I am a student of film but I'm no god. I don't know everything. I don't know what good acting is or good special effects or any of that stuff. All thats important but I usually don't consider those things when determining if I did in fact like the movie. So having said that, when I continue this little diatribe about Godzilla (1998), know that I'm not going to discuss any of those things. I am going to talk about the plot and what the movie says about people as a culture or species or however you'd like to classify us.
The plot is weak. A group of scientists and soldiers must kill the monster before it destroys the city, multiply, and take over the world. This may seem all well and good but my problem with it is, "Who is the antagonist/protagonist"? If you think that Godzilla is the antagonist, you have to ask yourself, "Is Godzilla trying to stop the protagonist"? That's what an antagonist does, they try to stop the protagonist from accomplishing thier goal.
So what's the protagonists' goal? First, who's the protagonist? Let's just say it's Nik Tatopolous played by Matthew Broderick. So what's his goal? He wants to stop Godzilla, or better, he wants to kill it because if he doesn't, it will multiply and take over the world. Okay. But that means that the way Godzilla is trying to stop Nik from accomplishing his goal is by...uh...not being killed.
Well that's not very compelling! Of course it doesn't want to die. It's stupid. But if you think about it even more, you ask yourself, "What side should I be rooting for"? And this leads to what I really wanted to talk about - what does this movie say about us? What's it say about our values and culture?
Well, it's not good. In the beginning of the film, we are shown nukes going off in French Polynesia and various reptiles being exposed to the radioactive fallout which turns Godzilla from mild-mannered komodo dragon to gigantic lizard. And as the movie progresses, people get scared and decide that this thing poses a threat to mankind and it must be destroyed. And we destroy it. We destory it and it's kids. Nice. Now this thing did considerable damage to NYC but that's the only thing it did that prompted the military to be involved. It wasn't malicious, that's the point.
So this is what I got out of it: competition must always be destroyed, even if it doesn't pose an immediate threat. And what's worse is the fact that we created the thing from the nuclear bombs. I think Godzilla should have won. We created the monster, its only fitting that it destroy the creator. That idea is a classic literary and cinematic technique. But the ending they had just summed up humans this way - we destroy. And the only thing that comes from our destruction are horrific monstrosities that, should punish us for our destructive ways, but instead, they too are destroyed.
My ending would have been hundreds of Godzillas roaming some grassland in Africa in harmony with the other animals. In the foreground, a band of humans hide behind some bushes wielding spears. The world would have been returned to a simplier place thanks to the Godzillas. That ending would have been poetic justice served to people for creating nuclear weapons.
But no, nothing is learned from this film. No insights gained, nothing can be taken from this film other than reinforcement for our collective appetite for destruction.
No comments:
Post a Comment