When all three ex-wives are yelling at you.
The latest installment in the Godzilla series, Godzilla: King Of The Monsters (2019), suffers from an American malady: it tries to explain far too much.
As I thought about this movie, it occurred to me that, in many previous installments, Godzilla has represented the Divine. Recall the Greek gods, the Roman gods, the Scandinavian gods, the Judeo-Christian gods, and that they often behaved in ways that might be described as immoral, erratic, even capricious. If we admit that humans are limited to human thought-patterns and ways, it remains true that we can label the gods, the members of the Divine, as obeying their own, incomprehensible, morality systems. It’s not that they have no impulse control, but that they have their own constraints and requirements, unique to their Divine situation, and attempting to interpret them in a human context is, at best, problematic, and most certainly futile.
And Godzilla? Ignoring the reality that there have been many writers and directors who have used the characters in this saga to their own purposes, we’ve seen him, or her, at a malevolent worst that results in the apparently reasonless destruction of Tokyo (Gojira (1956)), as both a savior and arsonistic destroyer (Godzilla 2000 (1999)), Godzilla as a reckless Earthly guardian (Godzilla (2014) and Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965)), a rather ridiculous parental figure, and a number of Godzilla vs everyone else stories. If we dare to believe Godzilla to be the same essential character in all these stories, and commit the signal crime of ignoring the multiple sources and capabilities of those involved in this story-telling, then perhaps the only conclusion to draw is that Godzilla is some representative of the Divine: occult, violent, and little caring for mankind’s fate.
And, as such, an embodiment of the inexplicable. Attempting to bring Godzilla and the balance of the Divine into the context of mankind is an intellectual error which, quite honestly, destroys the aesthetic of a good Godzilla story. Gojira, for all of its crude production values, portrays a Godzilla that stomps the landscape, going from city destruction to its own apparent termination, at the hand of a suicidal scientist, all for reasons on which we may speculate, yet can never know for certain. It has a certain impressive and horrid beauty to it, a glimpse into the madness of another societal matrix, rudimentary as it may be, that reminds us of the fragility of our own societies, that our concerns about our own speculative Divinities may be for naught when faced with a Godzilla that steps forth with his own agenda in clawed hand.
When Godzilla: King Of The Monsters tries to force a human framework on Godzilla, as well-meaning as it is, it diminishes the central wonder of Godzilla and his mysterious actions. We may think we understand why Godzilla does what he does, and why King Ghidorah must be vanquished, but the legend of Godzilla is diminished.
Along with the rather dismal and predictable human element of the plot, the entire movie is something of a disappointment. There are kaiju movies which are about humanity, such as Pacific Rim (2013), and then there are kaiju movies about the importance of acknowledging that there is the unknown, perhaps even the eternally unknowable – and these kaiju are the embodiment of same.
Godzilla: King of the Monsters makes the mistake of trying to shift from the latter to the former, and fails. If you admire kaiju battle scenes, you may want to watch this, but otherwise I think this is a failure.
