REVIEW - Godzilla (2014): The Dialogue is Expository and the Action Looks Nice

Dir. Gareth Edwards, Screenplay by Max Borenstein, Music by Alexandre Desplat

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I’ll be up front about the fact that this is a bit of a lame-duck entry for me, though I was surprised upon rewatching it to find it succeeds and falls short in different ways than I’d remembered. I’ll also put out there right now that this may be the one tentpole movie I could genuinely say I followed with enough personal investment to feel disappointed by. I kept up with the production in a way I rarely do Hollywood films. I sat in awe of early teasers that promised to deliver on the long-missing angle of Godzilla’s nuclear horror. I watched as Godzilla’s foggy silhouette roared over a static-riddled recording of the famous Oppenheimer “Now I am become death” speech. I was a bit crushed to have put myself in a theater opening day, having dragged a girlfriend along at the time, only to find a final product that fell so far away from my expectations. All of that undoubtedly colors my feelings on the movie, and I want to acknowledge that up front. However, I hope to also address what I think works, and what I think really doesn’t, in America’s second take on the iconic monster as a movie in its own right.

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In 1999, two scientists from clandestine monster-tracking organization Monarch (Ken Watanabe’s Dr. Serizawa and Sally Hawkins’ Vivienne Graham) find the remains of a gigantic terrestrial lifeform. The animal appears to have been killed by grotesque, H.R. Giger-esque parasitic pods hanging from the ceiling of the cave its skeleton is discovered in. In Japan, near the Janjira nuclear power plant, Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) is concerned about unnatural seismic activity. On the day he plans to force the issue with his superiors, the seismic activity destroys nearly the entire power plant, killing Joe’s wife, who he’d sent to lower levels to investigate. The main story picks up fifteen years later, as Joe’s now-adult son, Ford Brody (Aaron Taylor Johnson), returns home to San Francisco from military deployment only to be alerted that his father has been arrested for trespassing in Japan. Joe is convinced the government is hiding something in the quarantine zone surrounding the abandoned nuclear plant. Long story short, Joe is right, and two insectoid giant monsters codenamed MUTOs (massive unidentified terrestrial organisms) emerge to feed on modern nuclear energy and procreate, one from a cocoon discovered under Janjira, another from a waste-disposal facility in Nevada. Joe is killed in the MUTO’s initial attack. Ford is left to find a way to return home to his family after a monster attack cancels his flight out of Hawaii, teaming up with various military operations along the way due to his background as an EOD officer. Eventually each of the movie’s driving forces—the MUTOs, Ford, Monarch, and a reawakened Godzilla, here reimagined as an ancient predator and a natural enemy of the MUTOs—converge on San Fransisco for a final, climactic fight.

The visuals here are impressive, but they can’t raise the film above its flat characters, muddled themes, and some of the most embarrassingly expository dialogue I’ve heard in a contemporary Hollywood film.

The movie’s main failure for me is that—as breathtaking as its visuals and sense of scale often are—the content surrounding them is amazingly, terribly schlocky, completely at odds with the level of investment the film asks of its genre-savvy audience. I’d be retreading old ground if I pointed out that Ford’s story often feels incidental, that he doesn’t have character motivation outside of wanting to return to his stereotypically rendered family in this specific situation, that Johnson’s acting is wooden. The fact the movie’s interesting characterization tends to shuffle off with Cranston is a fault admitted even by its most ardent fans. Watanabe is given a bit of spotlight as a Japanese native who argues against the employment of nuclear weapons due to his father’s experience in Hiroshima, but it all comes off a little limply—most of his dialogue is relegated to delivering almost mystical proclamations about the true purpose of Godzilla, and it’s all very silly and unscientific and seems to come from nowhere germane to his character. This problem is shared with Hawkins’ scientist character, for that matter, who takes a moment early on to remind the camera that the movie’s titular monster is “a god, for all intents and purposes.” Sometimes they’re scientists, sometimes they’re the Cult of Godzilla; one-hundred percent of the time they’re delivering whatever dialogue will sound coolest before the scene cuts. There are no substantial characters in this film, despite the movie being entirely rooted in them, following them, relying on their individual conflicts, rather than taking a more distanced, intellectual approach.

