by king_ghidorah » Sun Mar 01, 2015 11:17 am
Or, How I stopped worrying about the atom bomb and learned to love Godzilla 2014...
Just thought I'd create this thread as it's something that's been on my mind a lot lately.
Going into Godzilla 2014, I really thought we were getting a film that would mirror the original. Godzilla would be a dark force of nature, punishing mankind for its arrogance. That's not the movie, or the Godzilla, that we got.
Initially, I wasn't really sure how I felt about the new Godzilla, or the new origin. I went from "Ok, that's kind of cool and kind of 70's esque" to "Man, that's just not Godzilla." (Interestingly enough, those are two popular reactions I've seen from Japanese critics, a third being "The Americans finally got it right.") I've since come around to "It's pretty much the best of all worlds, it's something that I wouldn't have thought of doing, and it's the quintessential American take on Godzilla."
What got me stuck on this movie more than anything, was that I felt the nuclear message was lost. Ford has really never bothered me. The cut always bothered me a lot for a while, but I grew to like them with time. I felt that 2014 Godzilla was too friendly, that he was too gentle. He dived beneath boats instead of crashing through them. He didn't light cities on fire with his atomic breath. He wasn't vengeful towards mankind.
But then something changed. I'm beginning to think the film makers might have been smarter than I had given them credit for.
What I mean specifically:
-I think I had discussed prior to the movie coming out, that I wasn't sure how you could mesh an anti-nuclear theme with a Godzilla that audiences could root for and want to see more of. Why would an audience care about a monster that just incinerated a city? The film managed to find a way to split the difference, in that it made the MUTOs represent that anti-nuclear theme, while still giving us a Godzilla we could care about. The MUTOs represent many of the dark aspects of nuclear proliferation. More nuclear weapons leads to more monsters and death. This movie gave Americans the movie monster that most people in the west have always thought he was, a big dinosaur monster that beats the crap out of other bad monsters. The anti-nuclear aspect of the Big G isn't something most casual people equate with the series, most people are more apt to think of Godzilla vs. Megalon. And in that, Gareth and crew gave us the definitive version of OUR Godzilla.
-But here's the element that I find most fascinating, and it's the one I'm not sure was intentional. Even though the MUTOs represent the dark side of atomic warfare, I think what's more interesting is how the film views Godzilla. The Japanese Godzilla is a representation of the dread and fear over nuclear warfare and war in general, while the American Godzilla, the country that dropped the bomb, is a more more nuanced and morally gray creature. He has some uses, but he's a powerful force of destruction and should not be taken lightly. Like I said, I'm not sure if this was intentional or not, but I find it fascinating how a fictional creature that's a metaphor for atomic weapons could be viewed so differently from the country that had these weapons used against them, and the country that used the weapons. There's some interesting cultural discussion to be had here.
Anyone have any thoughts on this subject?
FTW