Spoilers:
I want to get this off my chest first: if you are going to kill off Juliette Binoche fifteen minutes into your movie, you'd better have something
damn impressive to replace her with! Sadly all the special effects in the world cannot match Binoche doing a winning smile to her husband. Somehow I don't think the film figured that out. Oh well, you've killed off Binoche, at least we've still got Bryan Cranston....oh.
I'm joking a little, but a film which gets rid of its most charismatic actors in the first quarter of its running time only to leave us with our nominal hero, Lt. Blandy McBland, acted by someone who makes me yearn for the dramatic range of a Sam Worthington in the role, doesn't seem to understand what potential is being thrown away.
I have a few qualms about this film beyond the lack of human interest too. This seems like a film that is strangely in thrall to and weirdly incurious about military might and the potential for that might to be wielded in a brutal or cruel manner. OK, so there is a silly subplot about setting off a clockwork atom bomb that then has to be disabled again (suggesting how easily the military can get diverted off onto the wrong track by their superiors?), but really all the generals and soldiers seem fine and just trying to do their best, and try to learn from their mistakes. There's not even the slightest question that we need troops on the ground here, even if I could not really figure out the purpose that many of them were serving apart from being used almost immediately as expendable monster fodder (This was often the only way that I could tell Lt Blandy McBland apart from the rest of the interchangeable army guys, in that he was usually the only survivor of every encounter!) Has the emphasis on the environmental balance theme, rather than man's warlike nature, somehow enabled the idea of needing an all powerful secret organisation and then military complex that takes over from the secret organisation to justify themselves in this film?
I guess in these post-Iraq War times there's just no way to even portray the military with even a slightly cynical or jaded eye, even in fantastical fare? But there is almost a deafening silence here surrounding this aspect of the film. (The film that this issue reminded me of in a strange way was that time travel film
The Final Countdown in which Kirk Douglas pilots a modern US aircraft carrier back to just pre-Pearl Harbor and has to decide whether to intervene or let the attack get carried out. But beyond this intriguing story, the filmmakers were obviously far, far more interested in showing shots of aircraft taking off and landing on top of the aircraft carrier that they were given special permission to film on. The enthralling logistics of military hardware end up taking precedence over the story, and in a way the same applies to this film, as we get almost endless shots of helicopters and boats and equipment to pad out the running time)
And it is not just in the military aspect but the way that the film uses almost a 'greatest hits' mash up of imagery of real world disasters from the last couple of decades - not just 9/11 dust clouds, or Fukushima radiation zones, or the Thailand tsunami chasing crowds, or the final imagery of a post-Hurricane Katrina-esque Superdome, but all of them lumped together in a context-free montage in which almost personality-less victims of tragedy are all seemingly given the same scream sound effect to their scenes of blind panic.
But to briefly shift away from the carping, I do think Gojira himself comes out of this film with more dignity that he ever has. The title monster is the closest thing to being a hero. Although, to immediately shift back into carping again, I think this causes its own dissonance. The 'human drama' in the film, such as it is, is seemingly all about families, especially fathers somehow failing sons and wives and the next generation trying not to make the same mistakes. Now lets put aside the way that the older family unit actually gets torn apart through forces beyond its control, suffers for the unavoidable tragedy with the father dying shattered by his experiences being something that infuriatingly gets set against the younger family unit being relatively unaffected whilst our hero damningly never even gets close to getting near to his wife and child to help them at all. The even bigger dissonance, at least as far as I see it, is that this whole idea on the human scale level of the primacy of the family unit above all seems utterly undermined by the monster-level action in which Gojira is a lone, single entity which gets spurred into action by the pair of Mutos getting ready to breed and who ends up destroying the (seemingly loving, for all the care and attention paid to the movements and gestures of the two Mutos) couple whilst at the same time our Lt McBland incinerates their offspring!
I guess only human families are allowed to be sacrosanct! (If it wasn't, that ridiculous scene involving the busload of children wouldn't have allowed them to have gotten away so easily!) But I did like the way that it seems that Gojira here appears to be taking a stand for all the grumpy, childless single people in the world! However I did like that at one point it seemed as if Elizabeth Olsen's character was finally going to have a purpose - that of simply being forced to witness an alien mating scene! But the film shies away from showing anything that graphic!
While I'm putting the boot into the film, I also wasn't much of a fan of the overblown score. Particularly during the monster wrestling fights when the score insisted on doing a musical sting to every blow as if it was something out of the Adam West Batman series, but really the whole score is far too bombastic as if afraid to let any event in any scene play without being underlined with musical awe a few times for good measure. The Ligeti piece is the exception that proves the rule, in that suddenly an abstract and weirdly beautiful (if annoying due to reminding me of a better film) piece of music plays, yet it is incongruous by turning up sandwiched between scenes underscored in such a heavily orchestral, yet also blandly anonymous manner.
So, there are a few nice images here, the first quarter or so was interesting, and I like the monsters themselves, but I feel that this film is about on a par with Pacific Rim. Though this Godzilla is far more dour, 'grown up' and self-serious than the 'big kid' Pacific Rim, while strangely feeling sillier for that (and this Godzilla is not quite as good as the Emmerich Godzilla, which the structure of this film far too often copies. Perhaps there are only so many things you can do in a monster movie?). At least Pacific Rim (or Cloverfield, though that dialled the monsters a long way down in order to emphasise its characters) had some emphasis on character development, even if it was all tried and tested archetypal character arcs, and seemed to care about relationships with other human beings and humanity as a whole.
