Jurassic World Rebirth

Deux Ex Machina Park

Jurassic World Rebirth
Directed by Gareth Edwards
USA/UK/Malta/India/Taiwan 2025
Universal

Just like the last few movies in the Jurassic Park/World franchise, the marketing of this latest, seventh installment, Jurassic World Rebirth, is trying to convince me that the world needs yet another Jurassic Park sequel and, like the last three movies in the franchise, it failed to do that. Of the last three films, only the final installment where the old characters from the first movie reunite to take part in the adventure, had any real entertainment value in it and, frankly, it felt like the last hurrah of a franchise dying out much quicker than the dinosaurs it lionised. So it would be true to say my expectations going to see this at my local Cineworld in Enfield (soon to be turned into flats, it would seem... not sure what I do for new releases on this blog at that point), were pretty low.

So it came as a pleasant surprise to me that, although this new installment has its flaws, it’s actually a pretty good movie and I liked it a heck of a lot more than the previous three films, for sure. And, perhaps even more surprisingly, its one big asset, way more than the tired old CGI effects and a really badly designed, genetically mutated dinosaur, is the script and the way the actors use some good dialogue to build the characters up. Finally it feels that the writing is actually good on this thing... much more than it was on many of the sequels. 

On the story front... well they’ve backtracked on the bolder global situation where those last three films took us (one of the only saving graces of the last trilogy was the direction it was heading in and the world building it took to get us there). But in this film, while we humans, as a species, are still co-habitating the Earth, it turns out that these new dinosaurs (for reasons completely a mystery to me, since their days millions of years ago), are unable to survive for very long on the majority of the planet and have made their home around the equator instead, in the places they can still exist and thrive. Places which are now legally off limits to the rest of the world. And in this world, a team of scientists and mercenaries are going in to one of these areas to obtain blood samples from three of the biggest species of dinosaurs in order to... create medicine which will cure heart disease in humans and make sure we all live longer. 

Which seems ridiculous as a plot device to me because, if anything, the world is already way over populated to be able to sustain our own species effectively but, sure, lets make sure nobody dies of heart disease. Whatever. So we have a team going in and, also rescuing a small family unit who have gotten into trouble on their way in so... when they all get split up on a big Dinosaur Island later, the shenanigans are many and the human equation is tugging hard at the peripherals of the story too. 

On the acting front we have a mercenary played Scarlett Johansson, one of the best actors of her generation, really killing it in the character development stakes, by making her protagonist upbeat in the face of many personal bad experiences. Her fellow mercenary, played by Mahershala Ali, does pretty much the same and these two are very good at making you believe in these people as characters. And a whole host of cast actually, including Rupert Friend, Jonathan Bailey and their fellow performers are all pretty great in this.

And talking of Jonathan Bailey, when he first touches a live dinosaur on the island this lot eventually find themselves stranded on, that clarinet solo on the score is actually being played by him. The film’s composer Alexandre Desplat let him sit in on a few of the cues. And talking of that score... it’s got the obvious John Williams reference points and there are a few scenes where it needs those melodies... although they don’t always make intellectual sense in terms of leitmotif placement. That being said, it’s got a nice mix in the movie and it’s probably the best of the movie scores in the franchise not scored by Williams. And because of that mix, I was able to concentrate on it during the film a little better.

Okay so, well acted, great dialogue writing and a nice score. On the downside...

Yeah, there’s almost no peril here. The constant deus ex machina style escapes from certain death for everyone kinda wears thin very early on in the film and doesn’t really let up. The dinosaurs are... not much of a spectacle here and there are a handful of nail biting moments but, yeah, the suspense is not what it could be, I thought. And the reveal of the human villain of the piece is... something you will have figured out in the first five minutes... so no real surprises there either.  Also, the film seems much more kid friendly and, despite the odd severed limb, I think the horror elements could have been ramped up to better serve the story on this one, for sure.

Another problem is there are way too many shout outs to the very first movie in this. Some of them fairly subtle but... most of them really jammed into your face. 

So, not too much else to say on Jurassic World Rebirth other than... what Rebirth? Is this supposed to be an optimistic reference to the hoped for box office takings for the companies involved? Because I saw no rebirthing or even just birthing in this movie. It’s almost like they  threw a bunch of non sequitur titles into a hat and picked the first one that came out. However, like I said, some decent character writing in this one and I much preferred it to the last three. Worth going out to see on a big screen, maybe. 

The Creator

AI Sir

The Creator
Directed by Gareth Edwards
USA 20th Century Fox 2023
UK cinema release print.

