Going Nuclear on Godzilla (2014)

 

Timothy Sáenz

Blog Post – Godzilla (2014)

Due: Friday, 16 April 2021

RIG – Monsters

Prof. Scott Johnson

MFA in Writing Popular Fiction

If you are having trouble getting to sleep at night, play the movie, Godzilla, the 2014 version, and you will tumble into a deep sleep, possibly even a coma. If ever a film existed full of explosions, earthquakes, crumbling skyscrapers, and monster roars that could substitute for counting sheep, it is this one. So you may have to turn the volume low enough. A morality tale about mankind’s naughty flirtation with nuclear power, Godzilla will put you to sleep within 45 minutes, which is about how long it takes before we get a real glimpse of any of the monsters that appear in this film.

Here is the problem with Godzilla and all its iterations except the first. Godzilla began as a serious monster story hampered only by the limitations of Japan’s postwar film industry. After that initial entree, it became a children’s movie franchise stern enough to fool only those in grammar school. Film company Toho put on exhibition men prancing about in rubber suits, mimicking human movements and gesticulations that toddlerfied the monsters as they destroyed cardboard and paper mâché metropolises. The Godzilla sequels transformed kids into cheerleaders for the stegosaurus-plated, eponymous, gigantic, reptilian hero as he battled the really bad monsters, Mothra, Ghidorah, et. al., to save Japan and the world from their rampages and to some extent from stupid mankind.

After 40 years of that, someone decided to return to the original idea of a scary, several hundred-feet-tall, fire-breathing monster. That brought a bad script and Godzilla to New York (Godzilla, 1999 version), and the franchise has been heading south since, unable to recover from its self-inflicted wounds. I mean, I’m okay with Godzilla as a kiddie-monster franchise. It just can’t be rehabilitated into what it once was.

The heavy-handed morality tale of Godzilla (2014) makes matters worse. We go to monster movies to be scared. When a movie becomes preachy, it reduces the scare. The experience becomes an intellectual exercise as we debate whether we must rid ourselves of nuclear power because we might create radiation-sucking monsters or whether its benefits and our capability to render its use safe warrant the risks of its benefits.

Even the premise stated above sounds ridiculous. No one really believes nuclear power is going to create humongous monsters any more. It’s been 76 years since the United States dropped atomic bombs on Japan, one on each of two cities. The results horrified everyone and compelled Japan to sue for a peace that would end World War II. In all the time since the bombs were dropped, neither those nor any other detonations or nuclear power plant accidents have created the abnormally-sized creatures depicted in Godzilla (2014) — though we do not have access to all the secrets of Chernobyl. Nuclear power has its dangers, but the giant-sized monster film can no longer carry the torch of that message. Cinema, and fiction, need something else.

In spite of all that, I did learn a few things from the film other than a new way to fall asleep. For one, movies with multiple monsters will be less effective at scaring older kids and adults. The uniquity of the monster helps drive the fear it creates. The multiple monster scenario was a carryover from the kiddie Godzilla films and didn’t fit here. Secondly, monsters must look scary to be scary. The face given to Godzilla in this movie looked like past iterations of baby Godzilla. Not scary at all. The whatever-they-were that Godzilla fought looked mechanical and not organic. That diminished the sense they were real. Thirdly, writers must present a clear, sensible scenario and a straight story line. We already had an ensemble monster cast and the filmmakers added an ensemble human cast and strained to tie their stories together. Thus, several characters turned up almost everywhere, including the Philippines, Japan, the Pacific Ocean, Hawaii, San Francisco, and parts of Nevada and/or California. Those characters included Dr. Serizawa, Lt. Ford Brody (whose military credentials are never questioned by the troops he tried to join), Admiral Stenz, and Capt. Hampton.

The U.S.S. Saratoga is made the flagship of the anti-monster operation, even though the Saratoga was decommissioned a decade earlier; even if it hadn’t been, it wouldn’t have been the biggest and baddest ship the navy could have assigned. My friend and I laughed as helicopters, which have the ability to hover safely at a distance and unload their deadly arsenals, flew right at and within arms reach of the monsters on strafing runs, only to get slapped out of the sky by the annoyed behemoths. Maybe I should have paid closer attention, but the idea of troops escorting an ICBM to another location, and of shipping that ICBM by rail car, was absolutely ridiculous. Whatever the hell was going on there was beyond credibility. And who the hell is Monarch? I know what they said in the movie. Sounded contrived and was fake and sounded like a way to avoid assigning responsibility.

Here’s another laugher: a viewer could see on the fake TV screens reporting on the catastrophic events that “thousands” were still missing. Really? The report wasn’t “millions are dead?” Between Vegas, San Fran, Oakland, etc., we should have at least had hundreds of thousand dead and displaced. At least!

Godzilla (2014) — how a script and its execution can kill a monster without having anyone or anything else touch it.