Tag: Godzilla

Godzilla: King Of The Monsters

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Warner Bros’ latest effort in their strategy to create a self-contained universe out of Toho’s Godzilla and his accompanying trademark monster characters to rival that of Disney’s popular Star Wars and Marvel cinematic universes is a mixed bag. On one level, it’s a hackneyed family story involving a couple splitting apart with their daughter caught in the middle, a plot not of the slightest interest to fans of Godzilla who aren’t paying to see a family drama. On another level, it’s a thinly veiled excuse to recreate Godzilla, King Ghidorah, Mothra, Rodan and others with state-of-the-art, special effects technology and have them fighting against one another, at which aim it succeeds handsomely. In passing, it delivers facile, one-line ideas about nuclear war and global warming. Finally, it wants to explore the iconography of these extraordinary creatures, but scarcely knows where to begin. They are great properties, but you can’t help but wish it was directed and produced by people with a stronger visionary sense.

The family story concerns scientist Dr. Emma Russell (Vera Farmiga) with her daughter Madison (Billie Bobby Brown) in tow. Her husband Mark Russell (Kyle Chandler), who when the film starts is out in the wilds studying wolf packs, is attempting to get back in touch with his daughter by email. Insofar as this family dynamic drives the characters, it feels pretty redundant. Farmiga upstages the rest of her onscreen family, investing her essentially cardboard character with pathos well beyond what the hackneyed script deserves. The presence of scientists played by oriental actors Ken Watanabe and Ziyi Zhang seems curiously peripheral, even though at one point the former plays a significant role in attempting to rejuvenate an apparently dead Godzilla.

Much more interesting is Emma’s use of a device she’s built called the Orca to produce sound frequencies mimicking those of Titans in order to make them behave in certain ways. Her falling in with crazed military type Jonah Allen (Charles Dance) suggests her as a megalomaniac determined to unleash the giant beasts and cause havoc on Earth, but then she presents an alternative scenario in which mankind has ruined the planet through global warming and the monsters are its way of getting out of control humankind back in its rightful ecological place thus saving the planet from extinction. Promising concepts, but sadly they’re never really developed into anything. The same is true of ideas about Godzilla absorbing radiation so that he can produce self-immolating blasts which nuke his one-on-one adversaries in battle while he survives.

Put aside the many shortcomings, however, and the recreations of giant radiation-breathing lizard from the sea Godzilla, flying creature Rodan, Mothra the giant moth and, most especially, three-headed King Ghidorah, greatly impress. The latter is the real star here, with his three heads swirling around menacingly on their long necks. Ghidorah possesses hydra-like qualities, but only once do we see a missing head regenerate, one of numerous elements on which the filmmakers fail to capitalise. A line of script somewhere posits him as a being from outer space who’s come to Earth and upset the balance of the monster ecosystem by displacing the ruling Godzilla, another idea which is nice as far as it goes, but doesn’t go very far. Kong is name-checked a few times and appears occasionally in static images to remind us that Godzilla vs. Kong is due out next year.

A mysterious organisation called Monarch, the corporate logo of which coincidentally resembles that of Extinction Rebellion turned on its side, has a series of numbered Outposts around the globe where various giant beasts are held in underground storage facilities. As titles such as ‘Monarch Outpost 61, Yunnan Forest, China’ appear on the screen, they create a believable sense of a covert, global network.

Yet in terms of developing an overall mythology, the whole is nowhere near as satisfying as the vision behind Warner Bros’ underrated kaiju (giant monster) movie Pacific Rim (Guillermo del Toro, 2013). Toho’s original Japanese Godzilla/Gojira (Ishiro Honda, 1954) and the more recent Shin Godzilla (Hideaki Anno, 2014) both proved the property capable of incisive socio-political comment even as its men-in-rubber-suit monsters of the fifties or their later computer-generated effects counterparts satisfyingly burned and stomped Tokyo. The new Godzilla: King Of The Monsters doesn’t really have anything like as much to say, preferring to trade in spectacle and fall back on monsters fighting each other, sending in troops with guns whenever the proceedings need another boost to keep the adrenaline up. In other directorial hands, it could have been very special indeed: on so many levels, a seriously wasted opportunity. That said, the creatures themselves are fabulous – and they get an awful lot of screen time.

Godzilla: King Of The Monsters is out in the UK on Wednesday, May 29th. Watch the film trailer below:

Your Name (Kimi no Na wa)

Posted on by mjbstaging

In a spectacular and bravura single take, vertical panning shot, a meteor descends from the heavens through the clouds towards the small lakeside town of Itomori. Then, another time, another place: on a train in Tokyo a teenage girl spots a boy and their eyes meet but there’s no time to exchange names. She knows him but he has no idea who she is. As she gets off the train, he asks her… “Your Name?”

Thereafter, Tokyo boy Taki wakes up some days Mitsuha’s body, and the other way round. Soon, each starts writing the other messages on their hands, arms and mobile phones so that the other one knows what he/she has been up to while they swapped bodies. Until one day, her messages stop.

Like the falling meteor which unexpectedly splits into a shower, at once a beautiful display in the Tokyo night sky and an impending disaster in Itomori, this weaves together two ways of looking. Girl and boy. Countryside and city. Celebration and catastrophe. As a ribbon snakes through space and meteor fragments fall through the atmosphere, a thread weaves through a loom meshing separate timelines. When the two teens meet at the beginning, she is near the end of their encounter while he is at its start thanks to subtle storytelling sleight-of-hand. They may not both know each other yet, but they are connected. When finally they meet again on urban Tokyo hillside steps, the moment is poignant.

Although the meteor is expected to fall in one piece, at the last minute it splits into fragments, one of which will wipe out Itomori. After learning through Taki that this will happen, can Mitsuha and her friends alert the town – busy celebrating its annual festival – to evacuate before lives are lost?

Japanese films have dealt with disaster for a long time, most notably in Godzilla (Ishiro Honda, 1954) which turned the devastation of the A-bomb into the eponymous, city-wasting monster. Recent reboot Shin Godzilla (Hideaki Anno, Shinji Higuchi, 2016) shows the franchise still capable of delivering such myth and metaphor.

Not that Your Name is necessarily about nuclear strikes. Japan has a long history of earthquakes and associated natural disasters, most recently the 2011 tsunami and resultant damage to the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Life goes on but such disastrous events linger in the national psyche and inform popular culture. Even as Your Name absorbs Itomori’s annihilation into its wider culture as a pretty light show over Tokyo, it grapples with the magnitude of the disaster by placing us in the immediate days and hours beforehand.

Elsewhere, Your Name plays out as both teen romance and dual exploration of male/female identity. The two protagonists wake up separately in each other’s bodies to discover with a mixture of delight and embarrassment that they possess the genitals of the opposite sex. As the twin narratives move on to explore more psychological sexual differences, the body swap device proves genuinely affecting. By the time of the impending annihilation of Mitsuko’s home town, you’re completely hooked.

It’s one of those rare movies to watch multiple times. If, like this writer, you saw it last year in a small cinema, to catch the new digital IMAX print on a bigger sized screen is a real treat. While scenes with minimal detail and movement show up the fact, other sequences are all the more effective. This applies not only to the big outdoors vistas where you’d expect it but also more intimate, everyday scenes. In short, compared to much smaller screens, the IMAX format allows Your Name’s visuals the room they need to breathe.

Your Name is out in the UK on Wednesday, August 23rd.

For another animation about Japanese life against the backdrop of impending disaster, click here.