academic-drifter

When you watch any of the Godzilla movies produced by Toho Studios, what you are seeing is not just an entry in one of the world's most iconic franchises, but a look at the issues facing contemporary Japan. While this has long been appreciated about the original 1954 movie, this holds true as well for all of its successors. Watch them in succession, and you will see Japan's emergence from the ashes of the Second World War into a prosperous and hopeful nation grappling with the problems of the modern world. From corporations and consumerism to industrial pollution, the franchise has addressed it.

And perhaps in none of its entries is this more blatant than this one. Inspired by the twin national disasters the nation suffered in 2011, it is about the lack of leadership in the country today. Instead of encountering another nuclear accident or an earthquake and tsunami, however, the disasters are merged into a single destructive entity that shambles out of Tokyo Bay one morning to carve a path of destruction through Tokyo. Faced with an extraordinary problem, Japan's ossified political and bureaucratic systems can do little more than hold meetings to debate options and worry about the consequences. Sequences of meetings convened and then abruptly ended so that the same people can meet somewhere else as a different group is by far the funniest moment of the movie. In a Japan facing a catastrophe, it's not deck chairs that are being shuffled, but crisis response teams.

The creature does not wait for any of this to be resolved, but proceeds instead at its own frightening pace. One of the most interesting choices made by the filmmakers to the titular character is to turn Godzilla into a constantly-evolving organism. What appears at first to be some sort of monstrous, bug-eyed lungfish goes through growth spurts as the film goes along to become the creature so familiar to millions of moviegoers. And every time it does so, it creates new fetters of red tape to bind the government's response. Thrust out of the comfortable confines of routine and the guidance of plans, nobody dares to make a move lest they embarrass themselves; it's far safer to stick to the script rather than propose something that might risk their position and professional reputation.

It's an approach that only allows the emergency to spiral further out of control. As Godzilla morphs into a threat beyond the ability of any available response to manage, Japanese leaders find that they have to adopt the unorthodox in order to address it. And therein lies the message of the movie: if Japan is to cope with its manifold problems, it must embrace change and learn to adapt. That this lesson comes almost too late is underscored by the closing shot, one that is easily the most effective of any in franchise's history and which secures the movie's place among the best Godzilla films Toho has ever produced.

I have long been a fan of a stylish series about an ageless man living in modern-day New York who uses his wisdom to solve crimes. That show was "New Amsterdam," and even in spite of its criminally short run its premise and stylishness have long stayed with me. This was why when I first learned that a similar show was premiering a few years later I viewed it with more than a little disdain. If the concept was good enough to warrant a copy, why did the original have to go away.

Eventually I was convinced to give it a try, and I'm glad that I did. For while the premise is still a little too similar for my liking (couldn't they even be bothered to set its location in another city?), the show stands on its own merits. Foremost among them are the caliber of the actors involved. As the leads Ioan Gruffudd and Alana De La Garza are more than capable of holding up the show, and they're more than capably assisted by Joel David Moore and the great Judd Hirsch in secondary roles. The guest stars are also up to the task, and the recurring performances by both Burn Gorman and Hilaire Burton are among the highlights of the series. They make the most of the material they're given, which isn't terrible but is pretty formulaic. The plots generally have Gruffudd's Henry Morgan as an ersatz Sherlock Holmes able to draw upon his two centuries of accumulated knowledge to solve crimes baffling the mortals with whom he works.

Had it merely been a procedural featuring an immortal the show would still have been pretty ho-hum. The associated exploration of Morgan's past is what makes it a cut above the others. While the connections can be a little forced, they help to develop Morgan in a way that makes it understandable how he came to be the character we see in the present day. His marriage to Abigail Morgan and the ongoing trauma of her loss even decades later is a particular highlight of this approach, and one that helps to explain the nature of his personal relationships when we are introduced to him. I especially valued how it kept his relationship with De La Garza's Detective Jo Martinez professional for most of the season, and the erosion of that near the end suggested an unfortunate abandonment of a dynamic that was better without the romance. Plus, with all due respect to De La Garza, any romantic relationship Martinez might have had with Morgan couldn't have been interesting as the one the show had already developed between Morgan and Burton's Molly Dawes/"Iona Payne." In that sense, with the satisfying conclusion in the season finale of the Henry-Adam rivalry, perhaps it was best that it ended when it did. While the cast and crew proved that they were more than capable of producing an entertaining show, there were already budding signs that it had nowhere to go but down.

Douglas Livingstone's adaptation of John Wyndham's classic novel has been living rent-free in my head ever since I originally saw it on PBS back in the 1980s. As a longtime fan of the source material, I appreciated the relative faithfulness of the miniseries it, and the efforts (apart from one dodgy animation) to realize its premise of walking carnivorous plants on a limited television budget. Rewatching it on DVD when it was released a few years ago proved a highly enjoyable rewatch that confirmed thankfully that my memories of it were not overly gilded by nostalgia.

It wasn't until I reread the novel for the first time in years, however, that I came to appreciate the true excellence of Livingstone's work. Though the story is set in some unspecified near-future, it is very much a product of mid-20th century Britain, with all its class and gender roles and reflections of the contemporary world-view (such as the exaggerated perceptions of what Americans can accomplish). The three decades that had elapsed since the novel's publication in 1951 allows Livingstone to make it very much a work set in then-contemporary Britain. The tweaks involved are minor, but by making such changes as turning Coker from a professional agitator into an idealistic history teacher he made the material far more relevant to his audience.

What I appreciated most, though, were not the changes, but the subtractions. Even with the benefit of six episodes in which to tell his story Livingstone pares down the plot to its essentials. Gone are a number of superfluous characters, as well as Bill and Coker's meet-up with a trio of survivors after leaving Tynsham Manor. This allows Livingstone to take his time in the first episode of laying out the premise of the triffids, to spend the first third of the series developing the tension of a world afflicted by blindness, and to develop Bill, Josella, and Coker, the three main characters of the story. Such efficient storytelling enhances starkness of the story's setting and the element of loneliness that is an important theme of Wyndham's tale, which help to make it by the far the most effective of the adaptations of one of the great works of science fiction for the screen.