King of the Monsters

As I see it, the only way to begin a review, which this might well turn out to be, of Gareth Edward's new film Godzilla is to say "Very recently, I saw Godzilla."  Sentences that begin "Bryan Cranston plays a nuclear scientist in Japan with a wife (Juliette Binoche) who works with him, and a son, and so one day" or "Gareth Edwards' new blockbuster hits theaters on a wave of etc." or any of your standard openers, feel slightly disingenuous to me.  There's so much understood going in about Godzilla, such as what he is and does, where he's from and why he's from there specifically, that one should, in theory, be able to cut the line so that all preamble can be condensed, with no loss of understanding on the part of the reader, to "Very recently, I saw Godzilla."

Which indeed I have done, and I'll tell you:  this is actually kind of an odd one.  It's the second (or third, depending on whether snobs like you count television) full-length feature from director Gareth Edwards.  His previous offering, 2010's Monsters, was to my eyes an only partially successful attempt to combine old-fashioned monster movie-as-allegory directness with a modern arthouse, of the American independent variety, sensibility.  But as weak as I found the majority of Monsters to be, there is within it the seed of Edwards' particular genre aesthetics.  If that seed hasn't blossomed particularly in the four years between that film and this new Godzilla, I feel confident that's not because Edwards doesn't know what he's doing, or what he wants, but rather that this particular aesthetic is not something that's going to be embraced by the kind of people who have the kind of money Edwards would need to expand significantly on the one concept that makes Monsters memorable.  It would be both expensive yet not remotely commercial, is what I'm getting at.  Yet here it is again, no larger but still recognizable, in the very expensive-to-make Godzilla.

And I'm talking about what, exactly?  In Monsters (which I talk about in more detail here, if you care) Edwards ploy was to show the audience very little of the titular beings until he shows you everything, and that withholding when paired with the explicit image's inexplicability, becomes very powerful.  Okay, but how can you do that in, and perhaps more to the point who would want it from, a modern Godzilla film?  To explain I suppose I will have to tell you a little bit about the plot.  So:  Bryan Cranston plays a nuclear scientist in Japan with a wife (Juliette Binoche) who works with him, and a son, and so one day, on the scientist's birthday, a terrible accident destroys the nuclear plant, his wife is killed, and for the next fifteen years the scientist follows an obsession that the cause of the accident isn't what the official story says it was (it was actually Godzilla). His son (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) grows up, joins the Army, goes to Iraq, comes home to his wife (Elizabeth Olsen) and son and then immediately has to fly to Japan to get his dad out of jail for trespassing, long story short it was Godzilla just like I said, plus two other monsters, there's a whole thing about these guys that is explained to us by scientists (Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins).

So that's how things get going.  And before I get to the important stuff, I have to point out that Godzilla is a strange one in a couple of different ways, and before Edwards' unique approach asserts itself, the strangeness is apparent in how quickly he blows through the above plot stuff.  Godzilla is just about exactly two hours long, which in the world of modern effects blockbusters is actually about thirty or forty minutes on the lean side.  The film opens in 1999, with one of those scenes of scientists wearing safety suits with the flat glass helmets shining flashlights in a cavern (which I'm about done with, by the way; pretty soon all films will become one and we'll have scenes of scientists in safety suits holding flashlights in caverns while they use the internet to look up old newspaper articles about mysterious local deaths) and by the time we've reached the modern day section with Taylor-Johnson and Cranston in Japan, I can't imagine more than ten minutes have passed.  Most films of this type, that material takes up a solid half hour.  I was jarred, but perhaps only because I've been conditioned to the torture so that someone offering me kindness seems untrustworthy.  In any event, that's different, and pretty clearly part of the philosophy of this Godzilla is to hack things to the bone as much as is reasonable, a philosophy that can lead to clumsiness, as when one scene featuring Olsen ends with her standing outside the hospital where she works, about to go back inside, but when we see her next she's in the middle of the street, in the rain, with let's just say some threatening things surrounding her.  It's not necessary to know, when you get right down to it, how she ended up there, but there should be a clean flow between scenes, unless it is your plan to throw that shit right out the window; however that is not Edwards' plan.  "Plunging ahead" is not usually the most graceful way of navigating this stuff.