Gareth Edwards is one of those directors who, well... I usually tend to quite like his films but find there’s often something which disappoints and prevents them from being a great movie. I saw two very different trailers for his new film, The Creator, over the last couple of months... one was very much based on story and the plight of the central characters and the other one was more of an action movie kind of trailer. The first one disappointed me with its clichéd plot somewhat and the second one made me think... well, some of the robots look pretty cool. So I figured I’d give it a go and just not expect too much from it.

Which was probably the best attitude that I could have gone in with because, despite what some may justifiably call weaknesses in the basic DNA of the movie, for me this was the film by Edwards which is truly great. By which, perhaps I mean, it’s definitely his most accomplished and entertaining movie to date, as far as I’m concerned.

The plot follows a military character in Earth’s... relatively close... future. It’s been many years since the AI beings, such as robots, allegedly nuked Los Angeles and the US government (and various other powers... but not all) banned AI. But not in Thailand where humans and AI live in peace. So America goes to war with the AI, using their super weapon and obliterating AI and AI sympathisers. The main protagonist Joshua, played by John David Washington, who has a robot arm and leg, is undercover trying to find the enemy’s genius professor/creator and he’s been trying to do this for a number of years, by latching onto the alleged daughter of the target (played by Gemma Chan). And in that time the two have fallen in love, got married and she’s pregnant with their child. However, she and the baby inside her get killed when Joshua’s American team attack the place where they are living and wipe almost everyone out.

Five years later, after Joshua is still recovering from the psychological issues of losing her, he gets recruited in to find a new super weapon that this professor has created, which can allegedly wipe out the US superweapon and turn the tide of the war on the AI resistance. And I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say, if you’ve seen any of the trailers, that the superweapon turns out to be an AI in the form of a little girl, played by Madeleine Yuna Voyles. However, once he finds her (after most of his unit have been wiped out), Joshua goes on the run with her, trying to keep her alive (or is it the other way around?) because he belives she can lead him to his wife... who is alleged now to still be around in the land of the living and in cahoots with the enemy. At which point the film becomes a road movie as the two bond with each other and he comes to realise that maybe AI are not just machines which you can terminate and turn off but, instead, have something approximating a soul and sense of self awareness not dissimilar to human beings.

So, yeah, to be fair, it’s a movie which is, really full of story clichés and, there are a couple of ‘twist’ reveals which most audience members will see coming fairly early on in the movie (like maybe five or ten minutes in). But, that being said, this in no way spoiled my enjoyment of it because, honestly, it looks absolutely stunning, has some gritty and suspenseful moments and whizzes by at a cracking pace.

Now, the look of this world really is a potpourri of many different science fiction elements which, if you’ve read, watched or ingested it in whatever media the genre has been living in from, say, the late 1920s to the early 1970s, you’ll be very familiar with. In other words, there’s nothing really new here in terms of the film’s acquirement and refashioning of old genre concepts... but, again, it’s done so well and, the film is nothing if not eclectically post-modern in its regurgitation of this material and it does it in such a convincing and entertaining way that, I couldn’t help but fall in love with it. And, in terms of that kind of stuff, it would be true to say that the director tips his hat and says to his audience ‘look, I know you know all this stuff but go with it, it’s fun’ by using the company motto of the Tyrell Corporation from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (reviewed by me here) quite blatantly within the first couple of minutes of the film. And, as one of my favourite critics pointed out in a podcast, the resulting world building is first class here.

One of my favourite moments was the return of the idea of walking bombs... or running bombs in this case. I’m not talking about just sentient bombs here, as in John Carpenter’s early 1970s movie Dark Star... but proper walking bombs which I don’t remember seeing, albeit in a much more expressionistic and beautiful way, since the annihilants seen in the 1940 theatrical serial Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe (reviewed here). The versions in this movie are both ‘cute’ and brutal, running through enemy lines at full pelt until they come to a stop and just explode. There’s a wonderful suspenseful scene during a battle sequence in the movie which deploys these creations and an equally wonderful visual reveal when Alfie (what Joshua has named this ultimate AI weapon in the form of a girl), steps in to lend a hand against these things. And, frankly, it’s nice to see this concept back again after so long (I guess there was probably a sidewayds variant of these in Screamers too, if I remember correctly... based on Philip K. Dick’s short story Second Variety).

Lastly, after a great last shot where the changing expression of Alfie’s face pretty much invites the viewer to bring their own baggage with them about their thoughts on AI consciousness and its nature, I waited around for some of the credits because I wanted to find out who wrote the music. I was surprised to find it was Hans Zimmer. Now, I love Hans Zimmer and always go to his concerts when I’m able to but, this is such a different score from him. It’s not as flashy or sweeping as his usual stuff for movies which are, to be fair, often inherently of that nature anyway. Instead it feels much more focussed on stepping back and allowing a more intimate musical landscape for the film, which seems like a much more appropriate choice for this kind of story. Alas, the score is not, at time of writing, available in a proper CD format so, it’s unlikely I will get to hear any of it away from the movie unless he decides to add it in on one of his future concert tour play lists, it would seem.

