They've Rebooted Godzilla for Some Strange Reason

Yeah, I was actually about to just do my typical "What are these assholes doing?" sort of post but then I watched the trailer.

I like science-fiction and fantasy and adventure thrillers. Or I like these genres, anyway. But I usually do not like movies made in these genres.

They usually are missing something. They're usually missing the main thing I'm paying money for: A sense of wonder. A sense of mystery, and not just mystery, but grand mystery.

So often they are just put together in this format:

Action Teaser
Talking Bullshit (Hero and Heroine don't like each other)
Action Sequence (Minor character is killed under uncertain conditions)
Talking Bullshit (Heroine learns that the Hero is broody and has "depth")
Action Sequence (Fistfight)
Talking Bullshit (Hero and Heroine flirt)
Action Sequence (Chase)
Talking Bullshit (Villian yaps at the Hero and Heroine and tells them his plan)
Action Sequence (Major Firefight with Jets and Bombs and Shit That Glows!!!)
Kissing Bullshit

I'm always wondering to myself: Where, when they were writing the script, did they expect a 10 year old boy (or the 10 year old boy in all of us, including in women) to go, "Wowww...!!!"

The only Wow factor they're offering CGI Cartoon shit happening faster and bigger.

This reminds me of why Metallica stopped playing speed metal. They realized that the competition in speed metal had simply become unidimensional -- it was simply to play things faster, and then faster, and then faster still, and then, when that got boring, to try playing things even faster.

What is the endpoint of that, they wondered? Is that a competition worth winning?

CGI hasn't had the effect of liberating filmmakers' imaginations -- it has had quite the opposite effect. CGI promises, they think, a guaranteed payoff: We'll just make our cartoons bigger, louder, and faster than they were last time, with more pixels and more texture-shading, and there you go. Art has been made.

But Bigger, Louder, Faster is a creative ditch just like speed metal's Faster Faster Faster.

There's a moment in Temple of Doom I love. It's such a throwaway line. It means nothing at all. But it's great.

Indy and Short Round and Willie are traveling by elephant through the jungle on their way to the Pankot Palace. First of all, that's neat right there. It's a very short "Adventure Trek" montage, but who doesn't love the idea of riding an elephant through the jungle?

And then the sky is darkened by a swarm of flying animals, and Willie says, "Look at those big birds...!"

And Indy says, "Those aren't birds, sweetheart. Those are giant vampire bats."

Well, there's no such thing as a giant vampire bat. Vampire bats are tiny. The bats being filmed were actually fruitbats, which are large, but, as their name implies, not vampiric, except with regard to fruit.

But that simple little line, tossed in there, with absolute no plot consequences whatsoever -- "Those are giant vampire bats" -- gave me a little thrill, a little sense of wonder. Maybe there were giant vampire bats and I just hadn't heard of them -- hey, Indy said so, and Indy's a genius.

This little line -- a nothing little line -- and a very cheap-to-film shot of common fruitbats paid off big, at least for me.

That line wasn't made by special effects. The shot cost a thousand dollars; the cost of the writer writing it was about seventy-five cents. It was just a writer wondering, "Hey, what can I put in here that would be surprising and kind of neat?"

I've mentioned before the half-buried skeleton of the immensely large, unidentified alien animal seen in the beginning of the Tatooine Trek of Star Wars. Again, not terribly expensive. And yet just seeing that huge skeleton provoked me, as a kid, to wonder what the hell the complete creature looked like.

There just doesn't seem much room in movies any more for the viewer's imagination. Your imagination isn't wanted, needed, or even usable -- everything is an obvious as a shotgun to the face, and everything is Louder and Faster and Also Louder, because, God forbid that a movie might have the confidence to play a scene quietly and let you think about what you're seeing.

Anyway, I'm sure Godzilla is awful, like every other piece of crap that Hollywood makes. But that trailer gives me some hope-- I was expecting that HALO dive to be the typical Been There Done That crap, but instead there's this incredible cloud-scape and red signal-smoke dripping down like blood and ominous music (which reminded me of the music that announced the Monolith in 2001) and just little openings which allowed my imagination in and allowed me to ask, "What's this about? What's going on here?"

They seem to be presenting Godzilla as a mystery, as a frightening primal force provoking dread and wonder, rather than as an opportunity for One-Liners and Toyshop Tie-Ins, as they did in the last film.

I don't know if that will work. There are some ideas too silly to give the Sense of Awe treatment to, and a giant mutant radiation-breathing T-Rex on the loose in NY San Francisco seems to be one of them. (I think it's San Francisco -- there's a triangular building in the skyline, and I think the metro sign says "BART.")

And I don't care about Godzilla at all. I'm not a child. I don't care about giant monsters knocking about cities. I've seen this before.

In the last ten years, I've seen this kind of thing about 35 times now.

But what I am interested in -- and I'm slightly hopeful for this movie, based upon the trailer -- is that at least one more movie might possibly make me say "Gee whiz" or even "Wow" one more time in my life.

At least someone is thinking. That's a good thing.

posted by Ace at 05:47 PM

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