Fundamentally, though, who cares?  One thing about Godzilla that surprised me was that it follows the rough structure of the later Godzilla films made by Toho, when Godzilla acted as a kind of savior of mankind, defending them against other, more vicious monsters (in this case, thankfully though not really surprisingly, Godzilla's helpfulness is just a happy, for humanity, side effect of his natural predatory behavior; he's not overly concerned with being benevolent, or consciously aware that such motivation is even possible), and so much of the havoc wreaked upon Japan, Hawaii, and San Francisco is the result of Godzilla squaring off against this kind of husband/wife monster pair which have also been on the radar, as Godzilla himself has been, of various scientific and government agencies over many decades.  But for quite a while, Edwards doesn't want us to see it.

To give a couple of examples, in one dramatic scene we see Godzilla and one of the other creatures coming together to do battle -- for the first time in the movie, I might add -- and right then Edwards cuts to Taylor-Johnson and Olsen's kid watching it on the news.  And even then, the point for Edwards is not to give us a good look at this fight but through the lens of media, or some such thing, but rather to highlight the absurdity of an oblivious Olsen telling her son to turn off the TV and come to dinner.  Later on, these creatures are slamming together again, mouths snapping at each other, but here Edwards has his camera down where Olsen would be, and moving backwards, as Olsen would be, into shelter, and the doors of that shelter close and cut off Olsen's, as it would cut off the camera's, and our, view of this battle.  So not only is Edwards fucking with us, but he wants us to be aware that he's fucking with us.

The way he handles the human characters is illustrative, as well.  Taylor-Johnson is positioned as the hero, and he is, but if he has more screen time than, say, Olsen or Watanabe, and I'm sure he does, it's not so much more as to make him feel anything more than part of an ensemble, one that even as a whole is overshadowed by enormous monsters that we're often not even allowed to see, even as the people are playing second fiddle to them.  Even when Godzilla isn't on screen, and, for instance, Watanabe and David Strathairn are sharing a scene, it's Godzilla -- absent from our eyes for maybe twenty or twenty-five minutes by now -- who dominates.

When all is said and done, we'll have seen Godzilla do everything we hoped we'd see him do, but that we, or I, left the theater feeling he was a mysterious character is a strong mark in Edwards' favor.  As ubiquitous and as soaked into international culture as Superman, yet I still found myself thinking "This Godzilla, what's the whole deal with him anyhow?" Part of this is achieved through Edwards' focus on the other two creatures, the "bad guys" of the story, who, as I've said, are a mated male and female, and before the shit's really off the hook (and please make no mistake, for all Edwards' coyness, eventually shit really does fly off the hook, and the special effects, and the imagination that dictates what these effects should depict, are all top of the line), Edwards takes time showing these things simply behaving, doing things that, if they make sense, make sense in the same way that the behavior of wild animals in nature makes sense to a human observer.  This is when the best part of Monsters comes through into Godzilla.  Those moments, and also when Edwards brings Godzilla in, cloaks him in smoke or darkness, and lets his massive tail swing silently over our heads as he simply turns.  One thing Edwards understands that almost no one else in the world who makes these kinds of movies does, is how breathtaking such sights as the one he's presenting, monsters such as these, would be if human beings actually encountered them.  Add to that the iconic shudder that accompanies the name "Godzilla," and nothing less than awe is called for.

Prawns and Monsters

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The basic idea behind Gareth Edwards's Monsters is a good one -- or maybe not the basic idea, because I don't know which of the film's three or four ideas was Edwards's jumping off point. But the basic narrative idea is a good one, and that idea is this: the Earth has been sort-of invaded by aliens, specifically one chunk of the Earth, and a man and a woman (played respectively by Scoot McNairy (!) and Whitney Able) need to travel from that chunk, to another, alien-less chunk. These aliens, while not obviously aggressive, are nevertheless alien, and therefore ignorant, enough of Earth and humans that they're causing a good deal of havoc. Also, while sometimes very large in size, they're not everywhere, so while this man and woman go about their difficult journey the aliens are spoken about far more often than they are seen, and when they are seen it's usually in glimpses, and more often than not on television.

