Up From The Depths, Thirty Storeys High

When Gareth Edwards' Monsters came out in 2010, I reasoned that many of its sometimes severe deficiencies were the result of a noble attempt on the part of its director to stretch a tiny budget further than it could reasonably be stretched. If there's one thing to be gleaned from Edwards' new film Godzilla, heralding the long-awaited return of cinema's most iconic movie monster, it's that Edwards actually suffers from some severely misaligned priorities. For even with a projected budget of $160 million behind him, he has once again turned out a film that is, in spite of a great deal of care and insight behind the camera, an absolute fucking slog in places where it really shouldn't be. It's a good deal more galling this time around, however. It doesn't just feel like a waste of that hyperinflated budget, but something trickier and all the more frustrating: there is a fantastic Godzilla film that could have been assembled from essentially nothing more than footage that already exists within the film, and to be instead saddled with the fitfully spectacular and frequently tedious film that we got instead is an outright tragedy.

Picking up the mantle from Japanese studio Toho after their iconic mascot was put to pasture ten years ago in the wake of increasingly lackluster box office returns, Godzilla serves as a reboot to the now 60-year-old franchise begun in 1954, and the first time an American production company has taken the reins since Roland Emmerich's spectacularly misbegotten 1998 misfire. The new film opens in Janjira, Japan, with nuclear plant supervisor Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) losing his wife Sandra (Juliette Binoche, wasted) in a plant meltdown caused by freak seismic activity. Things jump forward 15 years to the present day and we're introduced to Brody's now-adult son Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), returning from a stint in a US Navy bomb disposal squad before being unwillingly summoned to Japan to bail out his father, who has remained obsessed with uncovering the true cause of the meltdown, convinced that there was a cover-up. Joe is right, of course, and his snooping brings both he and his son to the attention of a shadowy team of scientists lead by Ishiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) and Vivienne Graham (Sally Hawkins, also wasted). The Janjira plant has become the nesting grounds of a great big Something, dubbed MUTO (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism), and the Brodys have arrived just in time to see it hatch.

It's at this point that Brody the younger more or less takes over as the lone protagonist of the film and things turn into a race against time by the Navy to put a stop to a pair of MUTOs who are cutting a swathe across the United States - first Hawaii, then Nevada, and finally San Francisco. There is another Something hunting the MUTOs, though, and the film respects its audience's intelligence enough not to play coy with its identity. Yes indeed, a hulking prehistoric lizard dubbed Godzilla by Serizawa's team has been woken by all the seismic activity, and it is pissed. Ford also has a wife and son (Elizabeth Olsen and Carson Bolde respectively) in San Francisco, and that fact that I could summarise so much of the plot without mentioning them once is a keener demonstration of what they add to the film than anything else I could say. More worrying still is how little of that plot actually revolves around the presence of Godzilla himself. It was a ballsy move of the filmmakers to assume enough existing familiarity with Godzilla that precious screentime need not be wasted in establishing his importance, but it tips too far over the line into taking Godzilla for granted entirely, assuming that we will understand his importance and care about his fate simply because he is who he is.

I will say this much: for probably the first third of its running time, Godzilla  is damn near faultless. The fifteen-year timeskip feels dreadfully unnecessary and certainly contributes to a lot of the bloat later on in the film, but everything else is spot-on. Even the opening credits are thrilling; a rapid assault of historical footage and snatches of on-screen text that are hastily whisked away while the most driving and ingenious orchestration in Alexandre Desplat's otherwise forgettable score pounds away demands we sit up and pay attention and leaves us with just enough information that we're hungry for more. The following scenes detailing the tragedy at the plant and glimpses of Serizawa's research are nearly as good and set in motion a whirlwind of information and imagery that churns along at a breakneck pace and brings the film's giant monsters into the fold with hardly a wasted breath. Things get a little rockier when Godzilla's backstory is detailed, a moment of horribly strained writing that hits all the wrong notes and manages in one fell swoop to completely depoliticize one of the most political movie monsters in history, serving up mythology in place of allegory and leaving Watanabe helpless to salvage the moment with all the gravitas he can bring to bear.