And that’s me pretty much done on The Creator. For me, this is Gareth Edwards best movie to date and I will certainly be looking to pick this one up on Blu Ray at some point in the, hopefully near, future. I absolutely loved it but, please, don’t anyone make a sequel.

Rogue One

Rogue One’s Run

Rogue One  - A Star Wars Tale
2016 USA Directed by Gareth Edwards
UK cinema release print.

Warning: There’s a whole galaxy load of spoilers in this review so probably don’t read this until you’ve seen the movie.

First up, before I pull this movie apart a little, I’d like to ask you all to take this review with a pinch of salt. The reasons for this are as follows...

1). I was pretty ill when I made the journey into London to see this film. I traditionally always see my first viewing of a Star Wars movie in London’s West End (since the end of 1977 at the age of nine) and so I like to make sure I see each subsequent one in a similar venue (if not the same). If it hadn’t been that the cinema in question, the ODEON Leicester Square, had charged me an exorbitant £24 for the single ticket, I wouldn’t have braved it into the nation’s capital city to see it... I was that ill. This could have affected my viewing of it somewhat.

2). There have been a few films in my life where I didn’t get the brilliance of them until I watched them a second time. These have included The Mummy Returns, Avengers Age Of Ultron (reviewed here) and, very recently, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens. I’m guessing this was because there was just too much information for me to process the first time around and so, on subsequent viewings, I was able to appreciate the experience much better. So bear in mind that, although I love The Force Awakens now, I initially came out of my first screening totally depressed with it. So... bearing in mind I didn’t hate Rogue One nearly as much as I did The Force Awakens, I’m kinda hoping this troubling movie will grow on me on any subsequent viewings. That being said, I’m not planning on rushing back to see this one anytime soon and that’s all the wriggle room I’m going to give this movie.

Okay, so Rogue One starts off, as has been stated by many people, quite jarringly. There’s no opening title crawl after the familiar “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...” (don’t worry Lucasfilm & Disney, I’ve grammatically corrected the number of dots on the end of the statement for you) which is a bad move, no opening rendition of the Luke’s Theme Star Wars fanfare (another dumb move) but, to be honest, the most jarring thing is not in the visuals but in the music here because, quite frankly, the first shot of the film itself is not inconsistent with the kind of shot you would normally get after a standard title crawl. The difference is purely Michael Giacchino’s opening sting which is deliberately heavy handed, for some reason. Think about the openings of the three Insidious movies (reviewed here, here and here) for a comparison. Giacchino does a similar thing here, albeit less atonal and more in keeping with the musical vocabulary of John Williams.

After this we get a story about how the Death Star plans were recovered to needlessly but, interestingly, make the plot device in the original Star Wars movie (later retitled Star Wars Episode IV - A New Hope) work. And, although it’s, for the most part, immersed in something which is similar to the known Star Wars universe, it doesn’t really feel much like a Star Wars movie, to be sure.

One of the many things which make it very different is the goody-goody moral attitude of the Rebel Alliance as portrayed in all the earlier movies. In this film you have one of the good guys shooting an informant in the back under the guise of calming him down and the same character keeping a hidden agenda from his comrades in arms for a good deal of the movie. So these are the dark edges of a war which, while absolutely necessary in real life, I would imagine, to being able to survive a war... have not been overtly on show in a Star Wars movie before, when it comes to the good guys doing bad things (I’m discounting Anakin Skywalker killing all those kiddies in Revenge of the Sith because he was already established as a villain by that point).

Now one of the bad things which threw me in this movie is that it tries so hard to be a separate channel, so to speak, from the regular Star Wars movies, that it seems somewhat contradictive when it does it while making so many references to the originals. Like The Force Awakens, it’s peppered with both sound effects, sound samples and lines of dialogue culled form the Star Wars stories so far. And to compound that further, it has a lot, really a lot, of characters from the original movies popping up in this movie. Like the Walrus Man guy and his surly friend in a moment that looked to me, pretty much, like the whole scene and dialogue was spliced into a new background in a way that almost makes the scene in A New Hope redundant if you happen to watch this one first.

