Review: Godzilla (2014)

Godzilla. The short version of my review can be summed up in two questions: One, why did we really need the humans? And, alternatively, why did we even need the monsters?

I'll explain. Version One: Just Give Me the Monsters — Once again, humanity proves that its greatest weakness is its inability to communicate effectively amongst members of its own species. In this movie especially, it became pretty clear early on that the humans weren't going to have much of a role to play in the ultimate defeat of the M.U.T.O.'s (massive unidentified terrestrial organisms), because Godzilla, in this incarnation, plays Mother Nature's peacekeeping force, sent out to "restore balance" by chomping major kaiju neck.

Somehow, we still found ourselves following a somewhat disjointed cadre of humans—a soldier who always seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, a scientist who seemed to get invitations to the war room just so his warnings could be ignored, and a nurse (the soldier's wife) who just wanted to keep her son out of harm's way. The human part of the movie was surprisingly strong (see Version Two, below) but felt a little bizarre and unnecessary, given that we already knew the humans were neither going to defeat nor be utterly destroyed by the M.U.T.O's. It was even a pretty safe bet that (most of) the main characters would make it out alive.

So why even have humans at all? Why not just make a ninety minute, epic kaiju fight? We didn't see Godzilla on screen until past an hour into the film, and when the final fight did take place, it only really got good in the movie's final minutes—up till then, most of the action was obscured by cinematographic tricks that can be ascribed either to an editor with effed up ideas about what audiences want out of a monster movie or to budgetary constraints. Seriously, don't fade to black on me when Godzilla first meets the M.U.T.O. when you've already kept him behind the scenes for half of a film titled Godzilla, for Pete's sake! If the ultimate showdown between monsters would have happened one way or another without human intervention, you'd better make it a good showdown.

Since the monsters seemed capable of sorting out their problems with or (preferably) without the humans, Godzilla's real conflict came from the humans' hard-pressed efforts to shoot themselves in the foot—which brings us to Version Two: Make This Literally Any Disaster Movie.

The humans bicker. They fight. They ignore sound scientific warning. They almost die trying to arm a nuclear war head in one scene and then almost die trying to disarm the same warhead in the next. They do their absolute best to destroy their last hope of salvation, fail miserably, and live to see another day, through no real fault or merit of their own.

Now this isn't to say that the parts with the humans were bad. As I alluded earlier, I was surprised by how much I connected with the characters and how moved I was by moments of tension and tragedy—only a few minutes into the film, I was muttering, "No no no no," as Ford's mom tried and failed to outrun the leading edge of a reactor meltdown.

So why not just scrap the monsters altogether? Make this movie about human resilience in the face of disaster—preferably, a disaster that doesn't need to monopolize screen time for the latter half of the movie. Almost every single scene centered around the human characters could have remained the same if the precipitating events had been a bonafide nuclear apocalypse and not a monster smackdown. Bonus, the humans' ultimate powerlessness in the face of nature would have felt like a sad acknowledgement of humanity's eternal predicament rather than a somewhat baffling, "Why didn't they just sit back and let Godzilla do his thing, like, an hour ago?"

All in all, it wasn't a bad movie. I liked the monsters and I liked the human characters. I just couldn't help but wonder why they all had to be in the same film at the same time.

Citations: Godzilla. Directed by Gareth Edwards. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2014.