Should You Go And See Godzilla This Weekend?

GODZILLA .

You can’t say his name softly. It deserves caps and yelling. He’s an oversized icon of rubbery, gnarly goodness.

Godzilla would be Japan’s imaginary national creature — which is saying something, because Japan is crowded with yokai and fantastical beasts. He is the wonder and terror wrought from atomic bombs, emerging in dumb chaos and destruction only to eventually claim his place as Japan’s unlikely defender.

Attempts to translate Godzilla for Western audiences have often stumbled, not unlike a dude in a rubber suit dying for a smoko. Hollywood fails because — despite its adoration of spectacle and grabbing things from other cultures — Godzilla is closely wedded to Japan’s culture – a culture which has never really given a shit about explaining itself to the West, making it untranslatable and therefore unsellable.

But Hollywood persists.

The first Japanese Godzilla film was recut in 1956, with Raymond Burr bloating his way through a Westernised edit of the 1954 original. Roland Emmerlich’s attempt to recreate Godzilla in 1998 was so horrendous and divorced from its Japanese origins that its monster made a guest appearance in  Toho’s 1994 iteration, Godzilla: Final Wars — and was torn to pieces by the real (Japanese) Godzilla. In Sydney, no less.

With that in mind, Gareth Edwards’ attempt to capture the Kaiju King has a lot of lowered expectations to meet. With previous Western reboots so execrable they qualify as a cleanse, Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla – which was released Australia-wide yesterday — is the best of a very bad bunch. Like his previous film Monsters, Edwards has delivered a flawed, uneven but intriguing film.

Edwards has particular strengths: he composes scenes of staggering visual beauty and crafts massive concepts. Godzilla has both — each shot is cinematic perfection that expertly uses space to create a sense of epic grandiosity.

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On The Monsters:

The film’s devotion to the monsters shows Edwards understands the universe he ushers us into. The monsters are designed to evoke memories of their Toho  predecessors, one of men in rubber suits, and there are quiet shout-outs to other kaiju, like Mothra. There is real affection in how the monsters are shot and choreographed.

Godzilla’s design is kicked up a notch not only in height but also in width, and every shot makes use of his size to convey his status as an alpha hunter; his spiky ridges sailing through water appear monumental, gliding primal majesty.

Sadly, the MUTO (aka the bad monsters) look like an unfortunate hybrid of Cloverfield and Starship Trooper’s bugs. Why Hollywood hasn’t been able to move past Cloverfield, one of the most disappointing monster designs ever scratched, is an enduring mystery, and its taint spreads to this film.

The monsters stomp through the film as the true stars and lead characters. This is the reason we buy film tickets, and we’re not disappointed. Godzilla harks back to his Japanese heritage as noble defender and savage aggressor. Meanwhile, every scene with the MUTO establishes them as vile, toxic weapons of mass destruction. Their fight scenes draw from film history and are brilliantly choreographed and rendered.

On The Humans:

But while Edwards understands monsters, he sure as shit doesn’t understand people. You get the feeling that the director would perhaps be more comfortable working in silent film, because dealing with dialogue is completely beyond him. Any emotional connection begins and ends with Bryan Cranston.

One wonders if the resulting detachment is a result of bad direction, bad script or just bad acting — because all three are abundantly on show. It’s possible some 2×4 planks earned Screen Actors Guild cards for their work in the movie — Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Carson Bolde in particular. Meanwhile, Ken Watanabe turns in a performance so disassociated it feels more appropriate to credit his appearance to Skype — he was too blasé to even phone in his performance.

To be fair on the actors, they may be lost because they are barely given anything to do in the film, apart from deliver bullet points of exposition and motivation. At one point, Watanabe shows his Hiroshima memento to an Admiral as a prop to discourage him from using nuclear weapons. He just drops the H word and literally staggers off. No speech, no delivery, no emotion, no impact.

So: Should You See It Or Not?

As a national treasure of Japan, it is hard to extricate or translate Godzilla from the culture that created him. What works in a Toho film won’t work in a Western blockbuster, because the cultures fuelling him are wholly different. We have different expectations from each region and Gareth Edward’s entry is flawed on both fronts.

Scenes jump from scary to sad to stupid. While this is generally appreciated and even expected in its Toho variants, they aren’t entertaining enough here to match the previous films. The one scene that attempted humour was a bizarre and inconsistent note: the film hadn’t bothered before, and didn’t bother after.

As a standalone Hollywood film, Godzilla fails. As another entry from Toho, Godzilla fails. And yet I jumped from the cinema buoyant, even elated. Because even though they failed on every other front, the film-makers succeeded where it matters most: they love the same monster we do.

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Godzilla is in cinemas now.

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Amy is a Melbourne-based writer who enjoys politics, culture, social issues and the gentle art of sitting. Tweet her @_AmyGray_