Month: November 2017

I liked this movie more than I thought I would. It is a Godzilla reboot from 2016. There is a little something for every adult in this movie but not that much for little kids. Even Japanese kids will probably get incredibly bored. There isn’t really that much action and the type of action that there is can be classified as a certain type, little humans taking on the big monster. The puny humans use some innovative methods to take him down but a child may not understand what works and why it works. Not appealing to children may have hit the production in the pocketbook but I still found the film very enjoyable.

Why?

The scientific explanations for how he came into existence and how he should be fought were pretty interesting. There were various references to mutation, power generation and animal biology.

All conversation on courses of action were couched in a complicated web of interactions that had elements of consensus management. There were many political groups identified and from the initial alarm of monster’s existence all the way through to the various courses of action you could transparently see the machinations. Power brokers rose and receded and it often seemed like the processes were taking far to long and everyone was doomed because no solution worked to stop Godzilla. Then a scientific focus team was put together led by Rando Yaguchi(Hiroki Hasegawa) that came up with a solution that “just might work”.

The Americans were on the scene fairly early and offered to Nuke it but with a slight delay this never occurred. The US representative was Kayoko Patterson(Satomi Ishihara) who had a rather unusual role. It seems she had political aspirations inside the US but was connected to Japan in some way, unclear on which parent or parents were Japanese but her Japanese language was native level. It is possible that in order to appeal to domestic audiences, the actress was not encouraged to make errors in Japanese. She showed up in Tokyo to basically say that if the Japanese government did not act on Godzilla, the US government would.

There were a lot of actors in this film, far more than an average film and many of them contributed to dialog in meaningful ways. You could see branches of government interacting with each other and they stepped out of the federal and into the regional or local at a later point in the movie. All the communication patterns of each government official was carefully thought out in the script and the actors did a great job at showing what the colloquial reaction would be with the aid of some very familiar props.

It ends with Gozilla being frozen and the US pulling back from dropping a bomb. All the characters sort of rally together and how it was great that they could work together to pull it off. There is no hint of a sequel but based on the story, it is pretty easy to imagine they could make one and also throw in a Shin-Rodan or Shin-Mothra.

Overall, I give this movie two underutilized, odd-looking, tyrannosaurusy thumbs up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ettore_Sottsass