I want to be very clear that it asks the viewer to treat it with absolute seriousness; look at any of the film’s visuals, its marketing, etc. But, as I pointed out in a one-off comment a week or so ago, the movie is filled with outrageous schlock from the get-go. The credits open over stock footage of nuclear tests, a tired trope of American B-movies, rather than this film’s Japanese source. The sequence ends on the image of a bomb with a little Godzilla face painted on it in the middle of a “No” circle, which is absolutely hysterical. The dialogue, even were the characters not the ciphers they largely wind up being, is shockingly, consistently expository. This colored even Cranston’s scenes in a way I didn’t remember.

In his earliest scene, Cranston carefully states his position and the nature of the unusual seismic activity while on the phone with a Japanese colleague. His wife has to remind him that it’s his birthday. He responds immediately that when she arrives at the plant, she’s to go to the lower levels. All of this happens in a quick rhythm, with no bits of believable or characterizing dialogue in between. It is monstrously, almost comically, efficient. This never lets up. Later, when Ford visits his father in Japan, they both state their jobs (English teacher, in Joe’s case, military in Ford’s) within seconds of getting through Joe’s doorway. Joe revisits the time line of events in Ford’s own life for the audience’s benefit. He even puts a tea kettle on mere seconds after walking through the door simply so it can boil over at the moment of highest tension between the two characters; they never drink the tea. As mentioned above, Watanabe and Hawkins’ dialogue comes in two flavors: exposition on the nature of the monsters, and wild, prophetic statements about ancient gods and natural balance, neither of which at any point feels remotely natural.

Perhaps the scene I find most emblematic of the movie’s glaring dialogue problems is the introduction of Admiral William Stenz, a naval officer tasked with tracking the MUTOs and liaising with Monarch’s scientists. In his first appearance, he plays a clip of the newly escaped male MUTO on an array of monitors, expositing on its origins, its abilities, the fact that they must track it, the idea that their cover story may no longer apply, etc. Presumably, he’s talking to the crew around him, though at no point do any of them look up from their monitors, seeming to be already engrossed in their work in a way that would require familiarity with all the information Stenz is delivering. The viewer’s next thought may be that he’s speaking to the Monarch scientists behind him, but he never so much as glances at them, and they seem to be aware of all the information he’s repeated as well. So, who is he talking to? The only possible answer is the audience, and the construction of this scene, in which  a newly introduced character sternly repeats exposition to a room full of subordinates who aren’t listening, speaking candidly and urgently to no one, is truly comical if you catch onto this issue.

It may seem like I’m harping on the dialogue too much, and I certainly don’t want to get into CinemaSins territory where I’m scrutinizing every line for small inconsistencies in a way the overall film or genre can comfortably ask audiences to ignore. Indeed, some viewers may be able to ignore the exact moments, or rather the truly unending nature of the film’s expository dialogue, that so get under my skin. That’s fine; we all have different tolerances for these kind of breaks from reality. I simply want to point out that, again, this is not a film content to sit in B-movie territory. It is not a colorful 1960s Japanese monster film, nor a dour ‘50s American one. It is an attempt to ask American audiences in 2014 to take seriously a long-maligned genre concept. Its visuals and tone cry out for the audience’s benefit of the doubt. It’s unfortunate, then, that its script, from limp characters to its handling of dialogue, falls so close to the B-movie trappings of old. If, like me, you have an internal “bad dialogue” alarm that goes off frequently when watching Hollywood movies, your ears are going to be ringing through the entire two-hour film.

