On the Big Screen: SHIN GODZILLA (Shin Gojira, 2016)

In an alternate universe, Hollywood's second film in its latest attempt at a Godzilla franchise is due in 2018. In the real world, Toho studios returned to the game it invented this past summer with a picture modestly entitled "New Godzilla." It's as new as a New Godzilla can get, since if I'm not mistaken this is the first film since the 1954 not in continuity with that film. That is, Shin Godzilla shows the ever-popular kaiju attacking Tokyo for the first time in the year 2016. That's a big part of its novelty as envisioned by screenwriter and co-director Hideaki Anno. He and co-director Shinji Highuchi are fascinated by the idea of 21st century Japanese society, and especially its government bureaucracy, confronting a "giant unidentified creature" without any precedent. It allows them to reconstruct many of the old monster-movie tropes from scratch, with what strikes me as a new touch of satire. The first half of the film in particular may make American audiences impatient with all the bureaucratic conferences and talking heads, no matter how the directors try to keep things lively with whipcrack editing. Shin is a kind of apocalyptic procedural, and a quick Google search just now shows that I wasn't the only person who felt a resemblance to another movie that would fit that description: Sidney Lumet's Fail Safe (1964). I don't know whether either of the filmmakers have acknowledged any debt to Lumet, but little details like intercom conversations between heads of governments, with translators standing by, and a brief mention of a theoretical nuclear strike on New York City make me wonder. Ultimately it's a trivial question, since Anno and Higuchi do an admirable job giving their Godzilla film its own identity.

Theirs is a new Godzilla in this sense, too: when you first see it, you won't be sure what the hell you're looking at. It seems that this sea creature has been chowing down on nuclear waste in the vicinity of good old Ohdo Island for the last 60 years before deciding to explore Japan, and it takes him a while to get his land legs. He crawls ashore, creating waves of boats, cars and trucks in his wake as he putters along, looking very little like his traditional self in this almost larval state. He finally hauls himself to his feet on the side of a tall building, only to immediately flop again. The poor creature seems to have a puppet face grafted onto a CGI body, but he soon outgrows this. He proves capable of auto-mutation and quickly becomes more or less bipedal, plus tail. He's still pretty wobbly, though, and you can believe that the Self-Defense Force could have taken him out if not for two stragglers, one on the other's back, getting in the way when they should have been evacuated. The Prime Minister, terrified of collateral damage, scratches what proves the last best chance to nip the creature in the bud.

In effect, Godzilla -- so the Americans have called him, having learned of a creature living near Ohdo Island years earlier, though the Japanese quickly correct this -- can program himself to grow. After slinking back into the ocean, he returns in much larger, more familiar form. He's still rather ropey looking, with perhaps his tiniest hands ever and quite the snaggletoothed and largely immobile face, but you'd definitely call him Godzilla, or Gojira if you insist. Now the full might of the SDF is unleashed on him, but from bullets to bombs they have no effect. It takes an American bunker-buster to get to the monster, and that only makes him mad. In the film's most outlandishly original moment -- one that drew applause from the monster-loving crowd at my local theater -- Godzilla unloads with not only laser breath but tail lasers and dorsal fin lasers, shredding large parts of the capital and nearly wiping out the government. Fortunately, even though the creature is a living nuclear reactor, he can't quite go all night and now needs to rest.

The last phase of the picture is a race against time as a team of malcontents and renegades led by fast-rising bureaucrat Yaguchi (Hiroki Hasegawa) rushes to perfect their wild plan to freeze the monster from the inside out before the UN, pressed by the US, Russia and China, greenlights a preemptive thermonuclear strike on Tokyo. This isn't as dire as threat as it could have been since Godzilla's dormancy gives the Japanese a fortnight-window to evacuate the city and a conscientious world pledges massive contributions to reconstruction, but the Japanese understandably resent the idea of taking yet another atomic hit. For that matter, so does our hero's American liaison, a Japanese-American U.S. Senator's daughter (Satomi Ishihara) whose grandmother survived the Hiroshima bomb. She has ambitions of becoming the first Asian-American President, but Americans viewers can't avoid noticing that the actress doesn't sound like a native English speaker. No matter. While there's plenty of (again) understandable bristling at American domination throughout Shin Godzilla, the filmmakers don't try to demonize all Americans and shows the military willing to help out crucially in the alternate plan. The big finish is epic stuff in which the city of Tokyo is virtually weaponized, the very buildings claiming payback against their tormentor. Maybe I'm a mark for "destruction porn," but I found it one of the best action sequences I've seen in a while. It was fun to root against Godzilla for once, other audience members notwithstanding, and it was exhilarating to see Yaguchi's plan come together against the odds after Godzilla had come to seem, well, godlike in his invincibility. Despite many dry moments -- I imagine an actual American edition, as opposed to the subtitled original playing limited engagements this week, would cut out a lot of the bureaucratic satire -- and despite some initial difficulty trying to follow two layers of subtitles, one for the dialogue, another for all the Japanese on-screen subtitles identifying characters, weaponry, etc., Shin Godzilla is a fun film for monster-movie fans, happily unencumbered by the mundane character arcs that burdened the most recent American Godzilla, despite its virtues. It's a textbook reboot, proving that something like the original narrative could be made fresh again after all these years.