Perhaps the most problematic thing is the return of Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin. Cushing has been dead for decades now but he’s been digitally resurrected using old footage, re-voicing and CGI twaddle. Unfortunately, he looks just like a bloody cartoon throughout the whole thing and I felt like I was watching a load of cut scenes from an old Playstation video game for a lot of the movie. I think it was a mistake to bring his character back into it this much in this movie, where he seems to have a much bigger role than he did in the original. Now, a friend of mine disagreed with me in the pub about this yesterday and he said the CGI work on Cushing was phenomenal. However, he then went on to say words to the effect that, “... obviously, you could tell it was computer generated but...” and there is the problem in a nutshell. So much CGI in many movies is totally invisible but, when the effects guys get ambitious, they usually ruin it. The fact that you can detect it, even if you didn’t know he was a digitally resurrected character, is absolutely rubbish and, as far as I’m concerned, not worth having in the first place. This monstrosity reminded me a lot of the CGI Yoda in the prequel trilogy, who also looked unrealistic and cartoon like. This is just awful and I think maybe Cushing’s character should have made a minimal appearance at best. When Princess Leia appears at the end of Rogue One, uttering one word, that was at least a bit more minimal and realistic, I thought. A much better use of the technology, as far as I’m concerned. Tarkin just pops you right out of the experience whenever he’s on which was not a good thing.

Another not so good thing is the prison transport truck which is carrying female lead Jyn Erso, played by Felicity Jones. As it trundles along on its wheels you just sit there all popped out of the movie again and go “What the f***? Wheels?” Even the primitive Gungans, over thirty years prior to when this movie is set, had hover technology just like “everything else in the Star Wars universe” asides from, obviously, the AT AT and AT ST Walkers. This is just wrong, wrong, wrong.

Okay, now the movie does something interesting in that we get a character in it who is a ‘Guardian of the Whills”. Now The Journal of the Whills is one of the first bits of Star Wars lore I can remember. It was in the original novelisation of the first movie and it referenced the tale as being a recorded set of facts from these fictional journals. However, although it’s been around in the public conscience since 1977, the Whills have never been overtly referenced in the actual movies themselves, that I can recall. So here we have Donnie Yen playing a Whill Guardian called Chirrut Îmwe except...

Well, there’s no easy way to say this... he’s basically playing Zatoichi.

Now regular readers of my blog will know of my love of the long running Blind Swordsman character Zatoichi and, to be fair, it’s easily the template for this character and the way Yen plays it almost directly references  Shintarô Katsu’s classic take on the character. Now, don’t get me wrong... I loved Yen’s performance here and I would be really surprised if the Japanese don’t offer him a new series of Zatoichi movies based on his performance but... it does seem like his character has just been grafted onto the movie with no rhyme or reason other than they wanted a cool, Zatoichi-like figure. Yes, I know the Star Wars movies are nothing if not a postmodernistic mish mash of various influences from 1930s Flash Gordon serials, Errol Flynn movies and Kurosawa chambera but still, this seems just a little bit too blatant in its ‘borrowing’... even for a Star Wars movie. He’s a cool character though so... whatever.

Darth Vader’s rampage aboard Princess Leia’s ship at the end of the movie makes no sense. Here he is all out using the force and his lightsabre to take out all the rebels, throwing them around with the power of the dark side like rag dolls... but in the following film, the original A New Hope, he resorts to using his hands to strangle a single rebel? Really? If he was still this powerful... doesn’t he come off as a little sedate in the original movies? Hmm... not going to say too much about that.

I’ve read a lot of bizarre criticisms that this is a movie with a strong female lead who dominates the plot. Felicity Jones character is the main character but I wouldn’t say she dominates the film and it really feels like a more ensemble piece, just like the original. So no worries on that front... all the actors and actresses (who aren’t digitally resurrected) do a good job here. I especially liked Alan Tudyk (Wash from Serenity and the Firefly TV show) as K-2SO. He’s pretty good and gets probably the best lines of throwaway dialogue in the entire movie.

It’s funny because people say it drags for the first half an hour and then gets going. I found it dragged the whole time and didn’t get going at all. Although I could see there was a lot of action on screen, it somehow felt really light on the action front to me and I think this was because the music wasn’t carrying me along in the action cues like it should have... which brings me to my main grouch about the movie... the musical score.

Now don’t get me wrong... I love Michael Giacchino and I love this score in some ways. I’m pretty sure when I put the CD on it will be a cool stand alone listen. In terms of what it does for this movie... well all I can say is that I wish Alexandre Desplat had stayed with the project.

Giacchino does some amazing stuff here in echoing John Williams orchestrational style from the first movie (possibly even more subtly than Williams did in his amazingly cool score for The Force Awakens) but what it triumphs in with the technical structure and texture of the sound it loses in its lack of rich melody. So it's like he covered the subtle details of how the scores work while simultaneously missing the broad strokes. Williams’ themes are barely referenced apart from a couple of appearances of The Imperial March (which is wrong because it should have really been pushing the original Death Star theme because The Imperial March doesn’t appear in A New Hope) and a couple of other moments, including Luke’s Theme in the end credits.

