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\n\t\t\tPosted by\t\t\tJohn Scalzi<\/a>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\u00a0\u00a0
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No, the 2014 version of Godzilla, the US-produced one directed by Gareth Edwards, is not the best Godzilla movie in the several-decade, several-dozen-installment history of the franchise. If I had to rank it, I would probably put it at three or four, depending on how I was feeling about Shin Godzilla that day (for clarity, number one is the original 1954 production, the Japanese version, not the cut-up US release, and number two is Godzilla Minus One, proof that $15 million goes a long way if you know how to spend it). So don\u2019t be jumping down my throat about that. Remember that the thing about these \u201ccomfort watches\u201d is not that they are the best movies, or, sometimes (but not in this case) even actually good movies. They are the movies I find myself watching over and over.<\/p>\n
And why do I rewatch this Godzilla, more than the others? Well, for one reason, I think this movie is one of Godzilla movies that actually gets the kaiju right. <\/p>\n
I wrote about this a year or so ago in my film column in Uncanny magazine. You can follow this link to see the whole essay<\/a> (and I recommend you do!), but the brief version is this: The recurring problem with Godzilla, the monster, is that the longer he sticks around, in sequel after sequel, the less he is an unstoppable force of nature and the more he becomes, if not an outright friend to humanity, then at least an entity whose interests appear to align with ours. That makes him progressively less interesting and, ultimately, boring. When a kaiju gets cuddly, it\u2019s all over. Then the only thing left to do is reboot him and start over. <\/p>\n The 2014 Godzilla was not the first US-based reboot; there was the 1998 version, directed by Roland Emmerich, which was financially successful and a critical and cultural flop, the latter being especially interesting to me, even at the time. The movie did what it was supposed to do: make money (it was the #8 top-grossing movie of its year domestically), but at the cost of Godzilla\u2019s cultural cachet; the humans in the movie were kinda soft and goofy and Godzilla, while not at all on the side of the humans, didn\u2019t feel like Godzilla. Godzilla is (to varying degrees of effectiveness over the years), a vessel for humanity\u2019s fears and a representation of the world smacking us back for our hubris. 1998\u2019s Godzilla was\u2026 just a monster, and not one that actually looked like Godzilla was meant to look (also, the laying of eggs in Madison Square Garden didn\u2019t help much). It\u2019s not a surprise that Toho Studios, the owners of Godzilla, later retconned the \u201998 Godzilla into \u201cZilla<\/a>,\u201d a kaiju, yes, but not the kaiju. Not Godzilla. <\/p>\n For the 2014 movie, Gareth Edwards and the other filmmakers didn\u2019t screw with what makes Godzilla Godzilla, they leaned into it instead. There were some criticisms of the monster design, because of course there would be, nerds are gonna nerd, but this film\u2019s Godzilla looks like it\u2019s sharing DNA with its Japanese predecessors. I remember some complaints about this monster looking too chonky and thicc, but speaking personally I didn\u2019t consider this a problem at all because (and here I get super nerdy myself), look, a 300-fucking-foot-tall monster ain\u2019t gonna be svelte in any of its dimensions. It\u2019s going to have meat on its bones, okay?<\/p>\n (Also, before you get in on me about the square-cube law, remember I wrote a whole novel about kaiju and I get into the square-cube law in it. Whatever you\u2019re going to throw at me, I already thought about it. Anyway, we\u2019re ignoring some elemental physics at the moment for this movie. Accept it, my dudes). <\/p>\n More importantly, Edwards, et al understood Godzilla for what is meant to be, a force of nature \u2014 indeed, the force of nature, a huge variable designed to zero out the equation when something threatens to unbalance it. In this movie that would be the MUTOs, a pair of Kaiju who eat radiation, which is why one of them was attracted to a nuclear facility in Japan at the turn of the century, wrecking it and then cocooning there to feed until the time was right to pop out, a weird, sleek kaiju that looks Art Deco, or maybe like the vector tanks from the Battlezone videogame. The monster heads east, looking for a mate\u2026<\/p>\n \u2026 and then here\u2019s Godzilla to stop it, at, of all places, the airport at Honolulu.