Godzilla

A noteworthy example of the post 9-11 sublime, Gareth Edward’s 120 million dollar “Godzilla” features splendid panoramas of skyscrapers collapsing into turbulent clouds of dust and swirling bluish fog. In one scene of this kind, a city -- it’s San Francisco -- dissolves into a volcanic firestorm while a vast gargoyle-creature observes from a perch on another crumbling glass tower. The story, which is laboriously complex, has no importance and the characters are stolid mannequins emblematic of valor, fortitude, fear and familial loyalty: small children frequently are the first to behold the behemoths emerging from the depths of murky CGI green-screens, a device that avoids the problem of showing an adult reaction to what is essentially a childish spectacle. (The children gaze at the monsters with loving incomprehension and fascination.) Some critics have complained that it takes this film too long to get underway, that there is too much exposition -- it is a sad thing when mainstream critics on film reveal that they, too, have developed the attention-span of hyper-active Ritalin-dependent teenagers. In fact, in pictures of this genre -- the giant monster or “kaiju” film --the anticipation of the leviathan’s appearance is generally the best part of the film, the most delicious part of the narrative. Once the big fellows appear, the picture collapses, like of one of its fragile skyscrapers, into fisticuffs between men in rubber suits, creatures flailing around with one another against a backdrop of paper-mache buildings and smoke-effects -- generally, the climaxes of films of this sort are, by definition, anti-climactic. This monstrously expensive CGI extravaganza is no exception -- the centerpiece of the last twenty minutes of the movie is two guys in rubber suits battling in a dark, unconvincing void filled with knee-high fires and explosions. All the money in the world, it seems, can’t eradicate this fundamental feature of these kinds of movies -- a fact that is, indeed, okay with this writer. The viewer is satisfied if a few minutes, even a few shots, are sufficiently beautiful and poetic in their sheer destructive frenzy to make the film worthwhile. In this case, I can recommend this movie to people who like this kind of film without reservation on the basis of one fine sequence: for reasons that are unclear, a hundred paratroopers dive into the maelstrom of the burning, monster-ravaged city from 30,000 feet -- the movie terms this a “halo-entry.” The paratroopers carry red flares and they fall like bombs, like Milton’s Lucifer, through a tempestuous sky into the vortex where the monsters, veiled in smoke and hurricanes of dust, are battling-- we see the falling flare-like paratroopers, glimpses of the monsters, seas of fire, facades falling down, all of this from a meteor-like aerial perspective. It is a wonderful scene, like a Chinese screen on which dragons are dueling in a typhoon, and scored to elegiac music that sounds like a chorus of wind-borne voices, something, perhaps, by Ligeti or Khatchaturian. (Most of the music in the movie is utterly atrocious, deafening, and redundant -- when two 600 foot beasts are battling against a backdrop of burning towers, we don’t really need dramatic movie-music to underscore the drama.) For all the money lavished on this picture, most of the CGI stuff is done is a foggy murk, bluish gloom that is profoundly unrealistic and that demonstrates that the film-makers have not solved the problem of making these monsters look even remotely realistic. When you pay your money for a film of this kind, you want to see the creatures fighting on a well-lit proscenium -- either a giant bathtub foaming with turquoise water or a card board city. I prefer the lyricism of the fake, the hokey, the unreal to the typical CGI murk in which these pictures present their fragmented and expensive special effects. And I want the rules to be followed: why doesn’t Godzilla deploy his famous radioactive breath sooner in the film.? (Although once the big guy starts using his mouth as a flame-thrower against his foes the effect is spectacular -- in one shot, Godzilla literally vomits incandescent fire down the throat of a MUTO, a Massive Unknown Terrestrial Object, causing the creature’s mantis-like head to come off in his claws.) Godzilla seems to be pulling his punches when he fights the evil creatures, probably to make the long movie even longer. Too repetitive to be truly thrilling -- the film features not one but three implausible races against the pressure-wave of a huge detonation -- a film of this sort is best appreciated silent, with the sound turned down, listening to Debussy, perhaps, as a sort of wild, disreputable poetry.