God-awful
Despite being well-stocked with Oscar-nominated actors the new "Godzilla" is worst yet
Books, arts and culture
by N.B.
THE genius of Ishiro Honda's original "Godzilla" (1954) was in its balance of silliness and seriousness. On the one hand, it had an actor in a paunchy rubber lizard costume knocking over cardboard buildings. On the other hand, it evoked the horrors of nuclear destruction with an anguish that is still affecting 60 years on. In contrast, the numerous sequels veered away from politics and towards out-and-out cartoonishness. When Roland Emmerich made a daft, New York-centric "Godzilla" in 1998, it contained very few traces of the original film's DNA.
The latest Hollywood reboot is being marketed as a return to the apocalyptic darkness that made Mr Honda's seminal masterpiece so powerful. The cast is stocked with Oscar nominees, including Sally Hawkins and Juliette Binoche, and its British director, Gareth Edwards, made an impressive debut in 2010 with "Monsters", a soulful, low-budget indie film that nonetheless featured some genuinely awe-inspiring tentacled aliens.
Alas, the required balance of silliness and seriousness proves to be beyond even him. His "Godzilla" has one of the most risible screenplays in the franchise's six-decade history, but he attempts to disguise the idiocy by blanketing it in unremitting dullness.
The root of the absurdity is that Godzilla is just one of the film's three over-sized antagonists. Long before the title character stomps to centre stage, we're introduced to another monster—a vaguely robotic insectoid that is supposedly a remnant of a prehistoric species. When it stamps its spindly foot it sends out an electromagnetic pulse that disables all the electronic equipment for miles around. Presumably this trait wasn't very useful during Earth's primordial past.
David Strathairn plays a naval officer with no characterisation beyond the designation "naval officer", but he proves that he deserves his Oscar nomination by keeping a straight face while naming the creature Muto, and explaining that this is an acronym for Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism. Just when the viewer has finished chortling, a second Muto pops up, requiring another Oscar-nominee, Ken Watanabe, to frown solemnly as he announces, "If the Mutos have spawned, they'll be building a nest." How he learnt the nesting habits of a colossal radioactive flea, which last walked the earth a million years ago, is never revealed. And then, after an hour and a half, Godzilla finally clashes with the Mutos. "I believe he's here to restore balance," intones Mr Watanabe. Strangely, no one says, "Sorry, but why exactly do you believe that?"
Some readers may be inclined to point out that films about 100-metre-high fire-breathing dinosaurs don't have to be strictly logical. And, to be fair, if a monster movie has the pulpy energy and visual pizzazz of, say, Guillermo Del Toro's Godzilla/Transformers mash-up, "Pacific Rim", a certain amount of boneheadedness is forgivable. But "Godzilla" is a long, glum slog with a murky colour scheme best described as "50 shades of grey". Its bomb-disposing hero (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is a brawny bore, poor Godzilla is reduced to the status of a supporting player, and, worst of all, whenever the computer-generated leviathans are on screen, Mr Edwards seems intent on hiding them, as if he's embarrassed to have them in his film. When a Muto lays waste to Las Vegas, all we see is a snippet of the carnage on a black-and-white surveillance monitor. And when Godzilla confronts the American Navy at the Golden Gate Bridge, the battle is observed at night, through driving rain and a smeary bus window. Mr Edwards might as well be standing in front of the cinema screen, shouting, "Move along, please! Nothing to see here!"
The right way to balance seriousness and silliness in a Godzilla film, it seems, is to have a thoughtful script about nuclear dread offset by some spectacular scenes of behemoth-vs-humanity devastation. Mr Edwards' method is to switch things around, so that the screenplay is laughable but the mood and visuals are as drab as possible. His main achievement is to make Mr Emmerich's version seem halfway decent after all.
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