Godzilla (2/5 Stars)

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.