Prologue
This is maybe the most beautiful giant
monster film I have ever seen. Maybe the most beautiful
any-kind-of-monster movie I’ve ever seen. If you don’t read anything else
in this review, I want you to at least have seen that much. That’s the
take-home message here. I can’t get over the awe I feel from experiencing
this film, even as I sit down to finally write this after taking in quite a
number of other reviews both for and against.
But
before we get to discussion of the new film, a few contextualising words of
introduction are in order as to my own lifelong relationship with the King of
Monsters. When I compulsively and devotedly watched Godzilla movies as a
little kid in the late 70s and early 80s, my mom would eventually walk through
the living room, pause and watch with me a moment, and then, not without
kindness and good humour, pronounce the whole production ‘so fakey!’ She
smilingly wondered how I could love it so much.
This was in an era
when a household still usually had just one main TV in one main room for
viewing it, and when you had to view whatever programming your TV stations
provided – home videos were not yet common and online streaming was, of course,
still nothing more than a gleam in some technophile’s eye, if that much. Lucky for me, some
executive guardian angel of my imaginative development saw to it that there
were plenty of Godzilla movies aired. And I mean the whole crew too:
Ghidorah, Rodan, Mothra, Mecha-Godzilla, Gamera, the lot. But
especially Gamera, beloved Gamera, The Friend of All Children.
The thing is, I had
never consciously noticed the ‘fakiness’ of these movies until my mother first
pointed it out to me. But even when I did clock that fact, I positively
liked that men were in monster suits playing, knocking down toy
cities, wrestling with each other. Plus, I either forgot about the fakey
factor altogether while absorbed in watching the film at hand or I believed
both the artistic lie and the artistic truth at the same time without any
diminishment of imaginative surrender, no dream-breaking—like those rare
moments in sleep where you suddenly realise you’re dreaming but you go on
embracing the dream-logic of the scenario anyway.
Now,
to capture my full experience of these films you have to also add to this ludic
(playful, make-believe) quality an element of true fear. I was mostly
never the least bit frightened when watching a Godzilla film when I was little.
But occasionally that playfully imagined sense of scale did creep me out
a bit as I watched: when, for example, that somehow goofy-yet-menacing
Godzilla head loomed up from behind the hills while a crowd of people ran
screaming away in the foreground; or when the entire gargantuan figure was seen
off in the distance at the far end of the city from the perspective of someone
looking through a high-rise window miles away; and so on. In those
moments I could enter so far into the make-believe of it that I experienced a
tiny tinge of the real feeling that would accompany the sight of a two- or
three-hundred foot monster towering above your city. A sense of awesome
fear would bend down and give me a gentle bone-shivering tap. Little
boy me received a tiny dose of mysterium tremendum et fascinans (a
spine-tingling sense of mystery that simultaneously repels and fascinates) even
from a guy in a hokey rubber suit and a toy model city.
Those little tinges
of fear obviously rooted deep in me and here’s how I know: I have had
recurring Godzilla nightmares all my life. The latest, I think, was some
time last year. In those dreams the gigantic eye of the kaiju monster
somehow almost impossibly sees me – me, little old me – from across the
miles of cityscape and air. And yep, when I try to run away from that
gargantuan gaze I might as well be slogging through invisible molasses.
‘Fakey’? Sure. Still, somehow for me Godzilla brings home
something of T. S. Eliot’s ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust’ –
and that handful of dust is little old me. It’s crucial to note thought
that this nightmare-inducing capacity Godzilla has for me in no way diminishes
my uncomplicated sense of affection for the greatest of monsters. I did
and do love Godzilla and Co. as much as any kid-become-adult did and does love
the more innocuous monsters of Sesame Street or what have you.
Some readers of this
blog will know that I even went on to sing here and there about Godzilla
monsters in a 90s punk rock band I was in. But one more important
thing to note in connection with my response to this latest film is that I
haven’t massively ‘kept up’ with Godzilla over the years. I’ve only
casually and incidentally re-watched some of the old films in my adult years
and haven’t more than sampled 90s or 2000s productions and up till now have
engaged in almost zero intellectual analysis of the phenomenon. That gap
between childhood enthrallment and now seeing this new movie, linked only by
simple love for Godzilla that has never waned even though I’ve not
intentionally fanned its flame, may be a central reason the film can really tap
into my sense of wonder.