Now, I need some melodic, lietmotif hooks to keep me inside the Star Wars experience. This movie appeared not to have any. It’s fine if they want to lose the Williams themes in favour of strong, new thematic material (just like Williams did to a certain extent in The Force Awakens)... but you need to replace them with something consistently recognisable to keep the interest going. In Return Of The Jedi, by the time of the forest battle on Endor, you already know the Ewoks theme because Williams keeps referencing it... so the action music which uses it is something you can tap your toes to as you watch the happy carnage. Here... we have nothing strong that I could latch onto. Yeah... I know this composer only had four weeks to do it and I think he’s done a fantastic job here... I’d be surprised if this is his last Star Wars project. This one just didn’t serve its purpose, as I see it, in this movie. Yes, it’s very clever and uses the grammar of Williams’ scores but... I stayed on throughout the end titles, as I do with all the Star Wars movies, to try and get a handle on the themes and I still had a hard time hearing the melodies. Maybe it was because I was so ill but... maybe not.

And that’s as far as I’m going in this review, I think. I am really hoping that I’ll regret posting such a negative review when I get to see this film again... I’m hoping I get much more out of it on subsequent viewings. At the moment though... yeah, I can’t quite see this as a Star Wars movie... especially when there are some terrible ‘deus ex machina’ moments in it and what looks like a tagged on ending scene for two characters who should have been dead already. there’s some bad stuff in this movie and I was feeling the ‘StarWarsiness’ of any of it by the time the film finished, for sure. However... I’m willing to give it another try so I'll see how it goes next time... I guess.

Star Wars at NUTS4R2

 Episode 1: The Phantom Menace 

Episode 2: Attack Of The Clones

Episode 3: Revenge Of The Sith 

Solo

Rogue One 

Episode 4: A New Hope

Episode 5: The Empire Strikes Back

Episode 6: Return Of The Jedi 

Episode 7: The Force Awakens 

Episode 8:  The Last Jedi

Episode 9: The Rise Of Skywalker

Godzilla 3D ( aka Gojira 2014 aka Godzilla 2014)

Aphid And Goliath

Godzilla 3D 
(aka Gojira 2014 aka Godzilla 2014)
2014 USA/Japan
Directed by Gareth Edwards
Playing at UK cinemas now.

Warning: Big, giant sized spoilers breathing fiery destruction in your face... although, to be fair, it’s a movie about big monsters. How spoilerish could it be.

When I saw Gareth Edwards first feature, Monsters, four years ago (reviewed here), I noted that I quite liked it but the last act left me unfulfilled. I wanted to see a giant monster carnage fight sequence at the end and, since it was shot on a very lean budget, I’m guessing money would have been one of the deciding factors as to why that didn’t happen? Either way, that’s not a problem when it comes to this movie because the director has graduated from his original Monsters to a feature involving the original King Of The Monsters... so this film does seem like a bit of a natural evolution for him, thematically, and it’s been released just in time for The Big G’s 60th anniversary... which is nice (although I would have preferred to see a Toho film, in some ways).

I don’t remember what age I first saw the original 1954 version of Godzilla but it must have been sometime around when I first saw King Kong on television. I would have been about 4 years old so around about 1972 I would guess. Actually, the story of my original encounter with King Kong, very late at night, is a nice one for me but I’ll save that for another review, I think. All I remember about the original Godzilla is that, when I later saw the third film from the original first wave (The Shōwa Series) of the three waves (Shōwa, Heisei and Millennium series) of Japanese films about the character, King Kong Vs Godzilla, when I was about 5 or so, I was stoked to see the two giant monsters fight.

Of course, in the first four films or so of the Shōwa cycle, Godzilla was still pretty much a villain or, to be more precise, an uncontrollable beast that people needed to clearly defend themselves from and stop at any cost. By the time we got to the next few films in this first cycle, Godzilla had pretty much been subtly transformed and recast as Japan’s avenger and guardian, coming out to fight against whatever giant monsters were out to stomp Tokyo and its neighbours.

Now this is kind of relevant here because Gareth Edward’s new take on the legend is actually not really a reboot of the 1954 version. In fact it acknowledges the 1954 version without paying too many respects to the creation and legacy of the character in any great way. The film’s occasional stabs of postmodern homage lie in the date he was first spotted (1954), the name Serizawa, given to Ken Watanabe’s character but seemingly nothing to do with the original character from the 1954 film, plus occasional visual or typographic references to Mothra and other kaiju eiga elements thrown up in parts of the frames. There’s one more big piece of homage in the design of the title character... but I’ll get back to that later. What the director does do, however, is reestablish the role of Godzilla as an avenging guardian to the world, coming out of retirement to fight a world under attack by giant monsters who, in this movie, take the form of oversized aphid-like creatures who are swallowing radioactive devices like losenges, to feed and reproduce from.