The movie’s highlight—credit where credit’s due—is absolutely the visual style it brings to its special effects scenes. Rendered largely in a black-and-red palette, the film carves out a visual niche for itself in an era of competent CGI action blockbusters. It’s impossible to mistake this film’s special-effects sequences as being from anything else. There is a fantastic sense of scale to the monsters here, and to their destruction sequences, and I find myself smiling any time those elements are on screen. I actually found myself, this viewing, agreeing with a widespread sentiment that I’d always considered a little juvenile: the idea that the monsters don’t appear enough in this film. If the scenes stringing the special-effects sequences together were more engaging, I doubt I’d feel this way, but I really was hungry to spend a few minutes with Godzilla fighting a MUTO at the hour-mark, especially after fantastic build-up to their arrival. If the audience has just come to terms with the idea that they’ll be spending the rest of the movie with Ford, with few interesting larger ideas, I don’t think that’s too much to give them. I’d love to see the female MUTO’s destruction of Las Vegas, rather than just the aftermath. The effects sequences are so well done, and the drama so half-baked and perfunctory, that I’d happily take much, much more of the former. In fact, upon this viewing, I almost felt starved for it.

I’ll touch on Alexandre Desplat’s score for just a moment. It’s serviceable. I don’t love it. If anything, it sounds around ten years out of date in terms of Hollywood tentpole movies—think something that would have accompanied a Spielberg film rather than the Hans Zimmer derivatives that have been so popular lately—which may be a positive for some, but isn’t an approach I feel meshes particularly well with the film. I think the movie’s visuals ask for something a bit more bold and atmospheric. This is one of those cases where I wish the studio actually had ridden the wave of Zimmer derivatives, as unimaginative as that approach would have been.

In terms of themes, the movie is muddled. This is going to be a recurring area to check in on throughout my Godzilla reviews, as I feel intellectual commentary is an essential part of what makes the series and genre tick (yes, woke internet critics, even outside of the ’54 film). There’s a bit of commentary on nuclear weaponry delivered through Godzilla and the MUTOs’ ability to feed on radiation and Serizawa’s plea to not use a nuclear bomb to lure the monsters in and destroy them, but it’s hardly touched on outside of one truly on-the-nose scene that manages to say little more than … nuclear bombs are bad, and we should try to avoid using them if we can. In the end, a bomb still explodes in San Fransisco Bay with little in the way of negative repercussions, so whatever, I guess. That pocket watch device is straight out of Fiction Writing 101.

I’ve seen it put forth recently that the film tackles the idea that mankind is still at the whims of natural forces in ways it would rather not consider. This idea at least offers a cogent thematic reading that tracks through the film—the MUTOs and Godzilla are ancient beasts; interference by way of trying to lure the MUTOs away with a nuclear bomb complicates the situation rather than solving it; Godzilla has to enter the fray, etc. It is, at the very least, a coherent reading of the movie’s major plot points. However, it requires the viewer to almost wholly ignore Joe and Ford’s contributions to the plot. I’d argue it’s still something of a failure to have a thematic throughline that doesn’t dovetail with the motivations and actions of the film’s protagonists. Mankind’s place within nature is also not a very urgent or uniquely contemporary thematic subject. I hope to eventually argue that both those elements, the dovetailing and the urgency, do hold true within the series’ most successful entries.

If you watch only the film’s action and spectacle scenes, you might come away convinced Godzilla (2014) is a bold reinterpretation of long-running monster iconography for contemporary Hollywood audiences—a visually distinctive, weighty, and all-around sober affair. If you watch the drama scenes, it’s perfunctory spectacle schlock, and it is this later identity I find dominates the film. Unfortunately I can’t bring myself to fully the separate spectacle scenes from the story around them. This identity—perfunctory spectacle with an almost embarrassing disregard for story and dialogue—is one I’m rather sick of seeing from Hollywood tentpole films. Yes, the Godzilla on display here is recognizably, crowd-pleasingly Godzilla. But it’s okay to want more from a script.

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Series Overview

As I review each Godzilla movie, I plan to put them into a tiered list that helps catalogue my feelings on the series as a whole. Everyone loves series rankings, right?

Love:

The Lesser Works:

Mostly Bad:

Watch for the monster scenes only (Hell):

Godzilla (2014)

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If you’ve stumbled across this and have any feedback for future blog reviews, or simply want to offer your take on the film, feel free! Leaving this open for comments.