<\/p>\n And what a very fine entrance it is, too. Edwards has learned from Spielberg, Scott and others that your monster is more effective the less you show of it, until, that is, it\u2019s time to show it all. Our first introduction to Godzilla are his back fins and body parts illuminated by spotlights and flares and exploding planes. And then, finally, there he is\u2026 and he is pissed. <\/p>\n This is the other thing this film does right. Godzilla is huge and Godzilla should feel huge, but for much of his existence, he hasn\u2019t. For the first several decades of his existence, as much as you might want to, you couldn\u2019t escape the fact that Godzilla, king of the monsters, was a dude in a rubber suit, stomping around a scale model of Tokyo. It didn\u2019t make the early movies bad (note my position of the original Godzilla in the rankings), but special effects tech was what it was. As time went on, more advanced compositing and CGI could have fixed that, but in the 1998 Godzilla, at least, didn\u2019t. That monster moved too fast and had no mass onscreen.<\/p>\n The 2014 edition doesn\u2019t make that mistake. Godzilla\u2019s big, and he\u2019s massive, and he acts and moves like it. Every move Godzilla makes in this movie is a spectacle of heft. There\u2019s no doubt he\u2019s going to do damage with every step he takes. Godzilla and the MUTOs eventually settle their scores in San Francisco, and while there is never any doubt that the city is going to get wrecked, here it\u2019s getting wrecked at a level of special effects mastery that gives it all an extra dollop of, well, not realism, exactly, but certainly consequence. Buildings don\u2019t fall over like cardboard when a kaiju smashes into them. They crumble, and they eventually fall, like they are actually made of concrete and rebar, and the Kaiju get smashed to match. <\/p>\n This wasn\u2019t Edwards\u2019 first time at the monster rodeo. He made his directorial debut with Monsters, a 2010 science fiction film about, you guessed it, monsters, which did some amazing things on a reported budget of half a million dollars. His budget for Godzilla was 32 times as much, for the monster fights alone, he got some good value out of the money.<\/p>\n I\u2019m mostly into this movie for the monsters and the havoc the wreak, but the human stories here, unlike most Godzilla movies I\u2019ve seen, don\u2019t make me want to just fast forward to the good stuff. One, it has a level of gravity to it that I appreciate; all the humans in it take what\u2019s happening seriously, and so does the screenwriter. There\u2019s generational drama, a husband and wife separated by monsters, a mysterious NGO dedicated to the tracking of kaiju, and a race to deal with a nuclear bomb that it was humanity\u2019s fault was there in the first place (there\u2019s that hubris!), and so on. It\u2019s fine! It moves along and no one acts stupidly, which is never a guarantee in a monster movie no matter how high-toned it is. Godzilla, I\u2019m happy to say, gives almost no shits about anything the humans are doing, any more than any of us would worry about ants if we got into a brawl with our cousin at a cookout. <\/p>\n That wouldn\u2019t last. There have been several sequels to Godzilla in the last decade, all as part of a \u201cMonsterverse,\u201d some involving King Kong. The further we go along, the more Godzilla is becoming an ally of sorts to humanity, and the more the stories feel drained of consequence. In the latest movie in the series, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, Rio De Janeiro is laid to waste with the same gravity as a bunch of kids knocking over a LEGO set. It\u2019s pretty, and silly, and since New Empire made more money than any other film in the series, the series will almost certainly continue to be pretty silly. <\/p>\n Thus is the nature of Godzilla. At a certain point, the returns will diminish and they will reboot him, yet again, to be a force of nature and not our pal (actually they already did with Godzilla Minus Zero, but that\u2019s not in the same timeline or extended universe, so (jedi wave) forget about that for now). Until they do, I have the 2014 Godzilla to keep me company. It lets Godzilla be Godzilla, and I like that about it. <\/p>\n \u2014 JS<\/p>\n Like this:<\/p>\n Like Loading…<\/p>\n