Godzilla – Terror without character

King of the movie by the guy who made Monsters: Godzilla moves on San Francisco

Godzilla turns 60 this November. The King of the Monsters had a great run between 1954 and 2004, when Japan celebrated his golden anniversary by having him squash the life out of almost every monster in his rogue’s gallery in Godzilla: Final Wars; including dishing out a veritable curb-stomping to the mutant iguana beast of Roland Emmerich’s much-maligned 1998 would-be reboot.

But looking back on 1954’s Godzilla (or Gojira), it’s easy to forget how important a film it was, reclaiming the monster movie from the B-movie bin where Son of Kong dumped it only nine months after King Kong(1933) became the genre’s first masterpiece. Gojira balanced strong pacing, effective monster attacks and light characterization with a highly political but not overwrought metaphor for nuclear destruction in the atomic age.

So where does that leave us in 2014? A Godzilla reboot with state-of-the-art digital effects is where; featuring strong pacing, effective monster attacks and light characterization. But it’s not all it could have been, and it so easily could have been great.

Gareth Edwards’s take on the colossal lizard is a mixed bag. Opening with flashes of historical drawings of mediaeval monsters, there is an air of pretention to this project which is quickly rinsed away. Images of A-bomb tests in the Pacific from the 1950s are shown to apparently destroy Godzilla (the Godzilla? A Godzilla?). Cut to the late 1990s and some Japanese nuclear facility (let’s just call it ‘Fake-ashima’) comes under attack from an apparent earthquake caused by some burrowing beastie – the white guy (Bryan Cranston) saw it coming, but could not prevent it.

In the present, Cranston looks to his estranged son Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) to help him prove that something unnatural happened at Fake-ashima, and that a cover-up has taken place. Soon soldier Ford, scientists Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins and the U.S. military are chasing creatures across the Ocean towards a final showdown in San Francisco.

Breaking Dad: Bryan Cranston with Aaron Taylor-Johnson

All the components of a best-of Godzilla franchise are in place. The design of Godzilla is sublime. The drama is very much in check (Ford’s wife and son are in San Fran). The action sequences and monster fights are choreographed with balletic composure. Alexandre Desplat’s bombastic score is a noble successor to the work of Akira Ifukube. So then what’s wrong? The answer mostly lies in characterization, but not where you might expect.

Edwards rose to notoriety in film circles when his 2010 film Monsters managed to tell an engaging human drama against the backdrop of a semi-apocalyptic monster attack; all for $500,000. Here, working with a budget nearly 500 times that size, the monsters are infinitely more satisfying, but the human drama hasn’t succeeded. That falls largely on the fact the central romance, Taylor-Johnson and wife Elizabeth Olsen, only get one scene together. It’s a strong scene of married life marred by military duty, but it’s not enough to hang the emotional core of the film on. Secondly, looking back on the entire Godzilla oeuvre, there’s a reason the heroes of those films are regular scientists and journalists and never soldiers – soldiers are only interesting characters when they’re forced to go against the orders they’ve dedicated their lives to follow through, but here Ford is actually the good little soldier boy throughout, and it’s not exactly endearing.

Bryan Cranston and Elizabeth Olsen are given far too little to work with, acting only as emotional fulcrums for a weight Taylor-Johnson still can’t lift. David Strathairn struggles to fit into his role as a top-tier general worse than he struggles to fit into camos a size too big for him. Ken Watanabe, that ever-reliable token Japanese star, is given the preposterous exposition section of the script; you’ll buy everything he’s selling, but when he’s not telling you what to believe, it’s hard to believe in what’s happening.

In an awkward (ex)position: Ken Watanabe

And that’s because of Godzilla. What is Edwards’s Godzilla? The film never seems certain. Certainly no product of the nuclear tests as in 1954 or 1998. More curious still, having a bomb dropped on him in 1954 has not left him with any vengeance towards mankind (in fact, like last year’s Pacific Rim, the film seems oddly unconcerned with nuclear power as a danger at all – an awkward Hiroshima reference gets briskly swept aside). The rival monster has far more explanation of where he came from; Godzilla comes off as an awkward plot-device, “addressing an imbalance in nature”, if we can excuse such hippy nonsense coming Watanabe’s mouth, and hunting that monster because… because. A line of dialogue from the trailer where Watanabe calls Godzilla “a god” has thankfully not made the final cut, which would have dumped even more confusion into the mix.

But the real shame is not the “what is he?”, but the “who is he?” Godzilla over his 50-year Toho run has been wrathful, vengeful, arrogant, proud, delighted, caring, even overtly sarcastic. Here the monster ranges from angry, to sad, to kinda tired, to kinda happy. He’s been reduced from a complex monster to a bland array of Seven Dwarf names. He has less characterization than the average Taylor-Johnson.