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But Monsters takes some wrong steps early -- starting with some unfortunate dialogue, as when Andrew (McNairy), who has been sent by his employer to find Samantha (Able) because she is, in fact, his employer's daughter, greets her by announcing "I work for your father's publication" -- culminating in the realization (this on the part of the audience) that Monsters is an allegory about an Important Issue of Our Time. This is, I suppose, inevitable, because these days, and in all the days that preceded these, science fiction can often be divided into two types: action stories, and Important Issue of Our Time stories. That's when it comes to movies, anyway -- in literature, it's quite a different proposition, because in that medium the genre allows for quite complex books like Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, and its bleak yet hopeful approach to evolution, or Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream, the conceit of which is that Hitler never went into politics, but rather science fiction, and The Iron Dream is, indeed, supposedly written by Hitler, and well, I have to admit I've never read that one, but I do like the idea, and anyway I think it's safe to assume that James Cameron will never be tackling that kind of material, or, at least, not on purpose.

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What I'm saying is, science fiction on film is somewhat less varied, and while I won't presume to speak for you, I'm beginning to suffer for it. Monsters, for all its minor faults, has a really nice, theoretical approach to the idea of extra-terrestrials, or rather -- and this, unfortunately, is crucial -- "aliens", and here I mean on visual terms. Thematically, however, somewhere along the way (right from the beginning, for all I know) Gareth Edwards apparently thought "Space aliens are a lot like Mexicans," and Monsters as we know it was born. Because Mexico is in fact the setting for Monsters, and America has built a wall along the U.S./Mexican border, and at some point, swear to Christ, Samantha actually says, in reference to this wall, "It's like we're imprisoning ourselves." That quote is inexact, but, I assure you, just barely. Almost nobody has realized, even at this late date, that unless you know what you're doing, you should leave allegory in the fucking toolbox. Virtually without fail, the result of removing it from that toolbox, with the intention of actually using it, is either a lecture, or a mix of a lecture and a round of high-fives with all the people who walked into the theater already agreeing with you. And I swear to you, it's not the specific politics or philosophy that is the issue here -- the problem is a lack of imagination. Being stopped in your tracks when you realize that "aliens" can actually have two meanings...well, that's not the kind of barn-storming idea that kept your Wellses and Asimovs and Ellisons and Delaneys and Silverbergs chugging along -- put it that way.

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But oh ho! Monsters, as it turns out, has quite a surprise in its pocket -- I realize I sound like a sarcastic dick there, but I actually mean it. I won't give away the end of the film, but before turning its story into a silly loop-the-loop for not good reason I can figure, Monsters presents us with a pretty darn good look at these titular "monsters" (to Edwards's credit, the underlying meaning of his title is not that "we are the real monsters," and for that I can only be grateful), and they're huge and beautiful and astonishing and doing...something. This stretch of the film -- a good five minutes or so, focused on these creatures -- is quite honestly one of the greatest bits of science fiction filmmaking I have ever seen. For a film that wears its influences not so much on its sleeve as on its forehead -- a lot about Monsters will seem awfully familiar to an awful lot of people -- to suddenly go all dazzling and awesome (the original definition, as in "wonder-inducing", as opposed to the more familiar meaning, "pretty neat") was a bit of a jolt. And it seems to me that this is why Edwards made this movie, because he knew he could do this (and, not incidentally, he could do it for not very much money); what he needed was a reason to do it, and the uninspired 90 minutes (and the dopey, but non-fatal, "twist" that follows) that precedes this moment is what he came up with.

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But Jesus, you know...I'll take it! What this section of Monsters is doing is exploring true alienness. Not the alienness of "the Other", which in college classrooms often means "people who aren't white", but true alienness, otherworldly, science fiction alienness, which itself, just lightly buried, doubles as the entirety of what we don't know and will not know in our lifetimes, and would never understand even if we could witness it. It's about knowing you don't know shit, that we don't know shit, even though the majority of us seem pretty confident that in a relative eyeblink, universally speaking, we've amassed all possible world and scientific knowledge. Finally, for all its massive failings, Monsters put me in mind of one of the greatest, and purest, science fiction stories I know: Terry Carr's "The Dance of the Changer and the Three" (you can follow that link and read the story yourself), which is a rather brilliantly dark take on the idea of uncertainty, approached by Edwards in Monsters with a more positive, albeit speechless, sense of wonder. So that ultimately my take on Monsters is that it's really not a very good movie, until suddenly, and however briefly, it is a very good movie.

