Godzilla (2014)

 It's almost exactly like this

Directed by Gareth Edwards

Starring Malcolm’s Dad, the Sane Olsen Sister and Kick-Ass

I just don’t know.

I mean, the movie was a big deal, people seemed to genuinely enjoy it, and it received good reviews. It has everything I love in a movie: big, flashy special effects… and… and…

The message of Godzilla is clear: don’t mess with nuclear power. Got it. That’s been the message since the first Toho film released in 1954. I didn’t feel as hit over the head with that message in this film, and I’m okay with that. For the most part, the world safely operates its nuclear power plants on a day-to-day basis. Except for Fukushima in 2011, there have been only a handful of core melt events since the advent of nuclear power.

I found the script to be disjointed, and it felt like a slipshod product by an industry working too quickly to capitalize on the Fukushima event and the resurgence of kaiju films (for some reason, Pacific Rim also received good reviews). I can almost chock that up to bad timing, as the work began on the script in 2010, but it’s hard to ignore the similarities.

The film raised a lot of questions it only answered in passing, such as why they’ve allowed a giant nuclear-powered parasite (the Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism, or MUTO) to feed on the ruins of the power plant it destroyed 15 years earlier. It’s like when you invite your socially awkward friend over to a party and they double-dip in the salsa:

“Oh, hey, that’s cool, you just destroyed our power plant… yeah, you can eat the rest.”

Then there’s our hero. He’s a Navy EOD tech. I’m in the Navy, so this is very nice to see. Go Navy! Beat MUTO!

Except, it doesn’t make any sense. He is not the only EOD tech in the word. He doesn’t have any bomb de-arming superpowers. Wait… why’s he going to Japan again? Oh, yeah, his dad’s in jail for trespassing in the same quarantine zone that used to be the salsa everybody could eat, but now it’s MUTO’s. He used to run that salsa. His wife died in that salsa. He wants to get some information out of his old house (and rescue some photos).

So, our hero gets home to San Francisco (there's no Navy base in San Francisco, so I'm a little lost there) from deployment and immediately leaves to go rescue his dad from Japanese prison.

Okay, fuck that. You haven’t seen your family in how long, and you’re running off to get your estranged dad out of Japanese jail? It’s Japanese jail! He’s got it better than you did on your whole deployment!

But he leaves and gets separated from his family again. Later, when the fleshy Megazords begin to work their way toward San Francisco… he tells her to WAIT FOR HIM!

Wait, what? No.

No no no no no.

No.

They evacuate the city but she refused to go--because, you know, he said he'd BRB--and of course it gets ugly.

Because he said he’d find her.

You know where else you can find her? Sacramento!

I wanted to enjoy this movie, and I was willing to look past a lot of the confusing action scenes (confusing because they were just so big of a scale… like all the Transformers movies), but I threw my hands up in the air in frustration when we got to the train scene. No reason in particular, I just hate train sequences. They’re all the same. Rushing through cars, jumping over couplings, falling from them and rolling violently through the dark. I’ve seen it.

I just… I just didn’t like it. I feel betrayed a little. Was it better than the 1998 version? Yeah, probably. Was it a good movie? No. Not even a little. At least not for me.

I’m not a kaiju fan. Not for any real reason than it just doesn’t interest me. They should be more terrifying than they are. I imagine if I heard of a giant lizard shooting radioactive fire out of his mouth attacking San Francisco, I’d feel some legitimate concern if not outright horror. But the idea in a movie isn’t scary for me. It feels too fake, too impossible.

Give me a Godzilla that’s possible. I think a smaller Godzilla is a good place to start. Make him the size of the Geico gecko. Then multiply him. Thousands of gecko-sized Godzillas melting ankles is kinda scary to me.

And give him a British accent. Every villain or gecko should have a British accent.