Thanks, I Hate It: Godzilla

2014's Godzilla, directed by Gareth Edwards and written by Max Borenstein, is a disaster movie. There's nothing inherently wrong with this. Titanic is a good disaster movie. So's Force Majeure. Where both diverge from Edwards' film is in their understanding that it's human connection and psychology which make disaster interesting, not the other way around. Godzilla simply shows us disaster and trusts that it'll be enough to keep us entertained. Juliette Binoche and Bryan Cranston both die before the one hour mark, Binoche without having said more than twenty words, and the film's square-jawed soldier protagonist, their son, is a non-character with all the presence of a wooden post. Nor is the disaster material itself -- trembling shots of buildings collapsing and dull, dingy monsters colliding ponderously -- much to look at. You could see the same in any superhero movie.

For a disaster film to succeed it must commit its focus to either the power of the catastrophe or the struggle of those caught up in it. Godzilla does neither, shuffling from airless spectacle to shopworn dialogue with no connecting thread or interplay between the two. Neither succeeds in altering the framing of the other, resulting in a sterile and disjointed film with precious few flashes of engaging emotional insight. The movie's only real moment of connection occurs when the titanic moth-like MUTOs reunite in the final act, nuzzling one another as bioluminescence flickers up and down their thoraxes. By contrast the film's monsters are exceptionally boring to watch in action, doing everything in painful slow motion as the heroic military tries futilely to halt their progress.

Godzilla's relentless blandness is firmly at odds with its wannabe apocalyptic overtones. Its spectacles are unframed and without context, its bloodless violence numbing. What's the purpose of making a Godzilla movie if you only have one color palette? If your human story in no way relates to society or the environment? Godzilla is vibrant and larger than life. Taken seriously he is reduced to a titanic animal, far too large to relate in any meaningful way to the world around him. His simple scale alienates him from the film, and Edwards never succeeds in harnessing that scale to produce terror or wonder. Perhaps it's the film's unadventurous choreography, its leaden use of motion, or its bog-standard score which might have rolled off a conveyor belt somewhere deep in the dark reaches of Alexandre Desplat's brain.  

In Toho's original Godzilla films the titular monster embodied many complex ideas about the atomic age, Shintoist animism, and the chaos and harmony of nature. Godzilla is a kind of mercurial spirit, vengeful if provoked by human arrogance or environmental destruction but a ferocious protector in times of crisis. Here he is the good monster and the MUTOs are the bad monsters. Their conflict is almost a moral one and once Godzilla is triumphant he retreats into the ocean, leaving humanity in peace. The Americanization of the story also dilutes much of the atomic subtext beyond the point of cohesion. Without the specters of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, what does Godzilla mean? From where does he draw his power to destroy and overawe? From nowhere, apparently.