The fumbling of such a pivotal moment is almost forgotten when MUTO hits Honolulu, though, in a scene that would have been inconceivable in the days when the monsters were men in rubber suits stomping around miniature sets. It's a scene that marries a human point of view with an immaculate sense of scale that could only have been achieved through the use of CGI, and it strikes a balance of awe and horror that could not be more perfectly suited to the material. It culminates in the first full shot of Godzilla, a slow upwards pan that shows off the new design, a perfect marriage of his traditional appearance with the increased detail and more animalistic features allowed by CGI. Godzilla gives of an earth-shaking roar, ready to fight, and... Cue a useless cutaway to Ford's wife and child that serves no purpose, narrative or emotional, and only serves to play keep-away with the scenes of monsters fighting that should be the movie's raison d'etre. It's at this point that Godzilla grinds to a halt and never fully recovers.

Ford Brody, you see, is just a godawful protagonist, and everything in Godzilla from there on out is focused on he and his family to the exclusion of nearly everything else, up to and including the giant monsters that everybody is presumably there to see. The Godzilla franchise is not known for its history of compelling human protagonists, of course, but then it has also been historically characterised by running times that come in south of 100 minutes (frequently south of 80!), at least 30 of which are given over to nothing but giant monsters beating the holy hell out of each other, something which is emphatically not true of Godzilla 2014. I don't entirely understand why the character of Ford and the fifteen-year timeskip were even necessary at all. Joe Brody is no-one's idea of a memorable or engaging character but Cranston draws on the guilt and obsession that motivate him and brings a livewire energy to the role that is miles more watchable than Taylor-Johnson's bland and inflectionless performance. It's made worse still by the aforementioned marriage of human POV and large-scale monster action, which means that we're given no respite from Ford's presence even when, after nearly an hour of wheel-spinning, the monsters start duking it out in earnest. What worked so well early in the film falls victim to diminishing returns swiftly, and it becomes clear that Edwards has no interest in trying anything else at all.

The tragic thing, though, is that when we do get an all-too-fleeting glimpse at the spectacle on offer, it's absolutely top-notch. Every moment that Godzilla and the MUTOs spend engaged in combat, the film could not be improved upon. Edwards has a great eye, and the choreography, lighting and use of colour in the action scenes leaves them stuffed with indelible imagery. If only it weren't doled out thirty seconds at a time, intercut with endless minutes of Taylor-Johnson's blank face! It's not even satisfying to think of in terms of quality over quantity: the exact same amount of monster action, if presented uninterrupted and in a film that was a good thirty minutes shorter, would be enormously satisfying. As it is the endless interruptions and lethargic pacing actually serve to dilute the strength of the spectacle, rendering what should be some of the franchise's all-time highs into far less than the sum of their parts.

History is littered with quite a few less-than-successful Godzilla reboots, so it's hardly surprising that this one, too, would be littered with problems - I haven't even addressed the way the film refuses to grapple with the US's role in creating Godzilla in the original, or why exactly a monster whose whole reason for existing was as a cautionary tale about nuclear warfare would appear in a movie with such a blasé attitude towards nuclear weaponry. Godzilla himself at least is in fine form; the new design strikes a perfect balance between paying homage to Godzillas past and bringing him into the modern blockbuster age (the MUTOs, unfortunately, feel like yet another rehash of the Cloverfield monster). It took some clumsy writing, positioning him as neither hero nor antagonist but simply a force of nature - a role arrived at much more organically in previous takes on the character - but Godzilla is now also in a prime position to reappear better than ever in future movies. Hopefully next time, he won't feel so much like the sidekick in his own starring vehicle.

6/10

I'm No Superman

With Christopher Nolan's "Dark Knight" trilogy all wrapped up and Marvel's film division absolutely monopolising the "fun" corner of the comic book adaptation market, Warner Brothers has turned its eye to dark-and-edgifyin' another iconic DC superhero. The result, in case you've been living under a rock for the last year, is Man of Steel, and it is a complete and utter failure of a motion picture.