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But I don't know, maybe recent disappointments have just made me soft, or quick to forgive, given that disappointment is not my favorite emotion. What I'm getting at here is last year's weirdly beloved District 9, the triumphantly successful first feature from Neill Blomkamp. The thing about the critical reaction to District 9 is that it appears to have had a positive baseline, so that reactions needed to grow from the feeling that it was rather nice that such a film, on such a scale, came from a country other than America. Which, okay, but from my perspective this means that I'm supposed to think that I don't really like the movie, but at least it came from South Africa. I'll give you that, if you think it's so important, but I'm still left with this broken heffalump of a lecture -- er, movie, this broken heffalump of a movie, whose noble goal is to illustrate Blomkamp's take on South Africa's current ethnic and political situation without chintzing out on shots of people exploding. I appreciate that, I guess, even though it means that District 9 is a mix of the two types of modern cinematic science fiction I'm most sick of.

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I thought of District 9 a lot while watching Monsters last night, mostly in the context of believing they were equally bad, and for the same reasons, but I think it should be clear now that in a head-to-head race, I think Monsters comes out ahead. For one thing, Monsters is visually consistent -- as a piece of filmmaking, it knows where it's going. District 9, meanwhile, consists of a very uneasy split between faux-documentary and standard, third-person omniscient (or whatever the opposite of a documentary is) action spectacle. This split is all the more uneasy because the documentary style is eventually just unceromoniously dropped. More obnoxious to me, from a technical standpoint, is the entirely absurd plot element involving the main character, named Wikus Van De Merwe. Played by Sharlto Copley in a much-hailed performance (even though I can't see what he does here that is any different from any other actor who has played a self-important, twitchy beaurocrat in any film ever; the film's innovation, which is genuine enough, is to make this guy the hero), Wikus goes from a guy whose job is to evict the space aliens from the impoverished blotch of Johannesburg they've chosen to inhabit since their baffling arrival some years before, a job he takes to with some callousness, to a guy who has great sympathy for, and even fights to correct, the plight of these same space aliens. He gets there because the aliens have this fluid, see, which is on one hand fuel that they need in order to escape from this South African plot of land back to their ever-hovering mothership, and on the other hand is a goo that if a human gets sprayed with it, it will transform him into a space alien. What good, or even just impact, this particular chemical property has on the space aliens when they're nowhere near Earthlings -- which presumably, in the context of their entire species, is almost all the time -- is anyone's guess, but it sure comes in handy in District 9.

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And look, I'm really not a big believer in the idea that the science in a science fiction film needs to be spotless in order to pass muster, nor do I find much worth in those who would pick away at all the supposed implausibilites in a story (strange, quick digression: the most recent episode of The Office features a protracted and even vicious snowball assault by one character on another, and I've seen people criticize this plotline for being too absurd in general, and because in reality one of their co-workers would certainly have stepped in and called an end to it; it is my hope that these people never enter into the field of comedy writing), but surely there are limits. When your plot hinges on something that is not only nonsensical, but also manages to rub our noses in metaphor, then something's wrong somewhere. How about I write a movie about a poor minority kid who travels with his dog through an unforgiving countryside, until one day he sees a rich white man drop a loaf of bread, and when the kid feeds that bread to his dog the dog gains the power to sniff out free money. Whatever, it's a metaphor.

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So District 9 is quite a bit more plotty than Monsters, which is fine by me in theory, much less so in execution. Worse, though, is that outside of some nice shots of the mothership, Blomkamp has no awe for his aliens. He's not trying to make a science fiction movie -- he's trying to make an action movie that Says Something. However, since he thinks he's making a science fiction movie, in order to stitch the action to his point, he's got to go through this absurd business with the fuel/transforming goo. But he betrays his intentions by having no curiosity about his aliens. Science fiction, along with everything else, is about curiosity, and Blomkamp has none. His "prawns" are not well-imagined creations -- they're substitutes. Like so many others, Blomkamp doesn't realize that something can be a metaphor and still be the thing itself, or if he does know this he thinks that making his aliens fond of cat food (which, honestly, is very close to being a joke from ALF) counts.

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Monsters is curious, though. It takes a while to get there, and frankly it's almost not worth it. But in the end, I believe it is. For about five minutes, Monsters is the anti-District 9, and for all my bitching, it gives me hope for the future.