On the Big Screen: GODZILLA (2014)

Could Gareth Edwards's picture possibly live up to its trailers? The great thing about them is that they sold the second American version of Toho Studio's famous daikaiju as a horror movie: ominous, mysterious, apocalyptic. The trailers let your imagination rampage. Those paratroopers whose red tracers of descent, streaming like the stripes of the American flag, particularly intrigued me. Were they actually thinking of landing on Godzilla? A crazy thought, but the trailer that could inspire it was something special. The film is a far more ordinary experience, inevitably, but the parachute descent is still a great moment, especially when we get the falling-worm's eye view of a city-wrecking giant-monster battle in progress. The problem is that Edwards wants us to care about what these paratroopers do once they touch the street, while the monster battle continues. In normal Godzilla pictures the humans step back and let the monsters do their thing. The new American picture pays lip service to that idea, but the filmmakers seem to assume that someone will be bored if there aren't people in the middle of the melee doing something we deem important. This inspires some nice camera movements as we pan down from the monster fight to the army guys scurrying through the streets with their dangerous burden, but the implicit equality of Godzilla's struggle with this film's evil monsters and the principal hero's (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) race to rid San Francisco of a doomsday device doesn't quite compute. I'm not as hostile to the human characters as some critics have been, but I must agree that Ford Brody isn't a very compelling personality. He makes the film about "family" and "fathers and sons," but not as offensively as one might fear. We're supposed to care about Ford because his father (Bryan Cranston) was killed in an evil-monster attack. Ford the elder is a generic obsessed crank; we're supposed to care about him because his wife (first lady of global cinema Juliette Binoche) died in a nuclear meltdown ultimately blamed on the evil monsters. Evil is perhaps too judgmental a word for these radiation-hungry survivors of a far-earlier epoch; they're just hungry and horny and we're in the way. But if Godzilla is a force for good, or at least for nature's balance, as this film's Dr. Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) insists, then whoever he fights are the bad guys.

In his original cycle of films, Godzilla was the prototype for the badass menace who becomes a hero because audiences thought him cool. The Edwards film, presumably envisioned as the first in an American cycle, skips ahead to make him the hero immediately -- he even departs to the cheers of an appreciative city -- and something feels unearned about that. Making him the hero also betrays the implication of the trailers that all the destruction shown were his handiwork. The film invites us to think of Godzilla almost as a god, but generically speaking it makes him a superhero. It becomes less about our anxiety over a threatening future, though that remains a necessary context, than about our desire for a hero with the power and will to set things right. This Godzilla is a characteristic product of Legendary Pictures and could, like last year's Man of Steel, be accused of purveying "destruction porn," except that Godzilla's been doing that since before most people involved in this production were born. Oddly, it also offers Godzilla, like Superman, as a sort of symbol of hope -- here it's the hope that nature will set things right -- while the rush to get the bomb out of the city echoes 2012's The Dark Knight Rises. What some see as destruction porn is an acknowledgment that casualties -- or collateral damage, if you will -- are inevitable, that America isn't immune anymore. Menacing clouds of dust and smoke are shadows of September 2001, while a monster-generated tsunami in Hawaii reflects our recent understanding of just what such calamities look like. The porn is in the details these days, but it strikes me that Godzilla isn't being criticized for this the way Man of Steel was -- most likely just because we expect this from a monster movie while many expect "better" from superheroes. Perhaps paradoxically, while Man of Steel disturbed many, Godzilla is almost reassuring, or aspires to be. We wouldn't want to think of a man as a god, but a monster, maybe!

The new Godzilla is less than the sum of its parts, but the best parts suffice as pure spectacle. There's a crass reliance on endangered individual children in some scenes -- again, the filmmakers seem to want us to care in a way we don't really need to -- but the climactic monster fight is just about everything you'd hope for, including a creative and very satisfying kill move for Godzilla. The effects make it great to watch, and fans of effects movies in particular are used to sitting through dull stretches to get to the cool stuff. They shouldn't feel disappointed by this latest American version, but they may wonder where Legendary will go from here -- presumably without Edwards, who's jumped to Disney's Star Wars franchise. "A different monster!" works for a B-movie series, but may not justify the expense of tentpole films. There have been three distinct series of Godzilla movies in Japan; I doubt whether the Americans will match the longevity of any of them, but it'll be interesting to see them try at least once more.