| Years ago, the mighty Earth
Defense Forces vanquished the seemingly invincible
Godzilla, sent writhing to pit unknown deep within
the crevasses of the Antarctic. Now years later,
as Earth is assailed by legions of monsters both
known and unknown, and by an alien force the likes
of which our planet has never seen ... is Godzilla
perhaps the least evil of what the globe has ever
seen, or perhaps the only power that can topple
the balance back? Or will melting that pit of
icebound cruelty lead merely to more destruction
than even the invaders from space and their monstrous
puppets had ever imagined on their own? The answer
is never so simple when one reaches the end of
days, or ... the FINAL WARS.
Almost certainly the most divisive
movie of its series yet made, Godzilla: Final
Wars opens with a credit dedicating the film,
to three of the gentlemen who made the original
50 years back: producer Tomoyuki
Tanaka, director Ishiro
Honda and special effects master Eiji
Tsuburaya. It then goes on to produce a spectacle
that not one of them could even vaguely have conceived
of and very possibly would have hated.
It's difficult to know what to
say about Final Wars except that at the very least,
it's ingeniously executed; reportedly the largest
budget ever assigned to a Godzilla movie was granted
to this one (although I'm not so sure that, if
one adjusted for inflation, that The
Return of Godzilla [1984], the 30th anniversary
movie, still wasn't more lavishly appointed).
Final Wars is a great deal less traditional than
the 1984 movie was, at least superficially; both
pictures are balls-to-the-wall, spare-no-expense
extravaganzas, but also each are made by filmmakers
with tremendously different instincts, and utterly
different agendas.
Final Wars director Ryuhei Kitamura
is perhaps the most singular, paradoxical stylist
ever to work on a Godzilla film; all those who
went before him either originated the tradition
of how Japanese monster movies were made, or were
just copying it. (Okay, there's one exception,
the brilliant Shusuke Kaneko, whose 2001 movie
Godzilla,
Mothra & King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out
Attack is the best Godzilla movie Ishiro
Honda never made. Or if not that one, Yoshimitsu
Banno's Godzilla
vs. Hedorah [1971] is.) Kitamura's skill
and dexterity is never in doubt, that he has tremendous
ability cannot be denied; the problem could be
said to be to what ends he puts this ability.
Final Wars is basically three spectacular movies
that they've tried to pack into one, and it often
seems as if none of these stories even knew how
to shake hands, let alone embrace into a comprehensive
tale, and more than once one gets the sense that
Kitamura's real directive here is not to have
made a proper 50th Anniversary Godzilla movie,
but to cobble together a product reel showing
why he should be directing Hollywood action movies.
I must say that in this regard,
Kitamura has succeeded completely. I have never
seen more elaborate stunt work in a Japanese movie
ever, except ... this is human stunt work. No
one goes to a Godzilla movie to see a gigantic
motorcycle chase that seems to go on for about
twenty minutes, no matter how brilliantly it's
done, though perhaps I'd find the sequence more
bravura if I even cared about these characters
(mutant soldiers, one enslaved by aliens) in the
first place. I really don't want to see another
eighty minutes of Matrix-like fight scenes ...
though maybe I would if there was anything even
vaguely resembling character development, or even
characterization, in the first place.
Kitamura spends so much time on
this kind of thing that the manner in which he
cuts the monster sequences is often borderline
insulting. This movie is over two hours long (as
far as I recall, the longest running Japanese
monster movie ever), and is packed with lengthy
fight scenes between humans and human-looking
aliens, and these parts, however amazingly well
done, become particularly annoying because they
seem to be eating up so much screen time that
should be devoted to the real reason we watch
these things: THE GIANT MONSTERS. Granted, I thought
the last entry in the series Godzilla:
Tokyo S.O.S. (2003) was a drag and a
half, and this movie represents something more
entertaining, but it's absolutely shocking how
cavalierly Kitamura treats so many of these sequences;
this was sold as the Destroy
All Monsters (1968) of our new era, and
while some of the chaos of this comes through
beautifully at times, it's often infuriating how
the director seems to pick and choose, completely
inexplicably, amongst what he decides he wants
to show us and what he doesn't. I think the editing
is actually superb from the technical point of
view, but why does he not show us so much stuff
we want to see?
Many sequences are just astounding
at the beginning: Rodan's attack on New York,
Angilas bouncing through acres of buildings, the
mammoth shrimp Ebirah having a showdown with mutant
soldiers (the best Ultraman episode that was never
made), and I'm only naming three of the beasties
who turn up in this (you have to be really dedicated
to the series to even recognize who most of these
guys are, I suspect). But then we get stupid,
cheap stuff like the way Hedorah, the Smog Monster,
is polished off within less than a minute, and
the way the movie never bothers to tell us whether
some of these critters are even definitively vanquished.