If the plot sounds silly, well... it really is.

The story in itself is fine, tonally,  in terms of the history of the character... but I did have a lot of trouble with the dialogue in certain places when it comes to dealing with the fantastical elements of the story. They have some great actors in this movie, you see. The main leads, played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Elizabeth Olsen (as a husband and wife in this one, after playing brother and sister as Quicksilver and The Scarlet Witch in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, reviewed here, and coming soon in the same roles in the 2015 movie, The Avengers: Age Of Ultron), are both more than fine in their performances and give the movie some likable characters to get behind. However, there are some real heavy weight, long respected actors here like the aforementioned Ken Watanabe, alongside Juliet Binoche, David Strathairn and Sally Hawkins and, though the director uses little character sketches for each of these, and other action “sequence characters” (I’ll get to that in a minute)... it has to be said they’re mostly just standing around wasted in this film and the lines they have to deliver, for a lot of the time, are absolutely preposterous. It’s strange because, although the story itself is quite silly, it does work as a credible whole within both the world they create for this movie and also as something which isn’t out of place in keeping with the sensibilities of some of the Toho movies... but the dialogue itself is terrible. So that was kinda bizarre... I felt.

That’s about the only real weakness of the film, other than a couple of personal preferences, that I could find. In other words... I was thoroughly entertained by this movie and a lot of that, I suspect, is to do with the director’s approach to the material. Judging from this film, Edwards has two really potent signature elements which seem to work really well here...

One is a philosophy of always leading you into something else with a little revelation. While the director doesn’t eschew establishing shots, he does tend to leave them in the dust at several points and, instead, starts from things being revealed in close up and then going wide. For instance, while looking for something in a storage facility in the Nevada desert, a storeroom door is opened and just a bright light is revealed. We then cut and pull back so we can see that the storeroom has a big hole in the other side of the room where “something big” has broken out into the surrounding desert. A very similar kind of reveal happens when some firemen go into a room in a suite in a hotel, only to find that the other side of the room is missing and opens out into the city landscape, where an aphid style monster has ripped through half the suite.

It’s a really interesting way of shooting things and the director persists with this kind of “reveal detail” in either large or small scale occurrences throughout the picture. But not only that... he also uses exactly the same technique in reverse a couple of times. For instance, we are just about to glimpse one of the first proper shots of Godzilla with one of the insect-like monsters getting “into it” with some killer combat moves in long shot... when a safety door is shut in front of it and the screen goes to darkness for a half a second before cutting to another point in the story. There are a few moments like this and it’s a good way of whetting your appetite for the main bout a little later.

So yeah, reveals are this director’s thing... at least on this movie. But there’s something else he does too.

I noticed that for the scenes of carnage, a lot of the time the director will focus on a few characters that are entirely incidental to the story and are only around for, pretty much, the action sequence they are in. He makes you care about specific humans, caught in the turmoil of having giant monster action in their close proximity, and he follows these minor throwaway characters throughout their specific scene. It sounds like it shouldn’t work because you don’t have time to get involved with, basically, “star extras”... but he does it really well and, somehow, manages to pull it off beautifully. I really felt for the bus driver in the bridge sequence, for instance, even though I knew I wouldn’t see him again after that scene was over. The director uses this kind of “acquire a character for a short time and then jettison” approach all the way through and makes it really work... I applaud him for that.

My only grumble with that, of course, is that some of the other actors, like Sally Hawkins, Ken Watanabe and David Strathairn, could really have done with having their characters expanded a little more, I felt. Giving them a little more purpose would have helped a bit... as would ageing some of the actors and actresses for the fifteen year time jump near the start of the movie. Strange that some of them look more or less the same in 2014 as hey did in the sequences set in 1999... at least, that’s how it struck me.

What else? Well you have Godzilla him/herself (don’t even go there... I am not getting into that whole Gojira gender argument, thanks very much).

One of the problems... on of the many problems... with the previous US outing in 1998 was the fact that Godzilla was all CGI and didn’t look anything like any of the classic Toho incarnations of the character (no wonder the Japanese incarnation whipped the US version’s backside in just a few seconds in the last of the Japanese movies, to date, Godzilla: Final Wars). The fact that pretty much every Toho Godzilla movie shot in any decade of the characters monstrous career has featured men dressed in suits stomping on miniature sets as the sole way of portraying the character has given them a look and feel that G-Fans love. If it looks too much more functional than something that could be done with the “man in suit” approach, then it was going to turn a lot of people off. Luckily, the version of Godzilla in this movie is very respectful to the look and design of the original (and the many different, evolving suits over the years, during the course of 30 movies). It looks like the man in suit has come to life and we get a much more expressive version of the classic look we know and love... and yes, you will feel sympathy for this version of Godzilla and you will be rooting for him to get the upper hand on his opponents as they gang up on him...

