Looking Back At: "Gojira" (1954)

With the snore-fest reboot coming out on Blu-Ray in a few days (the review for which you can read here), I thought it would be worthwhile to take a look back at the film that started it all: 1954’s Gojira.  I’d never seen it before, and what I was expecting to find was the film that spawned the kaiju formula, where an unknown force emerges, it turns out to be a giant monster, a second act scene of city destruction occurs, and a final resolving climax of massive destructive power removes the monster threat.  While that statement can describe the broad strokes of Gojira, it doesn’t really do the film justice for how it stands alone as not just a great Godzilla movie, not just a great monster or horror movie, but as one of the definitive classics of Japanese cinema.

See, what Gojira’s greatness comes down to is how it not only functions as a story of human struggle against a destructive force of nature, but it is also a powerful allegory for the dangers of nuclear proliferation and the pain and loss that was felt by the Japanese people at the hands of the nuclear holocausts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  When destructive forces first start hitting coastal Japanese villages, nobody knows what’s happening, and the cause of the destruction is never shown on-screen.  Then, when the force is discovered to be a giant radiation-absorbing reptile, it quickly becomes apparent that the Japanese military is nowhere near equipped to handle a crisis of this magnitude.  The first half of the film mostly consists of the human characters trying their damnedest to figure out just how to counteract this threat, and it’s hard not to feel their urgency, especially as we watch their country get torn apart by an unstoppable force.

The allegory is further nailed home by the climactic subplot involving the use of a new superweapon and a scientist’s internal struggle over whether unleashing his doomsday device upon the world would create a greater evil than the one they’re seeking to eliminate.  It’s a surprisingly powerful message for a film about a giant lizard, but the film pulls it off with grace.  The final scenes are actually quite emotionally charged, staying away from the action-packed climax one might expect from a monster flick and instead choosing to meditate on the gravity of the events taking place and the ramifications they have on the greater world.

Of course, I would be remiss to not mention the key destructive scene of the film where Godzilla destroys Tokyo.  Say what you will about the limitations of the special effects of the 1950s, this film pushes the edges of those limitations.  The miniature city that was built for Godzilla to stomp around it looks damn near perfect, and Godzilla feels just as enormous as his imposing presence is supposed to imply.  Sure, if you’re looking closely, you can see that the rubber Godzilla costume doesn’t actually provide for all that much mobility, but the film’s clever editing disguises that fairly well, and the look of the monster is the classic design that would spawn so many sequels in the coming decades.

Now, I won’t say that Gojira is a flawless film.  A couple of its human-centric subplots never really go anywhere, such as the story of a scientist who doesn’t want to kill Godzilla out of humanitarian concerns, or a romantic subplot that is dropped almost as soon as it’s brought up.  That minor complaint aside, though, Gojira isn’t really a film about any particular character’s story arc.  This is a film about the role of humanity in a post-nuclear age and a metaphorical demonstration of the consequences our irresponsibility in that age can cause.  This message may have been overshadowed by the pure spectacle that would come to dominate the kaiju genre in the coming decades, but it’s just as powerful today as it was fifty years ago.  If you’re looking for a treat from another era, get a copy of the original Gojira.

What do you prefer: the intellectualism of the original, or the full-blown fantasy of the action-packed Showa and Heisei eras?  Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

"Palo Alto": Through The Eyes Of Teenagers

Now Available on DVD and Blu-Ray

Palo Alto is a weird film in that it doesn’t really have a cohesive narrative arc.  The film is based off a collection of short stories by James Franco, so the interconnected stories aren’t so much actually related to one another as they just occupy the same timeframe.  Some of the ways the stories overlap feel a bit contrived, but this film is saved from being a jumbled mess by giving each of its protagonists appropriate room to breathe, and the film really knows how to convey the desperate loneliness that stems from adolescence.

The three main characters are April, Teddy, and Fred, high schoolers in the film’s titular town.  April is a good student and a dedicated soccer player, but she’s not a very popular girl and finds herself swayed by the advances of her soccer coach (played by an appropriately suave and sleazy James Franco).  Teddy is a decent enough kid who is a talented artist, but finds himself constantly in trouble through his association with Fred.  Because Fred seems to be his only friend, Teddy constantly covers for Fred’s antics, which lead to stints of community service and dangerous consequences.  Fred, on the other hand, is out of control, without adult influences in his life and so afraid of his sexuality being undermined that he acts out in insane and self-destructive ways. 