Review
So here comes Godzilla (2014).
I tried so hard to keep my expectations low, low, low. I did that
with films like Pacific Rim and Man of Steel and had a decent
time at both despite their obvious flaws. But I’d forgotten how invested
I was in Godzilla. I sat there in the dark cinema with my older children
before the film and had to physically quell my excitement. I was buzzing!
And alas, I just knew this unjustifiably optimistic attitude was going to
ruin it for me, that I’d end up overall underwhelmed.
But no.
No,
no, no.
(Spoilers
from here on out – this ‘review’ is really a discussion for those who’ve
already seen the movie.)
One of the major
categories of this film is majesty. In the film’s story, the project that
has followed the Godzilla monster since the 1950s is called the Monarch
project. We see this in the opening sequence of faux vintage footage.
For my money, the notion that overt word-drop is clearly meant to signal
was fulfilled in spades. The slow-burn pacing of the film only aids the
sense of majesty it eventually achieves at the reveal of the wondrous monsters.
The film’s score and cinematography serve almost exclusively this purpose
as well: to make you feel in the presence of immense, terrible, and
magnificent royalty.
Indeed,
after processing my feelings of awe in response to the film for a few days, I
came to the conclusion that Godzilla (2014) is mainly an aesthetic
exercise. And I have zero problem with that. I love a good story
and brilliant characterisation and drama as much as anyone. But I also
love a successful foray into sheer emotion and atmosphere and visual-visceral
punch. The director himself said they wanted to linger on moments
of ‘not story, but cinematic-ness’. It’s no wonder then that at times the
film felt to me, in both score and cinematography, almost echoic of the likes
of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
This film may have
more of what Timothy Beal calls the ‘monstrous sublime’ than any other I’ve
seen. Beal uses this terminology to distinguish an almost worshipful
feeling in the presence of monsters from the perhaps more familiar notion of
the ‘monstrous diabolical’: i.e. the merely, if awfully, evil
monster. The monstrous sublime need not be evil at all and in fact may be
awesomely, bowel-tremblingly good. It is, in my opinion, akin to
‘holiness’.
As
one reviewer pointed out, the solid if not especially
remarkable human drama of the film mainly serves to give a profound sense of
scale to the monsters. The movie is spectacularly MONSTER-CENTRIC –
somehow more so than Cloverfield or Pacific Rim or other recent
entries in the giant-monster genre. But not in a way that bludgeons.
The views of the monsters that we are given are exquisitely judicious,
uncompromising in their service of the film’s tone: lordly as a ten ton
lion. (And really, in the end I felt very satisfied with the amount of
giant monster action I saw. Wishing I could see more of the monsters only
makes me want to see the film again as soon as possible, which is a delightful
prospect.)
The scene where the
two MUTOs are mating in the rubble of a city they have rampaged to ruins put me
very much in mind of Lovecraftian visions from the Cthulhu Mythos, where
a future is imagined when primordial Old Ones rule the Earth again.
(Dave Henry over at Zekefilm noticed the Cthulhu connection too in his
excellent review, noting that these kaiju seem more like mystical Old
Ones than naturalistic atomic abominations or what have you.) This film’s
convergence with the Cthulhu Mythos seems significant, but a crucial difference
it has with Lovecraft’s celebrated ‘cosmic horror’ is that this monstrous
mating scene, for example, is not all pure horror, like some return to
madness-inducing chaos and carnage. It is ecologically beautiful, if also
no good for the safety of humans.
But
speaking of Cthulhu & the Gang, that sort of giant monster mythology is
already rooted in ancient Mesopotamian Chaos Monsters. Coming out
of that culture, the writers and compilers of the Hebrew Bible were ruminating
on the ecological and existential majesty and monstrosity of a very
Godzilla-like creature millennia before the Godzilla franchise was conceived.