Which leads me nicely into the choreography of those battle scenes.

As I said before, the director holds back and teases you, showing you through the eyes of the various human characters who will take up our attention in the foreground of a shot while things are happening in the distance (a similar tactic was taken in the movie Cloverfield, although that was a more natural thing to do because it was shot as first person footage). Towards the end, though, he stops teasing and you get some full-on giant monster wrestling. This doesn’t really deteriorate into one of those fights where Godzilla and other various kaiju start throwing rocks or bits of buildings at each other... which is okay for the intensity of this one actually. It’s up close and personal with The Big G and the aphids getting in each others faces.

Also, the writers use the classic fight dramatics which tend to go down well in these kinds of movies. Godzilla comes in and beats up the bad guys. Then the bad guys, or in this case “bad loving guy gal monster couple who want to hatch their eggs and destroy the world”, team up on Godzilla and do him some damage, thus invoking audience sympathy and concern for our big, scaly reptilian... um... thing. Then Godzilla gathers up his/her last remaining strength and gives one big final push and beats the living daylight out of the enemies... finally bringing in one of the old, key favourite weapons in, frankly, the most brutal and satisfying way I’ve ever seen Godzilla use it, to be honest. If you’re a fan of the character then you’ll know just what I’m talking about but, if not, then all I can say is the way I worded the spoiler warning at the top of this article was definitely a tip off to the killing blow, so to speak, in this film.

Another interesting thing, and I’m not sure if many of the audience would have noticed it at the time, is the echo of the main human protagonist, who happens to be a bomb defuser in the army, in the title character. It’s brought home visually by linking two scenes. There are a couple of completely preposterous moments in this movie when human characters you thought must have died... didn’t. It’s a big leap of the imagination in two particular places but one of these, when you think you are looking at a burn victim, is actually our human hero who is laying on the ground recovering, covered in thick dust. There’s a similar scene near the end of this one when you think Godzilla has sacrificed himself for humanity once too often and has died for our sins (the character actually dies a few times in the Japanese films... including the 1954 original). However, it turns out Godzilla's just unconscious and also covered in dust and scarring, which is kind of a nice touch, I thought.

One more thing I should address here is the music, of course. One of the first teaser trailers for this film featured one of my favourite composers, György Ligeti, on the soundtrack. Surprisingly, the music from that teaser is used in the corresponding scene in the movie proper... which is not something I was expecting. Now I love Godzilla scores and have all the soundtracks to these movies, mostly in the form of the six hugely, wallet munching Japanese boxed sets of the entires scores (and bonus tracks) which were released at irregular intervals over a 5 or 6 year period in commemoration of the character’s 50th anniversary. So I know the various classic Godzilla films provided by a number of composers, especially those by the Masaru Sato (who worked with Kurosawa a lot) and, the man who injected the series with three classic themes for the character (just on his very first outing) and who also invented the distinctive roar... Akira Ifikube.

Now I wasn’t in any way worried about this score because I knew it was being composed by Alexandre Desplat, one of my favourite contemporary film composers. I knew this guy could do a good parody of Ifikube if he wanted to but, in all honesty, I don’t hear a heck of a lot of Ifikube’s influence, and certainly none of his famous themes in this score. In fact, the end title musical suite that Michael Giacchino composed for the aforementioned Cloverfield is about as good a classic Godzilla parody score as you’re going to get. Desplat, it seems to me, hasn’t payed enough homage in his score and, I know some people say that he has but, honestly, I just can’t hear much more than the faintest influence in this.

That being said, though, Desplat’s score is nothing, if not appropriate to the visuals on screen and the rhythm of the editing and, once you resign yourself to the fact that nobody thought it was a good idea to pay the rights to use some of Ifikube’s original themes, you’ll probably realise that it’s still a fantastic, kick ass score and it works very well away from the movie too, as a straight listen. The score CD arrived in the post a couple of days before the UK release date of the movie so I had a chance to lower my expectations in terms of postmodernistic musical jokes on this one and realise that, once again, Alexandre Desplat has turned in a damn fine score in a year which includes, so far, his outstanding work for both The Grand Budapest Hotel (reviewed here) and The Monuments Men (reviewed here).