(One gorgeous long shot, of Rodan, King Caesar
and Anguirus all in a pile, after one of the picture's
better monster action sequences, wherein Godzilla
is of course victorious, misses so many moments
it's like an ache you can't get rid of to watch
it again; you just know that Eiji
Tsuburaya or Teruyoshi Nakano would have inserted
close-ups of their eyes fading or something; hell,
even Noriaki Yuasa would have done as much.)
This must sound like I'm angry
with the picture, and at some levels I am, perhaps
all the more so because of all the stuff that
works so well. I do think Kitamura is a first-class
director, I have not seen his work before, but
I wish he had taken less of a punk-rock attitude
(as I see it) to what should have been a tribute,
not a strange sort of mockery. Who didn't love
the idea of this movie when we first heard of
it? All those monsters coming back, how cool is
that? Yet there seems to be so much almost deliberate
misjudgement in the way it's executed, what, after
three viewings am I going to say? On the one hand
I'm delighted to see such a modern-looking, handsomely
produced entry into the series; none of the movies
since 1984 have been made with so much money,
and I'll tell ya, for the reported $18 million
that this cost, plus extra CGI work and title
design commissioned from Hollywood (the latter
executed by Seven's own Kyle Cooper, although
I can't fathom why he — or Kitamura —
decided it should go by so fast and be so hard
to read), your average Hollywood movie that attempted
this would cost at least three times as much,
I bet. But again, to what end?
There are many things to love here,
and I bet some of the things I'll single out will
surprise people. The score by Keith Emerson (of
Emerson, Lake & Palmer) actually somehow works
for this ideally, it's exactly the score this
weird picture wants and I can't imagine anything
else that would match its tone so well. (Two Japanese
composers Kitamura uses a lot are also credited,
but I have no idea who wrote what.) What we're
allowed to see of special effects director Eiichi
Asada's work is first-class, and there are many
brilliant ideas in the monster sequences (one
of the frustrating things about the movie is that
I never understood why we get tons of one such
scene and maybe a fingerful of another). I admired
the much derided, vaguely decolored photography
of the human scenes, and the sets were terrific.
As well, the acting is mostly terrific.
I thought for a while there that Kitamura was
going for realism, and then I recognized his style
is actually "heightened realism," though
not all the leads are up to it. But the supporting
players are ideally chosen. I don't know if Akira
Takarada, who starred in the original (it was
only his third film and his first as a lead) has
had a better role in decades; he plays a UN functionary
who turns into an alien-controlled freak, and
for a man pushing 80, he looks terrific, and is
clearly enjoying himself immensely, as he certainly
didn't seem to be doing in his phoned-in semi-bit-part
in Godzilla
vs. Mothra (1992). As well, genre goddess
Kumi Mizuno,
not as old as Takarada but despite her age still
looking gorgeous (she has fortunate cheekbones
and a still-lovely smoky voice) has more to do
in this genre part than she's been granted since
her own youth. Kenji Sahara (who also appeared,
for a split second, in the original Godzilla)
is more shortchanged as usual, but man, always
great to see him. Latter-day character favorite
Akira
Nakao also has a limited but nifty part.
However, the performance kudos
really belong to Kazuki Kitamura (no relation
to director Ryuhei, as far as I know), who pretty
much steals every scene he's in as the haughty,
epicene alien who casually kills his superiors
and takes over the show (and goes into repeated,
increasingly hysterical hissy fits every time
Godzilla slaughters one of his deployed monsters),
and Don Frye, not really an actor (as his line
readings indicate), but a hell of a presence;
I was not surprised to discover later that he
is originally a professional athlete, since I
did wonder how someone so beefy moved so fast
in those action scenes. Frye always seems to be
in on some joke that the rest of us aren't, and
when in the film's final act he more or less says
"We're going to wake up Godzilla just to
screw with the aliens, even though almost everybody
else on earth is dead," the picture's indifferent
nihilism almost obtains a sort of screwball comedy.
And screwball comedy is not what
should have been attempted in this barely explicable,
so-called tribute to Tomoyuki
Tanaka, Ishiro
Honda and Eiji
Tsuburaya, but if nothing else, I can't say
the thing is boring. Disappointing? I guess so.
Yet I wonder how time will judge this particular
entry in this particular and unusual series; it's
so rare for anyone on the staff to have tried
something so radical and different, and enough
of it works that I don't think it automatically
to be dismissed. If I could have been there to
review Godzilla
vs. Hedorah (1971) when it came out,
might I have hated it? I did as a child. As an
adult, I think it a masterpiece of sorts. I think
I'll never think of Godzilla: Final Wars
as a masterpiece, but I can't deny there's tons
of brilliant filmmaking in it; I just, again and
for the last time, wish that it had been focused
a bit more clearly.
This review can also be found
in the final 2005 issue of Cult Movies Magazine.
|
(3.5/5)