REVIEW - GODZILLA (GARETH EDWARDS)

This is no clean slate. Every reboot brings with it its share of baggage, and though an earnest remake of the Godzilla story didn't seem like a bad idea, that baggage has been interpreted differently by so many principal crew members in this spectacular Hollywood version that the film has wound up almost becoming bad in itself. It's concept upon concept upon concept, each one attempting to wipe the slate clean of the last, and not at all managing it. Director Gareth Edwards responds to a lack of humanity in the screenplay by smartly devoting his focuses to his film's visual design, and what a design it is. His deeply detailed compositions represent a world of conflict and confusion, in desperate need of a cleansing source. Lingering longer in the memory, though, are the images he constructs of vast spaces and structures, monumental, starkly beautiful, terrifying. The clear creative decision to mostly forego scenes of one monster brawl after another - perhaps the only such decision agreed upon by all major crew members - is a quirkily thrilling one, though it throws a focus onto the film's human characters, one which the script makes no sufficient effort in order to sustain. And Edwards guides his cast with apparent disinterest, making the casting of several reputable actors in key roles feel redundant. One notes a writer trying to divert attention toward people he has little genuine concern for, a director trying to divert it toward the strange spectacles he has manufactured, and an editor trying to bulldoze through a plethora of perfunctory plot so as to divert it toward monster-a-monster action. Edwards hits his stride here, actually, as the hasty edit feels less like rude interruption, and the film takes on a curious character unlike its genre cousins, in which bluster and bombast are brushed off. The film almost seems to glide through its second half (whereas it lurches through its first), and Seamus McGarvey's distinctively luminescent cinematography enhances this welcome sense of softness to counter the visual violence that is an unavoidable aspect of a big budget disaster movie. What is thoroughly avoidable, however, is such a negligent treatment of women, and the flippancy and disregard with which the entire gender is treated in Godzilla is ignorant and insulting.