The Bible calls its own mega-monster iteration Leviathan.
(Dave Henry beat me to this punch also with his excellent Echoes of Eden
article on the new Godzilla film: Leviathan Redeemed.) Just
look at the description of Leviathan in chapter 41 of the Book of Job and keep
one eye at the same time on all you’ve seen Godzilla be and do. You’ll be
tempted to skim past this part, but don’t. Take the extra minute to
actually read through this and let the poem’s imagery heave up before your mind’s
eye. I can’t promise it won’t bite, but I can promise it’s worth it.
And remember, keep one eye on Godzilla:
“I will not fail to speak of
Leviathan’s limbs,
its strength and its graceful form.
Who can strip off its outer coat?
Who can penetrate its double coat of armor?
Who dares open the doors of its mouth,
ringed about with fearsome teeth?
Its back has rows of shields
tightly sealed together;
each is so close to the next
that no air can pass between.
They are joined fast to one another;
they cling together and cannot be parted.
Its snorting throws out flashes of light;
its eyes are like the rays of dawn.
Flames stream from its mouth;
sparks of fire shoot out.
Smoke pours from its nostrils
as from a boiling pot over burning reeds.
Its breath sets coals ablaze,
and flames dart from its mouth.
Strength resides in its neck;
dismay goes before it.
The folds of its flesh are tightly joined;
they are firm and immovable.
Its chest is hard as rock,
hard as a lower millstone.
When it rises up, the mighty are terrified;
they retreat before its thrashing.
The sword that reaches it has no effect,
nor does the spear or the dart or the javelin.
Iron it treats like straw
and bronze like rotten wood.
Arrows do not make it flee;
slingstones are like chaff to it.
A club seems to it but a piece of straw;
it laughs at the rattling of the lance.
Its undersides are jagged potsherds,
leaving a trail in the mud like a threshing sledge.
It makes the depths churn like a boiling caldron
and stirs up the sea like a pot of ointment.
It leaves a glistening wake behind it;
one would think the deep had white hair.
Nothing on earth is its equal—
a creature without fear.
It looks down on all that are haughty;
it is king over all that are proud.”
Some of the resemblances between
ancient Leviathan and the very contemporary creation Godzilla are to me rather
uncanny.
I will say that I do
think you have to see the new film to appreciate the incredible effects that
create the ‘graceful form’ of this latest Godzilla (complete with the
‘glistening wake’ when it swims gigantically through the ocean). The
posters and movie stills don’t look all that impressive to me personally.
And I have qualms about some of the design choices. The snorting
nostrils certainly add an air of believable animality to Godzilla, for example,
but I just don’t like the feel they give all that much. But no such
qualms could quell the overall effect of majestic monstrosity this director and
his team have achieved. I wanted to jump up and cheer at moments in the
film, but I had to settle for covering my mouth and moaning a little since I
didn’t want to be the lone loud American cheering in a British cinema. (I’ve
heard reports of spontaneous applause in American cinemas.)
The wonderful
monsters in this movie are what eco-critics call ‘charismatic megafauna’ (e.g.
elephants, tigers, whales) turned up to maximum. The problem eco-critics
have often had with, say, a wildlife television program emphasising, often
through slow-motion camera work and epic orchestral scores, such beasts is that
‘the camera sometimes seems to stand in for the colonial figure of the white
game hunter’, which can distance us from real encounter with the animal Other (Ecocriticism:
2012: Routledge: p. 175).
But in Godzilla
(2014) all the drama and cinematography seem to work to make us feel like
‘strangers in a strange land’ rather than entertain us with a sense of our
control over a wild ecology portrayed before our masterly gaze. (Hey now,
don’t get worked up: I’m not over-intellectualising a Godzilla film.
It’s just an awesome movie about giant monsters wreaking havoc that taps
into our childlike sense of play. Nevertheless, the director clearly
upped that ante into an intentionally crafted space of awe and humility and I’m
just trying to go with that flow in this little chat here.)
