Star Wars, Star Trek, Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk, Batman, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Rooster Teeth, Game of Thrones, J.R.R. Tolkien, Harry Potter, the vlogbrothers (not to mention John Green's books), the superhero movies year after year, the list goes on and on...
My nerdy tendencies preceded all that, however.
Before my bedroom was filled with copies of Star Wars movies, books, and action figures. Before I waited in line at midnight for the latest Harry Potter novel. Before I riffed alongside with Joel, Mike, Crow, and Servo. Before I dreamed of living in The Shire or knew all the kingdoms of Westeros. Before I imagined my face under the masks of Spider-Man, Batman, or Zorro.
Before all that, I was the biggest fanboy of this guy...
 |
| Oh yeah! |
Godzilla! The King of the Monsters! The biggest thing to ever come out of Japan! Toho Studio's greatest creation!
I don't know when exactly I discovered Godzilla, because it feels like I've been watching his movies all my life. By the time I was 7-years-old I had already memorized all of his classic films (Well...except for one. Somehow Godzilla Raids Again escaped my attention until a couple years ago) from Godzilla's golden age of 1954-1975. By the age of nine I was moving on to his more recent films, which at the time weren't readily available in America and none of which were dubbed into English.
Besides the movies, I had books about the Big G. My favorite for awhile was an encyclopedia of Godzilla knowledge called The Official Godzilla Compendium that allowed me to recite every little detail about the movies, the characters, and most importantly the monsters. I could give you the size and measurements of almost every one of Godzilla's friends and foes, and what kind of superpowers, if any, they possessed. I could recite monster stats like some people recite baseball statistics.
Throw in an assortment of action figures and cartoon series, and I had just about everything a Godzilla fan would want.
Godzilla was the unquestioned champion of my boyhood. I didn't want to be a firefighter or police officer when I grew up. I wanted to be Godzilla!
Even Roland Emmerich's disastrous 1998 American adaption didn't deter my fandom.
(Not to mention the unforgivable sin of casting Matthew Broderick as your lead character.)
Utterly unstoppable against the forces of man and monster alike, there was no hero more impressive to little Dylan. No other character on TV or film could get my blood pumping like watching Godzilla prepare to lay the smackdown on some unwitting foe.
When depicted as a terrible monster of destruction, however, there was nothing more dreadful to imagine than Godzilla coming to shore. I actively planned escape routes out of the city in case Godzilla attacked (Because he is obviously real). I still tended to root for him even as the villain though.
I bring all this up now because on May 16th my childhood hero returns to the big screen in the extremely original titled movie: Godzilla.
There's no way I'm not seeing this. Even though many of the Godzilla films are barely watchable as an adult (Especially if you watch with English dubbing), I fondly remember my former awe of his greatness.
It is hard to suspend disbelief with even the more recent Godzilla films. Trust me, I've re-watched a few lately in all my excitement for the upcoming film. There are obviously people in rubber suits or puppets playing the monsters, and the armies and cities are clearly models. You can see the strings in some movies. Combine that with how goofy most of them, especially the ones geared more for kids, and sometimes you feel like the best way to watch them is through MST3K.
Yet there is still something endearing about many of those movies. With limited special effects capabilities, ridiculous monsters, and unbelievable plots they really tried hard to make serious movies.
However, the aforementioned American-made Godzilla from 1998 puts even the worst of the originals to shame. It's not even a real Godzilla movie; the monster bears little to no resemblance to the classic Godzilla. The monster walked less upright, laid thousands of eggs, was easily wounded, ate fish instead of subsiding off radioactive fallout, barely used his radioactive fire blast, went from Japan to New York City instead of, oh I don't know, somewhere along the West Coast, and changed size from scene-to-scene (Great work from the continuity team on that last one).
That was not the real Godzilla. (My favorite scene from the last Japanese Godzilla film is when Godzilla OG battles American Godzilla...and it lasts like ten seconds before American Godzilla is blasted into atoms!)
So I have a lot of hope resting on his new film by Gareth Edwards. The director's only previous experience was a well-received small budget monster film that featured genuinely interesting human characters and storyline in addition to the monster effects.
I'm doing what I can to avoid spoilers, but judging by the trailers released and a couple interviews I've listened to, Edwards seems to have the right idea of how to treat a movie like this (Casting actors like Bryan Cranston and Ken Watanabe also helps).
Before Godzilla became a megastar that Toho cranked out year after year while turning him into a children's hero in order to make boatloads of money, the original film was a dark metaphor for the destructive capabilities of the nuclear era - produced by the only country ever attacked with atomic weapons.
Godzilla is a direct result of nuclear testing; a dinosaur mutated into an angry representation of what atomic weapons are capable of. He is a killing machine; laying waste to everything in his path.
Gojira is rife with images of sinking ships, crushed people, and burning cities. The scenes where a widow comforts her children that they'll be with daddy again soon, followed by the aftermath sequence showing a devastated Tokyo complete with hospitals filled with burn victims can be hard to watch even by today's standards.
Many of these scenes and the overall message were edited when Gojira first came to America. They were replaced with awkwardly interjected scenes featuring American actors explaining the story. I highly recommend seeing the film in it's original unedited Japanese format for all its moments of destruction and dark comedy. I took GF to see the original Gojira last weekend on a big screen at SIFF Cinema Uptown. It was GF's first experience with Godzilla, and I'm proud to say she enjoyed it.
Many other Godzilla films also contain important messages about topics such as corporate greed, environmentalism, and bullying. I'm hoping Edwards can instill that sense of destruction, but with a purpose, like those movies did.
Naturally, I have my concerns about this new film. The previous American attempt, the inexperience of the director, and my skeptical approach to films in general all weigh on my mind. But none of that will be enough to keep me away from opening weekend!
Godzilla has starred in 29 (Or 28, depending on who you ask) movies so far - this movie could bomb and still be objectively better than half the list. There have been some real duds in there (I'm looking at you, Jet Jaguar!) The question is can the film also succeed with purists like me, who still think Godzilla looks just fine as a guy in a suit.
Here's hoping this is the restart of a beautiful relationship between myself and a gigantic mutated reptile.
Blogger's update:
I have now seen the film, and I am satisfied with it. Not ecstatic, but satisfied.
My main critique is how little Godzilla action there is. You go through half the movie before seeing Big G, which isn't bad in itself, but you don't get to see him actually do much until the very end of the film. There are two incredibly frustrating cutaways from monster fights to boring human characters doing nothing of note.
Saving the big fight for the end is a tried and true Godzilla trope, but once you've unveiled Big G you have to give us a little something - not literally close a door in our face.
Second complaint, as already mentioned, is boring non-Godzilla characters. I couldn't care less about Elizabeth Olson and Aaron Taylor-Johnson. The two characters I did feel anything for were played by Bryan Cranston and Ken Watanabe, but one of them was dead within a half hour while the other did little more than provide story exposition (Yet was still more interesting Taylor-Johnson and Olson).
Overall, however, Godzilla kept me entertained. I was grinning through half the movie at every scene with or even just hinting at Godzilla. None more so than the scene were they show his spikes glowing blue just prior to unleashing his fire for the first time - I almost popped out of my chair for that part! The inclusion of other monsters for Godzilla to fight was a nice surprise and Edwards did a great job in showing us how truly big and destructive giant monsters can be in the way everything reacts around them.
As I said weeks ago, even a mediocre film would technically be better than half the Godzilla movies in existence. This one pretty much fits the film - it's pretty standard as far as summer blockbuster movies go. But to a Godzilla fan, this goes down as a huge success and I look forward to the sequel.
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