Godzilla

In preparation for Godzilla, I watched Monsters, the first and only feature Gareth Edwards directed before this, and seemingly one of the sole reasons he was picked for the job. It's not hard to see why. Filmed on a super low budget, it's an alien invasion flick told primarily from the perspective of two people crossing through the quarantined landscape the extra-terrestrials have taken up residence. Obviously, the financial restrictions severely limited the extent to which the audience was able to view the martians, but rather than let that lead to a boring, uneventful drag, Edwards instead thought opportunistically, employing the classic rule - one which I've harped on about before - that something is scarier the less you see of it, to his advantage. The result was a really cheap flick that cleverly tricked the audience into believing it was a really expensive one that was just sparing with its special effects (it's even more impressive when you learn he created everything on his own at his computer using affordable software). Watching Monsters got me even more excited for Godzilla. The way I saw it, a huge budget wasn't going to let loose the beast in Edwards, free from the shackles of needing to think economically with what he could show. The way I saw it, he was going to show things the exact same way. It was just going to look much better. How great it is to be right.

It would be a mistake to think that Godzilla has a problem with its protagonist. Yes, Aaron Taylor-Johnson's acting is pretty wooden, but I think that's the point. In a bizarre twist of fate, it's Bryan Cranston's habit of pouring his heart and soul into whatever's on the page that feels slightly out of place. The film eschews complicated characters in favour of cardboard cutouts to keep you firmly locked in place with the story, because ultimately, Godzilla's protagonist is humanity. Aaron Taylor-Johnson struggles to reveal depth, but maybe that's the point. He's not playing someone who requires depth, he's playing the idea of a husband and father caught in a dire, life-threatening situation separated from a wife and child. This is not to discredit Bryan Cranston's performance, by the way. I put the guttural scream he releases when he closes a door to stop radioactive smoke from billowing out into the public knowing full well in doing so that he just killed his wife further inside among the film's finest and most affecting moments, and it's entirely down to the conviction of his performance. It's just existing in a film that well and truly gets by with accessible, one-dimensional archetypes.

The reason it does get away with such banality is because of the lens through which we view it. A Godzilla by another director with mountains of cash might have taken the idea of two or three monsters fighting in a city and concluded, "Who cares? It's all computers. Let's just have some magic camera high up getting the whole thing. Who gives a fuck about artistic integrity? They'll think all this fake shit is shit hot!" Do you want to know why movies like Transformers or The Hobbit make you tired? It's not the length. It's the fact that your awareness of its falsity is made all the more apparent by its impossible cinematography. When you can do so much of the special thing, it ceases to be special. Godzilla understands this, and I can't stress this enough, fucking perfectly. If we as humanity are the protagonist, the movie is seen through our eyes, and this is done by keeping the camera stuck firmly on two legs. We catch glimpses of these humongous beasts through windshields, or from a rooftop, or from inside the goggles of a paratrooper descending into the den of Gods. If the camera is level, it's because we're looking out of a high-rise window, otherwise the camera is looking up. This is all to elicit a particular emotion from the audience. It's not excitement, it's not tension and it's not fear: it's awe. From amongst the smoke that's blanketing a destroyed city, a gigantic tail cuts through. Slowly, almost gracefully, it clears a path and we tilt our heads to see what it's connected to. We crane further and further and the dark tower seems to go on forever, until a bolt of lightning cracks and we see the outline of a head. It emerges from the haze, and it's only as it begins to inhale that we realise how quiet the world currently is. It doesn't cut the silence. It obliterates it, with an impossible, earth-shattering roar that lifts and throws paper lanterns hung from street lights. And all we can do is shiver and stand in wonder of what nature has wrought.

Godzilla also utlilises what I like to call 'Bruce's Gift' to illicit the right emotion from the audience. Steven Spielberg's initial vision for Jaws was to show the shark in full profile from the first scene. Unfortunately, his animatronic (they called it Bruce) driven by electricity wasn't too fond of water. A broken beast forced him to rethink his strategy to scare the audience, and by pulling from H.P. Lovecraft's idea that your imagination will always exceed the monster he puts to pen, he hid the monster away from us and let a chunk of dock being dragged by something below the water's surface fill our heads with all sorts of terrifying notions. It's almost an hour into Godzilla before we see a creature. Preceding it, we've been fed imagery such as huge amounts of forestry razed in a snake-like shape and an entire nuclear power plant destroyed by the tremors caused by something shifting below it. It's well over an hour before Godzilla, larger than his foe, steps into frame. His body rising from the ocean's depths causes a tidal wave. He passes underneath a naval ship for what seems like an eternity. By the time we actually see his face, our heads have built something far greater than what the film can offer. And it knows this. Godzilla roars, our jaws drop and the scene abruptly cuts to a mother and child far away from the action. We catch glimpses of the brawl from news footage on the television, but it's up to us to fill in the blanks. Eventually, in the final act, the camera pulls out and stays there to watch the fight, because by then we've earned it. But even after viewing their full profile, the film exercises restraint. We'll catch a minute or two of the carnage they're capable of inflicting upon one another before they retreat into the shadows, leaving us only with a silhouette in the distance and the destruction they've left behind. We're powerless to influence, aid or combat them. They're mythical. Godzilla rises from the ocean's depths to save Earth from something that would destroy it. Not us, but our planet. When the job is done, he returns to the ocean, and we stand in his wake, wondering if he is our saviour or simply a force of nature. I had what I was worried were too high expectations for Godzilla. It met them. I don't exaggerate when I say that in many ways, it elicited the same sense of awe and excitement as the first time I watched Jurassic Park, and it's because Godzilla, like Jurassic Park, knows that it's not about the dinosaurs. It's about how we see them.