In distinction, I
think, from wildlife documentaries a lot of the sense of sublime in this film
comes from the way the camera portrays the monsters: like ‘hyperobjects’
that you can’t usually see all at once and never for very long, some vast
portion the kaiju swimming up into view, its aural centres sounding forth in
gorgeous alien noises, terrifying and tantalising at one and the same time (mysterium
tremendum et fascinans, people, I’m telling you). Furthermore,
these strutting mega-monsters give a slight ‘pingback’ to their tiny cousins
too in various scenes of the film: for example, we see in different
moments a beautiful millipede and a small horned lizard. On the opposite end of
the scale, towering even over the MOTUs, the film also evokes monstrous landscapes, the topography on top of which we live our lives (and far underneath
which, the MUTOs had up to this point dwelt), especially the incredible aerial
view of the mountain range in the Philippines that looks like the back of a
super-kaiju rising out of the earth itself.
The Japanese lead scientist
in the film’s story warns the military and his fellow scientists that our
mistake is in thinking we are in control of nature when it’s the other way
round. It’s actually rather amazing that this is one brief line in the
movie (with maybe another similar line or two – I can’t recall exactly).
The old Toho Godzilla franchise was fond of much longer soliloquies on
this theme. But this new film, like the passage from the Book of Job
above, shows you this truth rather than lecturing. The result is
that you walk away feeling it in your breast rather than cognitively
assenting to it or debating it in your intellect.
(image from http://godzilla.wikia.com/)
This all ties in
somehow to what some eco-critics have called the ‘swamp dragon’ in our
ecological visions and what Timothy Morton calls ‘dark ecology’:
i.e. ecosystemic harmony and thriving is not all about pretty flowers and
bunnies, nor even simply inclusive of beautiful predators savagely but
impressively devouring their prey – a full ecology has to include all the
‘ugly’ and ‘gross’ and poisonous stuff too (toxins and sludges and parasites
and so on). But I don’t want to rush into making such connections too
easily. In fact, I heartily approve of the subtlety and ambiguity of the
film as regards politics and other ‘messages’. I agree to some degree
with monster historian Scott Poole that monsters are ‘meaning machines’,
but not first and foremost (as Poole himself notes when he admits that
the term ‘monster’ tends to resist definition). A monstrum, as
many monster theorists have pointed out, is a ‘warning’ or ‘sign’ or ‘portent’.
Monsters do seem to point us onward as harbingers of Something Else.
But they have an integrity all their own as well. To parody the
title of an older little work on theology of art, Monsters Need No Justification.
Primarily and
primordially monsters are MONSTERS. They are there to be MONSTROUS.
I’m reminded of how one reviewer recently said that horror-master
Stephen King sells himself a bit short in emphasising the humans over the
monsters in his own comments on his fiction: rather, said that reviewer, 'one of the central ideas in King's fiction' is 'that the universe is more mysterious, freaky, and bad-ass than we know'.
That’s the
first ‘message’ of Godzilla (2014) and I don’t think we should take much
else from it until we’ve sat and soaked in the roaring stomping truth of that
for a good while. We should be floored, awed, speechless. Start
there. And do not proceed unless you find it hard to articulate what
you’re feeling. That’s the way the world feels (or ought to feel, contra
all-too-quick headlines and taglines and recriminations and justifications)
when tsunamis hit and tornadoes touch down or a loved one dies (or when a eucatastrophe
strikes as well – the birth of a baby, for example).
When the giant
monsters show up, the tiny people shut up. (After the initial screaming
and crashing have died down at least.)
So Godzilla is not
just about ecology any more than the original film was just about atomic bombs.
Godzilla, inasmuch as it evokes majesty and awe, is about ontology.
They are about questioning the boundaries of what is real.
Plus, if you want to
talk about over-mining resources unto ruin, ponder the inevitable
quickly-churned-out ‘franchise’ the success of this film will likely spawn.
Maybe this is a prime example of ‘eco’ irresponsibility based on greed
and disrespect and wilful ignorance, but this time in the ‘ecosystems’ of the
arts and culture. (Thankfully, the director himself said they
first and foremost wanted to focus on making an excellent standalone film and wouldn't consider anything else until that was accomplished. It shows.
