Godzilla

If the Halo jump had been the entire film, it would have been the best film I'd ever seen, hands down. As it stands, it was a good film, but the theatrical trailer has outdone it in mood and atmosphere, the two hour film doesn't quite sustain the sheer thrill and exhilaration on that initial viewing of the two minute trailer with Strathairn narrating and the gradual reveal of the beast. How can you genuinely expect to top that? It would appear you can't. What makes the whole thing sore is that the sequence is obviously included in the film but it just didn't have that same impact, perhaps because I'd already seen it a whole bunch of times, perhaps because Strathairn didn't do his voice-over (I hate voice-overs anyway but it felt lacking suddenly...) but also, it just felt slightly out of place. That's my complaint about this movie, the trailer was incredible, the rest was, ok. I could pick at it for a long while.

I admire this film for various reasons and they are particularly good reasons. For instance, it is predominantly set from a human perspective, in fact it just piles on the human impact of the film, it's relentless in trying to make us feel like we're living this film. What kind of fails is the fact that the characters (aside from Bryan Cranston who I'll get to later) are all so slight and hard to care about. They tried to make us care, they gave us such easy people to root for, but they didn't feel like people, just ciphers there to be dropped in on to remind us that there are people about. Other films have done this terribly and Godzilla for it's merits has a good go at making the core set sympathetic, but for such an amazing pedigree of actors, Sally Hawkins, David Strathairn, Ken Wantanabe, Elizabeth Olsen etc, they aren't particularly memorable or noteworthy but they work with what they're given. This is excluding Aaron Johnson who I really want to like (he was great in Kickass...) but is completely stoic throughout the film, call it PTSD, military training, but he is a complete wall with an unchanging expression throughout, he's damn hard to care about, it's actually embarrassing sometimes... Then there's Cranston who genuinely steals every scene he is in, he pours himself into his character and just proves to anyone watching he is a beyond excellent actor, the man chews the scenery like no one's business but he is unmistakeably in an upper stratosphere when it comes to acting.

Going back to the human perspective, not enough films of this ilk actually make us feel like we are part of the action, like there are human lives at stake.All the big set pieces do their utmost to give us the impression that this could be happening in a world not unlike ours. I really admired that about the film, that spent so much time and effort obscuring the beasts in order to add to the confusion and fear. It's clever and not oft done, if we wanted to see giant things punching each other we'd watch a different movie (Pacific Rim because it's awesome...)

There is also a respect for the history of Godzilla and a wide, global scope, as the film stretches across the Pacific spreading the threat and the action. It seems to have a deep respect and understanding of what the original 1954 movie was trying to say, Godzilla at the time being a metaphor for the nuclear threat that loomed over the world after the affects of the atomic bombs being dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. It briefly reflects on that, even going as far as having Wantanabe referencing his father, and having the same name as the protagonist from the original. Obviously the film doesn't play up the currently global anxieties of nuclear warfare as they aren't as predominant but I appreciated the respect the film paid to it's own history.

What is worrying is that I was thinking all this during the film; a bad sign I felt as time wore on. The film is neatly structured with the bulk of the monster action taking place in the last half and, as ever, focussing less on the monsters grappling, and more on how people were reacting to it. Godzilla, damn, he was impressive, a labour of love if I ever saw one, he looks truly magnificent, I've gone back and forth on how I felt about the MUTOs, I couldn't determine if they were lame or impressive, I was cycling back and forth, obviously we're rooting for Godzilla and I cared more for him than anyone else in the film, but those two big fellow chaps just weren't as impressive; the fights were, what we saw of them, fun for the brief punches and grapples we were entitled to see.

So there you have it, a film I was genuinely excited to see, that had so much potential and promise summed up in a trailer that gave me literal goosebumps; in the end it just didn't quite cut the mustard, it was a good film, a different film, technically interesting, but as far as balls out entertaining or memorable goes, I can't say it was.