The scene: a dark office. Four people are present. One is operating a projector – he’s not important. One is a military man, an expert in bomb disposal. The other two are scientists of some description – biologists, maybe? – one a British woman, the other an older Japanese man. They’re telling bomb disposal man about a creature, a gigantic beast that America dropped some nukes on in the 1950s. We cut to a medium close-up on the Japanese man’s head as he builds up to the monster’s name. “We call it,” he says, turning to the camera, “GODZILLA.”
The audience loses their shit.
Maybe that’s because Dunedin’s a little bit racist and can’t handle a Japanese dude saying “Godzilla”. Maybe that’s because the whole thing’s a little bit corny. I think it’s probably a bit from Column A and a bit from Column B, but I also think there’s a Column C. That Column C? For all its shock and awe, the new Godzilla movie has supreme difficulty getting the audience to connect with its characters.
This + Bryan Cranston-Moore + a lot of men blathering in control rooms Photo: Giphy
So what’s going on? Some people don’t care, they’re there for the destruction, and that’s fine. Others think it’s all intentional, part of some fuck-humanity extinction fantasy, which, um, sure, whatever. But Godzilla really works to make sympathetic human characters, leads we can connect with. It’s a bit empty if it’s just doing this to prove humans are destructive and dumb.
Besides, it’s not like Godzilla has problems getting us – the audience – to feel. Rocking a sizable budget, Gareth Edwards (of indie sensation Monsters) goes big and proves himself an impeccable craftsman, a man with a Spielbergian handle on the sublime. Learning from Jurassic Park and War of the Worlds, Edwards takes every opportunity to emphasise the size of his monsters in relation to everyday humanity. He pans up Godzilla’s body like a shocked bystander; he shoots Godzilla and his MUTO adversaries in low-angle shots bolted to the ground, monstrous bodies filling and spilling over the frame; he shoots action so that gigantic limbs, framed by skyscrapers, swing in and out of shot; he uses helicopter shots not to convey anything about the monsters’ movements, but to convey their scale in relation to the structures we call large.
There’s even one beautiful point-of-view shot where bomb disposal man (whitebread ‘hero’ Ford, played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson as a person) falls past Godzilla while parachuting into San Francisco, the monster’s head up close and stunning.
A registrar came into Adam's office while he was drawing this and, to his credit, didn't say anything Photo: Adam Goodall, 24
We feel a pronounced awe in those moments, moments that fill the screen with the beasts (or, at least, I did, I dunno, I’m not here to tell you what to do). It’s spectacle par excellence, drawing out our own feelings of insignificance in the face of a fictional CGI being that dwarfs our tallest buildings. But even in that POV shot, a shot that puts us right in the head of the film’s lead male, there’s a block – something that stops us from connecting our awe, as passive observers, to their awe, as characters in this fiction.
Is it that Godzilla is cynical about humanity and the place it occupies in Earth’s wider ecosystem? We’re constantly reminded that the birth of the MUTOs and the arrival of Godzilla are both tied to our pursuit of nuclear capabilities at the environment’s expense – they’re found in wretched open-cast mines and nuclear plants where the higher-ups are reluctant to take recommended safety measures, they feed on radiation from abandoned meltdown sites and nuclear waste facilities, the third act begins with the MUTOS stealing a nuclear warhead. Then there’s the military bods who decide to use the warhead in the first place, paving the road to hell with their well-intentioned ideas of dominion over nature. Our arrogance, our prowess at environmental recklessness, is in the crosshairs here.
That specific target is confirmed by the ensemble cast, all playing characters that work in the prevention of destruction and the study of the natural world – a bomb disposal expert, a nurse, safety engineers at a nuclear power plant, biologists. The more experienced actors take that cue – Bryan Cranston finds great pain and righteousness in his underwritten role, and Ken Watanabe imbues biologist Dr Serizawa with a deep wellspring of faith. Even if Serizawa is wrong, we come to believe that Godzilla exists to "restore the balance", to destroy aberrations and to point us to a better way of living. And that’s not even getting into the recurring images of reunited families.
So why can’t we connect? Perhaps because the film spends too much time with the military, not enough time with the Brodys or Dr Serizawa. We drown in detail about the nuke gambit and scene after scene in the second half of the film with the most dehumanising type of dialogue, military jargon. Meanwhile, the Brody family’s story becomes consumed by military manoeuvres, Dr Serizawa’s shift from lack of understanding to deification of Godzilla is barely explored, and Serizawa’s superfluous assistant spends all her time asking him what happens next.
For all its wonder, Godzilla lacks humanity. But that’s not really Gareth Edwards’ fault; the blame really lies with the writers. They laid the groundwork for an exploration of the tension between man’s self-interest and the wider environment – between man and his bombs and a saurian ‘God’. Then they squandered it all on men in uniforms blathering in control rooms.
Cover image courtesy of Roadshow Distribution.
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