulfilling his obligations to Warner Bros. and bringing on the large-scale CGI destruction, it just starts to feel like any other routine Hollywood product. You can make these things as huge and with as much state-of-the-art technology as possible (and to its credit, PACIFIC RIM's CGI is very well-done), but when you start thinking how much more fun it would be to just watch an old-school Toho GODZILLA flick instead, with guys in rubber suits throwing themselves around a cheap set, well, then something's missing. I don't mean to be curmudgeonly about it--PACIFIC RIM is an overall entertaining movie with much to like--but it just left me a little cold. I guess it's a matter of bigger not always being better.