Man of Steel more-or-less follows the template set by the marvelous Superman: The Movie back in 1978, with a few changes both major and minor to bring it in line with modern sensibilities (or more accurately, a film executive's idea of modern sensibilities), and a few more just for the hell of it - nearly all of them for the worse. It begins as that film did with a lengthy prologue set on the alien planet of Krypton, where leading Kryptonian scientist Jor-El (Russell Crowe) has failed to prevent the planet's imminent destruction. The only hope left for the survival of the Kryptonian race lies in he and wife Lara Lor-Van's (Ayelet Zurer with the absolute worst performance in the film, all glassy-eyed stares and stilted line deliveries) infant son Kal-El, who is sent away to Earth despite the best efforts of mutinous General Zod (Michael Shannon, whose performance is typically unhinged but distressingly free of nuance), who kills Jor-El in the process. For his crimes, Zod and his most loyal officers are banished shortly before Krypton is destroyed.

In the first of many abrupt shifts in the story, we find ourselves in the company of the adult Kal-El (Henry Cavill) on Earth, now rechristened Clark Kent, who is disillusioned with his life and searching for any trace of his Kryptonian heritage. For the next hour and change Clark's childhood in rural Kansas with adoptive human parents Jonathan and Martha Kent (Kevin Costner and Diane Lane respectively) is doled out piecemeal via flashback, inserted crudely into the present-day narrative at seemingly random intervals. As if this weren't fractured and aimless enough, we're also introduced to investigative reporter Lois Lane (Amy Adams), who crosses paths Clark at a US military dig site in Canada and becomes determined to find out more about him. Fractured and aimless it is, but this first act is still home to the majority of Man of Steel's best moments. Adams's Lois Lane is the only wholly successful modern update to the material, and if she is thus given appallingly little to do in exchange, she at least walks out with her dignity intact. The "Clark's childhood" material, meanwhile, is home to many terrific tiny character moments between the young Clark (played at 9 by Cooper Timberline and 13 by Dylan Sprayberry) and his parents. Lane is a perfect emotional anchor and remains so throughout the film, while Costner is nearly good enough to make the severe character missteps in the script actually work out in his favour.

Ah, yes, here is where things get really thorny. Starting with scriptwriters David S. Goyer and Christopher Nolan's (who also produced) decision to render Jonathan Kent as a far more morally grey and distant role model for the young Superman, Man of Steel embarks on a voyage that ends in the total character assassination of its hero. Towards the end of the first act things seem to be headed for something of a course correction: Clark is reunited with his biological father in the form of a holographic projection, who at least pays lip service to the notion that people are capable of greatness and that Superman's most important power is to unite them in reaching it, through dialogue that is largely taken from Superman's more iconic comic book outings. Indeed, a genuinely compelling middle act starts to take shape where this more troubled  version of Superman learns to love and trust the people of America and offer his services as their protector before that trust is tested in a huge way.

I was fully prepared to start really liking the film at this point, but then it chooses to sidestep having a middle act entirely. Instead the running time is given over over to the third act, nearly a full hour of relentless and desperately uninteresting action sequences. Many things explode, many buildings crumble, entire city blocks are laid waste, an unthinkable level of human life is wiped out, and Superman apparently does not give a shit. Here is where it becomes abundantly clear that Goyer and Nolan don't understand or care about a single fucking thing that they said earlier in the movie. Their Superman blithely decimates nearly an entire city without batting an eyelid, happily writing off any loss of life as necessary collateral damage to defeat the bad guy, and oh boy does "defeating the bad guy" take on a meaning that would ordinarily only be allowed to do so over Superman's dead body (as it does, literally, at one point in the comics).

Man of Steel is terrible Superman, then, but bad adaptations are often good cinema in their own right, which is ultimately their only responsibility. This particular adaptation, unfortunately, is not good cinema by any definition that I'm comfortable using. It borrows liberally and without thought or skill from Nolan's Batman films, all slate greys and jerky camera movements (a particularly awful shot during the Krypton sequence crash zooms in, then out, then in again in a single take) and frantic editing, without any consideration to why those films used that aesthetic the way they did. Where Nolan had an eye for physical plausibility and practical effects, keeping the action contained to a human-level idea of "large", Man of Steel is operating in a far grander register of giant shiny spaceships and cities being levelled and civilizations facing extinction; a register that is entirely incompatible with the gritty pseudo-realism of the visuals. On top of this, almost every scene is rotten with lens flares that would make JJ Abrams blush at the freedom with which they are allowed to obfuscate the on-screen action.