Which is not to say that when he unleashes his classic roar, or stomps defiantly on his opponent, that he isn’t clearly a worthy version of the classic monster. He’s just not quite there yet. Despite inherent problems, Godzilla is assertively satisfying, with a finale that rewards wholeheartedly after 100 minutes of monster foreplay. There’s enough innate craftsmanship on show to demand more appearances by this version of Gojira, but some proper fantasy world-building is required before we can buy this monster wholesale. Edwards has a lot to learn as a filmmaker (his reliance on Spielbergian child-shots to sell his disaster scenes proves this), but he is well on his way to becoming a force of nature himself. Should he return to Godzilla, there may no stopping the pair next time.

3/5

(originally published at http://www.nextprojection.com)

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Anna Karenina – Review

All the world’s a stage

Not another costume drama; I hear you say. And you couldn’t be criticised for saying so. It’s not that there have been an excessive number of period films in the past few years, or that they have not been of a high quality, but that the surge in well-produced TV drama has seen an explosion on our screens of ball gowns, steam engines and lives ruined by affairs. The costume drama has come down with a terrible case of the Downtons.

But Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina is something special. Not since Tom Jones has a costume drama been as ambitious, indeed audacious, stylistically as this film is. Leo Tolstoy’s tale of ball gowns, steam engines and lives ruined by affairs has been injected with a burst of visual flair by the Atonement auteur, staging much of the action within a 19^th Century Russian theatre, where characters move from scene to scene as if in an epic, shifting play.

Within this theatrical world, the stage itself plays host to bedchambers and offices, while the house is home to work floors, train stations and ballrooms. The poorer denizens of Moscow are briefly found living in the rafters amongst squalor and sandbags. But like Larry Olivier’s Henry V the doors are soon flung open to the outside world and Wright’s camera becomes free to roam in the icy wilds of Russia.

Keira Knightley as Anna Karenina

It’s a remarkable production of a book that has been filmed many times before, and while the text gives no real reason for such a theatre-themed rendition, Wright’s excessive cinematic flair not only justifies the stylistic choice but makes it the film’s biggest draw. Returning to the period drama after the critically mauled Oscar-slut The Soloist and the misjudged teen assassin oddity Hanna, Wright has produced his most visually tantalising film yet. There are plenty of examples of his trademark extended tracking shots, which are here used to sensational effect, with scenery and costumes changing on screen within the theatre to transition between scenes. A sweeping ball room sequence builds to a fevered pace to express burning desires and frantic jealousy, while in the film’s greatest set piece a thrilling horse race is remarkably enclosed within the theatre, with the animals thundering across the stage.

Wright regular Keira Knightley stars as the tragically smitten Anna Karenina, who although married to the good but closed-off Alexei Karenin (Jude Law), finds herself unable to resist the excessively charming Count Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). When the star-crossed lovers meet, sparks all-too-literally fly and a very public scandal is not far off.

Diamonds are your eyes’ best friends

Knightley gives a strong performance in the title role, although she permanently looks too young to play the princess (the passage of time is unfortunately poorly indicated). But her face, captured in repeated close-ups, is as beautiful as the gowns and diamonds that coat her person, and Wright tells his story through her amplified expressions, swamped in light.

Taylor-Johnson as Count Vronsky

As Vronsky, Taylor-Johnson is a weak link, not quite capturing the character’s newfound romantic nature as Anna draws him out of his womanising. Jude Law is surprisingly restrained as the jilted, befuddled Karenin, and is all the better for it – this is one of his finest performances in years. But the film’s most inspired performance is that of Domhnall Gleeson, sporting a luxuriant ginger beard as Konstantin Levin, an idealist aristocrat hopelessly in love with a spoiled young debutante. Gleeson evokes a remarkable sadness coupled with an honest pride that he is doing the best he can with his life, and his scenes are in every case a joy to watch.

The screenplay, by the venerable Tom Stoppard, finds ample romance and tragedy and even a healthy dose of comedy in Tolstoy’s text, and the film never gives way to excessive narration to tell its story. While the pacing runs out of steam for much of the final act, the resolution is well composed and no scene feels out of place.

Whether or not audiences take to the film’s theatrical flair remains to be seen, but Wright’s ambition is not to be scoffed at. With production and costume design more glowing than the Oscar statuettes they will win, Anna Karenina is a visual feast from the moment the curtain goes up.

4/5

(originally published at http://www.filmireland.net)