I wish others in the film industry could learn from this.) And
these kinds of (cultural) waste and mismanagement have their monstrous
consequences too. Aesthetic mass-destruction in order to restore aesthetic
balance can happen too, I suspect. I’m not sure how or what this would
look like, but don’t count it out.
Don’t get me wrong.
I desperately want to see this particular cinematic vision give us new
iterations of Mothra, Gamera, Ghidorah, and Rodan – heck, maybe even
Mecha-Godzilla! But not necessarily too soon or too (aesthetically)
cheaply, and maybe not at all if it can’t be done ‘righteously’ as regards
cultural production. I respect the monsters too much to grub for sequels
at any cost.
(image from http://www.godzilla-movies.com/)
Epilogue
I did not think I was going to see a
Messiah-themed film when I went to see this movie. I didn’t even noticed
how much I was seeing such a film until right toward the end when the
television news in the film was flashing the headline ‘King of the Monsters -
Savior of Our City?’ about Godzilla. This was after Godzilla had quite
clearly sacrificed himself to rid the world of its monstrous attackers, lay
buried in dust and rubble, and then ‘rose again’ the next morning. King
and Saviour are explicitly biblical messianic terms – they are what the title
Christ, the Anointed One, means in the Bible. The film goes out of its
way to give the feeling that Godzilla was sent in to save us from our
horrifying excesses. You could, of course, read this in some pantheistic
or maybe even, at a stretch, some ‘mystical’ naturalistic way. Maybe the
filmmakers would even prefer you to do so. But I’m not so sure.
Probably
the most talked about scene of the film is the ‘HALO jump’ the soldiers
perform in order to drop into the city that’s being raized by the battling
monsters. The long, score-enfolded depiction of the sky-diving soldiers
descending like angels into hell (those are the director’s own words to
describe the nature of the scene) will surely go down in cinematic history as
one of the most achingly beautiful artistic achievements of early 21st century film.
It is an awe-inspiring image of the heavenly penetrating into the
hellish.
Just before this jump
is made we see a chaplain soldier with his open Bible praying for his fellow
soldiers. It is not a ‘name it and claim it’ prayer demanding that God
deliver the world from the evil it has at least in part brought upon itself,
nor even a prayer of protection or victory. It is a very simple prayer of
thanksgiving that these soldiers have had the chance to serve together.
The sense of surrender to divine will, and willingness to die in service
of others, comes across so simple and, to me, profound. One could, of
course, see this scene as nothing more than little humans praying to their
pathetic man-made gods as a sort of denial of the shift to eco-centrism that
the film enacts. But I think it resists that all-too-easy categorisation.
The sense seems to me to be that humans must play their part and do
everything they can, even when that is very little, and they must trust to
something higher than themselves for the rest.
In
this connection it’s also fascinating to note that the main husband and wife
couple of the film are comprised, career-wise, of a nurse and a bomb-disposal
expert. These people are professional helpers, healers, redeemers – bit
players in the ecologically monstrous drama unfolding about them to be sure,
but intriguing in their aiding and redemptive capacities nonetheless. In
their tiny way, they actually reflect what Godzilla is doing at the much larger
level.
Envoy
In closing, I leave you with another
passage from Job 41. This was the section from the speech of Yahweh that
came just before the passage cited above:
“Can you pull in Leviathan with a fishhook
or tie down its tongue with a rope?
Can you put a cord through its nose
or pierce its jaw with a hook?
Will it keep begging you for mercy?
Will it speak to you with gentle words?
Will it make an agreement with you
for you to take it as your slave for life?
Can you make a pet of it like a bird
or put it on a leash for the young women in your house?
Will traders barter for it?
Will they divide it up among the merchants?
Can you fill its hide with harpoons
or its head with fishing spears?
If you lay a hand on it,
you will remember the struggle and never do it again!
Any hope of subduing it is false;
the mere sight of it is overpowering.
No one is fierce enough to rouse it.
Who then is able to stand against me?
Who has a claim against me that I must pay?
Everything under heaven belongs to me.”
