Godzilla is rated PG-13. Whole
cities are wiped out so two enormous bugs can be prevented from having sex.
- A.O. Scott
“Godzilla” is about a big fat lizard that fights two giant sized moths. The
cities that are destroyed are Honolulu, Las Vegas, and San Francisco. You see,
a long time ago the US Government dropped a big nuclear bomb on this big fat
lizard thing in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and such was the arrogance of
mankind that we believed that to be the end of the story. But no, two cocoons
with two large moths survived and in the present day release havoc upon the
world. The two moths are the bad guys in the story. If they like totally have
sex with each other they could make lots of babies, presumably more giant
moths. Godzilla is the good guy in the story. He lives on the bottom of the sea
(that’s why we never found him) and surfaces to kill the moths and save
humanity. Why he would want to do this is not explained. Actually nothing is
explained. All you should know is that this whole thing is due to the arrogance
of mankind. For Pete’s sake people, stop being so arrogant.
Godzilla is really big, like the size of a skyscraper and like when he
fights amongst skyscrapers they like get knocked down. Godzilla’s like Crash-Bam-Boom
and the skyscraper is all like Kablooie! To the fans of Godzilla this might be
enough of a reason to go see the movie. To everybody else I hope it is not
enough. For instance, this movie should draw comparisons to last year’s
“Pacific Rim,” a superior movie about big monsters who battle each other had
several features conspicuously absent here. The first would be a sense of
style. Guillermo Del Toro directed “Pacific Rim” and his brilliant artistry
saturates the entire movie. Compare the night battle in Hong Kong with its
brightly lit modern skyscrapers with the lumbering slugfest in San Francisco
with all of its lights conveniently blown out by an electromagnetic pulse. Also
the monsters and robots had distinctive personalities in “Pacific Rim,” whereas
in “Godzilla” they are essentially the 3D IMAX version of those
cardboard/rubber suits from the original 1950s movie. Secondly, “Pacific Rim”
had a sense of humor. It cast the gifted comedian Charlie Day from “It’s Always
Sunny in Philadelphia” as an excitable scientist. “Godzilla” has no jokes in it
at all and is completely bereft of funny people. Given that this is a movie
about big things destroying cities, that is a major oversight. Third, and this
is just a general thing, but haven’t we got to the point where movies can’t
simply get bigger with bigger things destroying even bigger things. I mean
‘Avatar’ had a pretty simplistic plot but it also happened to be a
gobsmackingly new visual kind of experience. ‘Godzilla’ won’t ever have that
same type of novelty no matter how big the lizard is now or in some future
version. This is not the first time I’ve seen skyscrapers knocked down by
something big in a movie. There are several of those scenarios every year. That’s
all I have to say about this movie.
I would like to a take a moment now and explore the idiocy of movie
ratings in what is becoming an annual tradition at this blog (The Absymal State of Movie Ratings, The Avengers, War Horse, Iron Man 2). “Godzilla” is rated PG-13. As
is pointed out above, whole cities are wiped out. These cities are populated
with people. They are generally in the background running away but sometimes
they are right in the middle of the action or in one particularly unsettling
shot looking through the windows of their office buildings at the big monsters
fighting outside. The astute observer can infer that when Godzilla knocks down
a building, we have just witnessed the deaths of several thousand people at the
very least. Sometimes it is even more obvious. There is a scene on the golden
gate bridge that shows many vehicles with people inside falling into the ocean
when the bridge is broken up by a giant bug. In another scene an airport tram
is broken up and at least ten people fall to their deaths outside of the hole
in the side. Given the overwhelming presence of death in this movie, why is it
not Rated R? The reason is because there is no gore. This is especially
noticeable when dead people are carted away from collapsed buildings largely
intact. Looking at them you would think they all died of heart attacks. As for all
the poor souls in the office buildings, to placate the censors, their dead
bodies are not shown at all.
Human life is cheap in “Godzilla,” but that does not stop the movie from
manipulating the very humanity it so plainly disregards. The result is a few absurd
scenes where some lives are arbitrarily assigned more value than others. Take
the scene on the Golden Gate Bridge where our hero’s son is on a school bus in
the middle of the bridge when Godzilla strikes. The bus driver disregards all
the authorities and takes liberties with the traffic rules brazenly passing all
the other cars that will soon meet their fate on the bottom of the ocean. Do we
not care about anybody else but this one kid in this one bus? When that kid
survives, in a way that unnecessarily endangers all the other people on the
bridge, are we supposed to feel relief?
Presumably the point of movie ratings is to protect children or whatever
from what I wonder. Whatever the reason, the effect of the MPAA ratings is the
proliferation of ignorance concerning the nature of violence. Imagine if you
took just PG-13 blockbusters as your basis for looking at the world. You would
think that you could outrun fireballs, dodge a hail of machine gun bullets
behind a car, and never be hit by falling debris from buildings or shrapnel
from explosions. Is that a moral way to teach kids about violence, specifically
gun violence? To only allow violence that has no physical consequences and
shield them from every instance of violence that shows what it can actually do
to the human body seems to me to be a rather immoral thing to do. Consider the
Rated R movie, “127 Hours.” It concerns the true story about a hiker whose arm
gets pinned underneath a large rock. In order to escape and save his life he
has to cut off his arm, the process of which the movie shows in full detail. It
is gory as should be expected from a realistic version of what happened. But is
it immoral? It is an act of violence depicted truthfully perpetrated to save a
life. What part of that is immoral? How? The movie would have gotten a PG-13
rating if it had not shown any blood during that scene or at least made it look
like the amputation didn’t hurt. But shouldn’t an amputation look like it
hurts? Shouldn’t there be blood?
The truth is that movie ratings are not concerned with morality. They
are concerned with the presence of blood on the screen. In any case, that is
why ‘127 Hours’ which cares deeply about human life is rated R and Godzilla
which treats human life as casually as spilt milk is PG-13. Will somebody
please think of the children?!?!?
Okay, that’s enough. I will keep quiet about this for another year.
