The allure of the technological advances in film-making is
particularly pressing in the action genre. Three challenges come to mind—that of
how to have the film stand as a metaphor for something that is both good and
bad in “real life,” develop a relationship storyline amid the digital effects
that enable such tremendous scale of action, and restrain the visual effects
lest they manifest as a sort of visual diarrhea. Godzilla (2014) is illustrative of what can happen when a
film-maker is not up to these challenges.
As a sci-fi film, Godzilla
performs the requisite function of standing for something going on in
society at a distance. The monsters
who eat nuclear fuel deliver the message, albeit filtered through the science
fiction, that nuclear power is dangerous. Interestingly, just as not all of the
monsters in the film turn out to be bad, nuclear technology has its good point
in holding promise in blowing up the bad monsters who ironically eat nuclear
fuel. If nuclear technology, like fire, puts us in a sort of a double-bind, so
too do the monsters in the film. Unfortunately, turning Godzilla into a “savior
of the city” at the end and not simply a foe of the nuclear-eating monsters
violates the Godzilla character inherited by the film. A similar problem is in
the Twilight films, which violate
vampire lore not only by having them out in daylight, but also by glittering
like jewels in the sunlight. Stephanie Meyer wrote a romance, rather than a
vampire story, and the film-maker tried to have it both ways—monsters who aren’t
really monsters. So too, Godzilla ends up not as a monster and yet technically
so, presumably to embrace as a symbol the ambiguity in our attitudes toward
nuclear technology.
The film also falls short in melding its human story with
all the digital glitter. The problem is in how the two very different scales
(the digital technology extending the larger) are related. As the monsters get “up
close and personal” with the human protagonist, such intimate contact between
such vastly different scales is too contrived to be believed. The distortive
effect includes much too much significance being attributed to the scientist’s
grown son. In other words, the narrative is distorted by the film-maker’s
attempt to extend the larger scale (possible with the digital toys) while still
having the emotional heart-tugs from a “human interest story.” The attempt is
clearly to make the son the hero who saves the city even as Godzilla is dubbed “savoir
of the city,” but the narrative itself supports neither. The son did not have
such a role, and Godzilla was merely fighting adversaries rather than trying to
save the humans. In the end, narrative itself gets sacrificed on the altar of special-effects
technology. Given the complexity in the human relation to nuclear technology,
constructing a workable narrative would have been quite a feat anyway—the eye-candy
just making the achievement of suitable substance all the more daunting.