And there you have it. This movie has great acting coupled with clunky dialogue. You will find your powers of being able to suspend disbelief in some of the expository speeches a little hard to maintain but the action is pretty solid and the direction is interesting and noteworthy. If you’re a lover of Godzilla movies in general... it’s way better than the previous US effort and, possibly, better than some of the later Toho originals. If The Big G is not someone you’re familiar with but you like ridiculous action sequences anyway... then you might also want to check this movie out. It’s a mostly good Godzilla flick with a lot of heart... and that’s quite an achievement in the modern, US blockbuster movie stakes these days. Stomp along to your local cinema and take a look.

Cthulhu Dawn?

Monsters 2010 UK

Directed by Gareth Edwards

Screening at UK cinemas

Warning! Monstrous spoilers will ensue.

Monsters is an unbelievably low budget movie of something like $10,000 and as such, should be applauded by all fans of cinema in general for making something that has elements which feel like they belong in a bigger budget effects movie. It has a certain beauty and proclivity towards heightened suspense, however, that in some places makes it feel a little like the writing and cinematography is trying hard to hold the knowledge of that budget from its audience.

These are the facts.

A meteor or something landed on Earth and set up an “infected” zone which is placed in military quarantine from the rest of the world. There is an extraterrestrial presence (and these things are very Lovecraftian Cthulhu mythos in appearance) being contained as much as possible in that zone... and so right away you can see the set up is very similar to Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s brilliant sci-fi novel Roadside Picnic (and the subsequent movie adaptation, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker).

The similarity pretty much ends their though as a reporter has to get his bosses daughter, who has received an injured arm in an unspecified manner by a monster attack during the opening of the film, across the borders out of Mexico (where the "infected zone" is) and back to the US before the exits are closed in the next day or so. Unfortunately, after bonding to a certain extent and with all their money gone on unusable tickets due to the daughters passport being stolen, they are forced to pawn her engagement ring to get passage on boat and then foot across the “alien monster infested zone” to get back to the US.

And that’s the basic set up... and it’s a really nicely shot and competently acted movie but... for me it also has its problems... or rather one major problem... which is the ending. But I’ll get to that soon.

The movie is pretty much a road movie through a jungle and as such, it reminded me of no less than one of Werner Herzog’s old classic “travelogue” movies like Agguire, Wrath of God. Especially on the first leg of the trip by boat. At one point on that trip we even see a boat that’s been tossed up into a tree (presumably by a creature) which seemed to me to be an almost deliberate echo of Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. Is Edwards referencing Herzog here? My guess is yes.

There are a couple of little set pieces involving an aircraft being tossed about from below a river by a monster and another where our two main protagonists are being escorted by a military like unit of armed men across the forbidden zone and they all get “monstered up” and only our two heroes survive. And everything leads to the point when they get to the wall that marks the end of the “infected” zone and re-enter America. You’ll get there way ahead of them in realising that, by the time they get to the suburban town on the other side of the wall it’s totally deserted (apart from a crazy shopping trolley lady who delivers perhaps the only genuine “jump” of the movie).

There are a few ways this film could have ended. All the way through the movie, the bosses daughter who you know survived an alien attack at the start has been checking out her arm. This coupled with the talk of the alien fungus spreading and growing and the talk of the infected zone made me assume that the girl would at some point pop free from her skin and become a raving alien monster... infected by an alien bite received during the credits sequence... sadly this doesn’t happen.

What is really needed though, in a film which has been truly competent at making you fairly edgy and cautious of these beasts... is some kind of extended fight/chase sequence lasting 10-15 minutes where the movie makes good on it’s threat, so to speak. You can maybe blame my Western outlook on the need for a horror/action punchline at the end of the film but, frankly, you’d be barking up the wrong tree with me on that one ‘cause I love movies which lead you to an understated place you’re not expecting. However, with the way monsters has been set up with all the graffiti on the walls and the news reports to remind the audience of the threat of their existence to humanity... I think they really needed to deliver some big set piece at the end. What we get instead is a vaguely suspenseful sequence with a tentacle groping blindly around our heroine in a shop (a scene which has been done to death in dozens of movies and which was taken to the extended, height of boredom in Spielberg’s tepid take on The War of the Worlds) followed by a sequence where we get to see two alien Cthulhu look-alikes having sex. Yeah, I get that we’re supposed to go away thinking...oh that’s really great... I really liked the ending of Encounter at Farpoint the first time around so I’m happy to see a rerun of it at the cinema... but not me I’m afraid. They really needed a run, jump and scare sequence to live up to audience expectations on this one I think... and it really doesn’t go there.

That aside though... it really is a beautifully shot film... so if you have a hankering for seeing something like one of those old Herzog pseudo-travelogue movies or maybe something a little similar to Apocalypse Now... but with no action set pieces and something perhaps a little less alien than Marlon Brando... check out the Monsters. You may just find yourself having a really good time!