Good outweighs bad in ‘Godzilla’

Published 8:00 am Thursday, May 22, 2014

Good outweighs bad in ‘Godzilla’

I was not a fan of the original Godzilla films. I think a few of the boys in my Kindergarten class could build better models of cities (and then stomp on them with our snow shoes). And the monster? Shoot, he looked like a Weeble Wobble, badly painted. I watched it on TV in the late 1950s with my WWII veteran father and I have a vague memory of thinking (no doubt with his encouragement) that this monster movie was more than just a monster movie: it was a film about a defeated enemy gigging the victor, the beginning of the usual post-war mythologizing making the former violent aggressor a victim of senseless destruction. I was maybe 6, and already my cynic glands were a-raging.

However, I live with someone who fell for such poor-pitiful-me kaiju schlock and saw it for what it appeared to be and insisted that we see the reptile yet again. I did not change my mind about the original film, but I started to forgive the old lizard with the help of the refurbished plot.

The film starts out in 1999 in Japan with American engineer Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) who is so distracted by mysterious tremors that he ignores his son’s happy birthday sign. He works at a nuclear power plant with his wife. The tremors intensify and he sends his wife to inspect the who-knows-what in the bowels of the plant and when the core is breached, Joe has to see her die of radiation poisoning. The plant is closed, all the survivors are evacuated and we go to modern times.

Ford Brody (Aaron Perry Johnson), the son, has become a soldier with a wife and child. His father has gone obsessive about the accident in his grief for his wife. He still says the tremors were not natural and the “accident” at the plant was more than just an accident.

Sure enough, we discover there was a government conspiracy plot (Ho-Hum!) and the nuclear tests were not tests but were attempts at killing the beasts. Only, it turns out, the radiation was Moon Pies and Twinkies for the kaiju. And this time it isn’t Godzilla, it is the Mutos (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms), a creature that look like a cross between a praying mantas and a pterodactyl. One is awakened in the Philippians and the other in Yuka mountains. These tremors are actually mating calls and they travel to San Francisco for a little love-making. Both are destructive on their trips to their honeymoon. Meanwhile, Godzilla seems interested in their mating dance. Americans are not sure why but they are pretty sure they want to blow them all up with the nuclear bomb. You know those Americans, always thinking a mushroom cloud solves all problems, foreign or domestic. But Dr. Daisuke Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) thinks otherwise. He thinks Godzilla is Ambassador for Mother Nature and the ambassador is not in favor of the Mutos having intimate relations, even in San Francisco. Godzilla is on his way to San Francisco to preach abstinence via a Mutos smack-down.

Meanwhile Ford looks a little confused. He goes to help his dad, gets caught in one of the Mutos’ path, saves a little Japanese kid — a scene with no apparent plot purpose — then jumps back into soldiering and finds himself back to San Francisco to do nothing much but be a witness to Godzilla’s heroic action, righting an imbalance in nature.

Here are the bad parts of Godzilla: Ken Watanabe is wasted; he either looks confused or constipated throughout the movie. The movie makes all the characters stick figures except for Bryan Cranston but he is dispatched too soon to keep our interest. Mr. Johnson might as well be the plastic toy soldier he held in his hand in a few scenes. Really! Stiff and emotionless; he looks more like an expert in Florentine art than a GI Joe. There are attempts at being clever and funny that fall flat (like the scene in a Las Vegas hotel suite) and this creates an uneven emotional flow. Many of the scenes seem like separate scenes stitched together with gaps left on the hard drive, forgotten, perhaps eaten by the Mutos. And don’t see it in 3D — too dark — 2D is dark too, but clarity is essential.

The good parts of “Godzilla”: the effects are diverting and the action is sufficient to keep one awake and Godzilla-as-hero is enough to keep us clear that there still can be a battle between good and bad (in the movies) and still stay away from the politics of the victor and the defeated. However, there still is the message about the dangers of messing with Mother Nature and the risks of all things nuclear. Nuclear fission and Godzilla: they are with us until the end of all things human and kaiju.

“Godzilla” (2014) earns three and a half bow ties out of five.

Steve W. Schaefer———