BEFORE: It's Halloween, and once more, scary monsters walk the land. Don't worry, most of them are between the ages of 5 and 15, and they just want candy. Unless you're in Hollywood, where most of the real monsters are powerful producers and directors, and we're hearing scarier and scarier stories about them every day now. But I digress.
Godzilla carries over as a character from his first film, to his most recent - and it seems like Hollywood's already working on a sequel to this 2014 film that will be titled "Godzilla: King of the Monsters", due out next year. Hmm, that title seems kind of familiar. But again I digress. Right before I started the Halloween chain I watched "Trumbo" with Bryan Cranston in it, so ending on this film sort of gets me back on track, picking up where I left off and all that. And we'll see Mr. Cranston again tomorrow, barring some late-breaking scandal news out of Hollyweird.
Thanks to TCM and their focus on Dracula and Hammer Films this month, I wasn't able to make much of a dent in my list of horror films to watch - even though I watched 21 films this October, new films rushed in to take their places, and now I have 25 left, which might be more than I started with. That's almost a full month of horror films to watch in 2018 - and that's why I may never finish this project.
THE PLOT: The world is beset by the appearance of monstrous creatures, but one of them may be the only one who can save humanity.
AFTER: This meshes with the history of Godzilla films, since he started out as a mindless villain, but then over time was shown battling even badder, more destructive monsters, so he became something of a hero, or at least an anti-hero. The first part of this film seems to hearken back to the original 1954 film, since it mentions that date as his first attack on Tokyo. Then we flash-forward to 1999, when a giant skeleton is found underground in a mine, along with two spores, one of which appears to have hatched. Shortly thereafter, there's an attack on a nuclear reactor in Japan - and though we don't see a monster at this point, its presence is surely implied. The American supervisor of this plant experiences a great loss during this attack as the plant is destroyed.
Fast-forward again to 2014, as the supervisor's son is all grown up, with a wife and son of his own, and is working as a bomb disposal expert for the U.S. Navy, but his father keeps getting in trouble with the Japanese government as he's still investigating the cause of the plant disaster - chasing monsters, as it were. The son has to travel to Japan to bail out the father, and thus all the pieces are put into place. Together they decide to investigate the old quarantine zone, and they discover a secret facility that appears to be drawing radiation from another giant monster, a winged creature that hatches and starts destroying everything in sight.
I'm afraid that's about as much sense as I can make out of this story, because after this it's extremely all-over-the-place. There's junk science a-plenty - for example, was the plant drawing radiation from the creature, or was it feeding it radiation? There's no real clear answer. Aren't there much safer ways to generate energy than to siphon it off of monsters? Or if they're feeding the monster radiation, for God's sake, why would they do that? These non-Godzilla creatures are apparently called MUTOs, or "Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms".
And then while we're focused on the MUTOs, we may not even notice that Godzilla doesn't even appear during the first HOUR of this film that bears his name. He must have the same agent as Harrison Ford, to get such a killer deal.
While one MUTO attacks a Russian sub near Hawaii, another one emerges from its spore near Las Vegas (umm, how did it get there?) and tears up that city. Meanwhile, Godzilla's swimming over from Japan, and they're all going to meet up in San Francisco. Which just happens to be where our hero's wife and son are - geez, what a coincidence! I mean, sure, San Francisco's nice and all that, but why leave Vegas, home of the casinos and buffets? Plus all the entertainment options, the great climate, this makes no sense. And the other MUTO leaves Hawaii to go to San Francisco? Again, I don't understand, Hawaii's like a tropical paradise by comparison.
But the nonsense continues, after some non-logical statements like "The monster's heading for Las Vegas! Quick, send the military to San Francisco!" And there's also, "Use this bomb to blow up the monsters! Only, not right away, set the timer for 90 minutes for no reason!" And don't forget, "Set up the tanks on the Golden Gate Bridge! No, don't bother to clear all the civilians off of it first, are you crazy?" And that's NITPICK POINTS #1-3, right there.
But wait, there's more, what about sending paratroopers in to find the monster's nest, which is underground? Umm, couldn't you have just driven the team there? And if the paratroopers are trying to sky-dive in to conduct a sneak attack, why do they have to have those cool red smoke trails coming out of their suits? The monsters have eyes, too, you know, and they could just track the smoke trails to have a tasty little snack drop right into their mouths... And let's not forget that these creatures feed on radiation, so by all means, let's use a nuclear warhead to try and kill them. Idiotic. And that's NITPICK POINTS #4-6.
And then we've got the hero's wife, who's a doctor, and seems pretty smart, but she can't follow the simple instruction from her husband, which is "Stay where you are, keep our son safe, I'll come get you." Instead she gives her kid to a STRANGER to be evacuated, and then wanders off in some random direction. What? That kid ends up in the most dangerous situation possible, all because she couldn't focus on her son and her job at the same time? This is not a great shining moment for women trying to have it all. Forget multi-tasking, she can even handle tasking.
It's all part of the Hollywood patriarchy, I'm afraid, which demands that we have a MALE hero who's in the military, an expert on bombs - in fact he's apparently the ONLY one with the right bomb knowledge, how is that even possible - and then he has to find his wife and son and put the family back together after defeating the scary monsters. Give me a break. Why couldn't the bomb expert be a woman? Why couldn't the film show any woman successfully accomplishing ANYTHING? We're never going to fix the gender issues if we keep falling back into these rigid stereotypes about men being more successful.
The special effects have come a long way since 1954, that much is clear. And Godzilla's back to his original look, after fans complained he was too lizard-like in the film released back in 1998. But it's a shame that the story here starts at ridiculous and then ventures into complete nonsense, that seems like a giant evolutionary step backwards.
Also starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson (last seen in "Savages"), Elizabeth Olsen (last seen in "Captain America: Civil War"), Bryan Cranston (last seen in "Trumbo"), Ken Watanabe (last seen in "Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant"), Sally Hawkins (last seen in "Layer Cake"), Juliette Binoche (last seen in "The 33"), David Strathairn (last seen in "The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel"), Richard T. Jones (last seen in "Vantage Point"), Carson Bolde, CJ Adams (last seen in "Dan in Real Life"), Victor Rasuk (last seen in "Fifty Shades of Grey"), Patrick Sabongui, Jared Keeso (last seen in "Elysium"), Hiro Kanazawa (last seen in "The Age of Adeline"), Ken Yamamura (last seen in "The Wolverine"), Garry Chalk.
RATING: 5 out of 10 EMP strikes
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