All of this is to say that it's director Zack Snyder's finest work since his 2004 debut, Dawn of the Dead. Hideous though the visuals might be, they are in every way an improvement on his last four efforts. Slate grey is an improvement over orange and teal, crash zooms and shaky-cam are preferable to pervasive speed ramping, and so on. What's more, he portrays the deaths of Superman's parents with a callous disinterest, expecting the cloying soundtrack to do the emotional heavy lifting. Not something that any director should be proud of, for sure, but for Snyder it represents the first and only time that he has successfully portrayed violence and mayhem without actively fetishising it, in Man of Steel or any other film. The film is not entirely free of directorial dick moves - a stupid gesture involving herds of CGI African fauna nearly scuttle what is otherwise the film's most (and only) successful feint towards spectacle, and there's a fantasy sequence involving Zod and Supes that is a fucking disaster of the heavy-handed visual metaphors and subsequent masturbatory wallowing that are a pervasive element of Snyder's back catalogue.

I understand (though I also reject) the desire to update Superman to appeal to a modern, more cynical audience, but what we have in Man of Steel is scarcely worthy of the name (not that it seems to want it; "superman" is used only twice in the film, and only mockingly at that). It's both morally and visually ugly, so larded up with expensive CGI and self-concious attempts to ape other contemporary superhero films that it aged more in the time it took me to leave the cinema than its forebear has in 35 years.

4/10, and it owes its supporting cast a hell of a lot for that

It's Haddonfield, but not as we know it

(Note: The following review is based on the Director's Cut of the film)

It's hard to imagine an easier way to earn the ire of legions of horror fans in this day and age than to announce a brand-new remake of a beloved classic. From the moment of its announcement you can all but guarantee hordes of faithful fans who have stuck by their given franchise through the worst of the sequel-happy 80s descending upon the IMDB message boards en masse raging about the travesty is being wrought upon their once-proud series, as if the act of remaking a film somehow causes the source material to stop existing.

It took a long time and a lot of raging of my own to realise how silly the whole affair was. It's true that horror remakes are almost invariably cynical exercises in brand recognition not worth the time it takes to watch them.  The same could also be said for a very great many horror sequels, with the added offence of being a part of the same continuity as the original and generally doing terrible things to the mythology in a way that retroactively taints their predecessors. No, most of these remakes have no damn cause to exist; but they do and there's no real use nor reason in fighting them.

In retrospect it probably should have come as no surprise when Rob Zombie announced his intentions to remake John Carpenter's 1978 seminal slasher Halloween. Both of his projects up to that point had been remakes after a fashion - the borderline-unwatchable House of 1000 Corpses owed more than a little to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the shockingly excellent follow-up The Devil's Rejects was at its heart a riff on Bonnie and Clyde imbued with the blood of countless 70s exploitation flicks. So it was that Zombie, armed with Carpenter's blessing and the advice to make the project his own, set out to bring us a brand-new version of the timeless original.

Except he didn't. It becomes abundantly clear only moments into this new Halloween that Zombie really has made the material his own. Indeed, there's a lot that tells us from the opening moments that we're watching a Rob Zombie film and very little that suggests a relationship to Carpenter's work.

After a title card informing us that it's October 31 in Haddonfield, IL (the year, by my calculation from the film's other title cards, is 1992), we join events already in progress at what we'll soon learn is the Myers household, where hardworking Deborah Myers (Sheri Moon Zombie, who has again come forward in ability by leaps and bounds since her last Zombie project) is struggling to manage the demands of both a teenaged and infant daughter, as well as the more juvenile yet Ronnie (William Forsythe), her trailer trash live-in boyfriend. It's hardly surprising that she is out of energy by the time her son Michael (Daeg Ferch) emerges from the bathroom (we know, as she does not, that he was in there disposing of a murdered pet rat).