All three are victims of their development in a society that doesn’t recognize the problems they go through.  April is a victim of her soccer coach’s advances, and when he turns out to be nothing more than a predator, April is alone in her knowledge of his violation of her.  Teddy only tags along when Fred gets out of control, and when Fred leaves him holding the blame, he’ll take it in order to protect his only friend.  And Fred, perhaps the most proactive in causing trouble, is just disturbed, partially due to having no adult role models, and partially because the word “gay” is so damn scary to him.  These kids are outcasts, just as we all feel when we’re in high school, and they deal with the sorts of issues that real high schoolers go through.  It’s heartbreaking to watch each of them go through their struggles without any real solutions to their problems ever presenting themselves.  But that’s how life goes, and that’s what the film is trying to share with us.

Now, the downside to this format is that the film doesn’t really hold together as much more than a series of vignettes.  Fred’s character isn’t really explored until the last third of the film, and before then his purpose is mostly to just show up and mess up Teddy’s life.  Only in retrospect does he become interesting.  And April’s story is rather clumsily tied into Teddy’s when he confesses his love for her in the latter half, even though the two characters had until then only shared one scene together.  It’s bizarre and lazy, and I probably would have preferred a less linear approach to storytelling, treating each character separately and watching their stories interconnect in small ways as the main focus stays on one character at a time.

As is, though, Palo Alto is a satisfying experience and it does a fine job of giving a realistic portrayal of the high school experience.  These kids are archetypes of the people we all knew growing up, the people we probably should have treated better but didn’t have the empathy to comprehend their pain yet.  Hell, we can all probably find a little something of ourselves in these kids.  I know I did.

Know any other films that convey a true-to-life adolescent experience?  Let me know in the comments below.

"Brick Mansions": A Forgettable Last Hoorah

Now Available on DVD and Blu-Ray

Let’s get one thing out in the open right away.  Nobody would give a damn that Brick Mansions exists if Paul Walker hadn’t died.  You know why I know this?  Because I just watched the movie, and I can barely think of anything noteworthy to say about it except that he was in it, and even then I would likely have only made a mental note that this was the guy from The Fast and the Furious and likely wouldn’t have even mentioned it.  But no, Paul Walker’s death was sensationalized when he died in a car accident last winter, right in the middle of what some would call the height of his career, starring in enough action films that were either completed or near enough to completion that he has a decent-sized postmortem filmography.  And yeah, I’ll give the guy credit that he knew how to play a normal everyman amongst larger-than-life action heroes, but that was pretty much the breadth of his acting ability.  He was a character actor that played one character that the young male demographic could identify with, but I didn’t particularly identify with him, so his loss didn’t hit me very hard.

So why did I devote an entire paragraph just there to explaining my ambivalence to Paul Walker?  Well, as I said earlier, Paul Walker is perhaps the most noteworthy thing about this movie.  Brick Mansions is a very generic action flick, and it’s pumped so full with fight scenes and car chases that it takes a full thirty minutes to actually establish what the main conflict of the film is.  In translation, that means that the film’s plot is so flimsy that it had to devote an entire third of its runtime to mindless filler in order to bring itself to feature length runtime standards.  And absolutely none of those fights or chases are memorable in the slightest, resorting to sequences that have been done in so many movies before and will be done again by lazy filmmakers until the end of time.

I suppose I should mention that the film co-stars David Belle, a renowned parkour stuntman, as a convict with aims to rescue his girlfriend from a slum overlord.  Belle is quite good at what he does, sliding around opponents like some sort of human snake and jumping around with unbelievable agility.  That said, though, he’s not much of an actor, which shows even in the cliché-ridden role with which he’s charged.  Walker brings his usual self to his role as a cop with a vendetta against the overlord, but that’s again just slipping into a role that we’re all-too-comfortable with.

The one thing this film does to try and differentiate itself from the generic mold is that it props itself up as a message piece, taking place in an allegorical, near-future Detroit where the classes have been literally separated by a concrete wall and the rich let the poor kill each other with a cold indifference.  Even if this message is more than a little unsubtle, it could have made for a workable movie if it had been incorporated into the storytelling.  Instead, it serves as a backdrop for a traditional damsel-in-distress narrative, and the blatant symbolism of it all is practically shouted at the audience in the last five minutes, seemingly in the hopes that it will come off as a deeper and more intellectual film than it actually is.

Instead, what we have here is a bland, forgettable action romp that will only be remembered because it was one of Paul Walker’s final performances.  Sentimentality can only carry a film so far though, and if that’s the only leg this film has to stand on, then that’s a very sorry looking tripod.

Do you have an opinion on Paul Walker?  Am I too hard on the guy?  Leave your thoughts in the comments below.