Off young Michael goes to school, where he is bullied mercilessly about his mother's occupation as a stripper by resident school bully Wesley (Daryl Sabara). The ensuing fight sees Deborah hauled into the school to discuss Michael's increasingly violent tendencies with the principal and psychologist Samuel Loomis (Malcolm McDowell), while Michael himself sneaks out to tail Wesley before beating him to death with a tree branch out in the woods in an incredibly vicious scene that is marred by what is thankfully the only poorly-judged slow-motion shot of the film.

Thus is the tone set for much of the next hour as Michael acts out his violent impulses on his family and is incarcerated in Smith's Grove asylum under the treatment of Dr. Loomis, all filmed with a lot of queasy closeups and grainy cinematography intercut with faked news and archival footage (one touch I liked was the noticably shittier sound quality in the scenes where Loomis is seen recording his conversations with Michael) combined with just enough carefuly crafted longer shots that you couldn't quite call it 'documentary style'.

It's fair, I think, to call this Zombie's best work to that point, treading well-worn narrative ground with great panache and an unnerring craftsman's eye. Watching Michael's journey from teenage fuck-up to passionless killer is genuinely convincing and incredibly unnerving for it, and watching the toll it takes on his mother gives the film its most human and emotionally-charged arc. All good things must come to an end though, and Halloween hits a stumble it never quite recovers from at almost exactly the halfway mark of its 117 minutes.

The action jumps forward a number of years to 2007, when Michael breaks out of Smith's Grove due to events that, in the director's cut at least, are almost unspeakably vile. He's only got one destination in mind, and it's not long before he's commandeered a vehicle and is headed straight for Haddonfield. It's only now that we meet Laurie Strode, the character Jamie Lee Curtis played in the original Halloween and the one that film was chiefly concerned with, and the new Halloween starts actually retelling the events of its namesake.

Unfortunately, because we're already an hour into the film at this point, something had to go to keep it a reasonable length and the axe fell on Laurie. Not content with butchering her role, she's then placed in the hands of the wretched Scout Taylor-Compton, who has absolutely nothing in her repetoire beyond being shrill and and obnoxious. It's a performance that makes even the few scenes spent introducing her and the two friends she spends her time trading crudities with (credit where it's due - Zombie deserves kudos for giving us a Final Girl who is a far cry from pure and virginal) hard to watch.

There are two major flaws that cripple the retread half of Halloween. The first is that it's too often content to outright copy John Carpenter, only not as well. It's worth noting that the filmmaking in this half of the film is far more anonymous, although 'anonymous' in a Rob Zombie vehicle is a highly relative term. The second is that it's absolutely not reconcilable with the first half in any meaningful way. Michael Myers as we see him in the second half is a largely characterless brute (played by the frighteningly large Tyler Mane) who shows no real echo of the Michael Myers we've just spent an hour with. The only link between the two halves, then, is Loomis, who is portrayed as an occasionally well-intentioned dick with a flair for melodrama that would make the late, great Donald Pleasance blush.

There are some small pleasures. Danielle Harris (in her third appearance in a Halloween film) is by a wide margin the most interesting of the girls as Annie Brackett, matched by Brad Douriff as her father, the town sherriff. The kills, unlike most you'd see in a slasher movie,  are distinctly unpleasant and not-at-all interested in audience satisfaction - the film is never terribly gory, but the deaths are every one of them brutal, held aloft on (perhaps unsurprisingly, given the director's background) terrific, eye-watering sound design that makes you feel every damn hit. The terrible plot revelation that ruined the original franchise is far more organically a part of this version, and if it had come forty minutes earlier as a continuation of what we'd already seen and not been shelved in favour of bland Dead Teenager boilerplate, it might have been enough to save this wreck. It certainly adds to the impact of the film's shocker ending, twenty seconds that tries to tie the two disparate halves together with only partial success, but serves in its own right as a pretty indellible image to leave the film with.

Halloween '07 is a font of so much wasted potential it'd just about make you weep, but it hits almost as much as it misses. Between the near-perfect first hour and a handful of moments of demented inspiration hidden amongst the dreary last act, there's more than enough good in the film  to chalk it up as an interesting failure. And in the annals of horror remakes, 'interesting failure' is tantamount to 'a damn masterpiece'. I'm glad the thing exists, and that's something it has in common with very few modern horror remakes.