Caution: This review contains spoilers.
I felt guilty about enjoying the new Godzilla movie.
The characters in the film reeks of poor development. Dr. Ishiro Serizawa spends his career researching MUTOs (or Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism). He can’t seem to figure out why the male MUTO is screeching, but thankfully there’s a readily available American (Joe Bundy) to help him figure out that difficult science-y stuff. The American soon dies, but thankfully he left behind a son who is American military named Ford. Ford has the personality of a toothpick, but is thankfully really good at disabling bombs (supposedly—we never actually see him do it in the movie). Because of this skill, he opts back into the Army to help save San Francisco. His ultimate role is to witness how Godzilla saves humanity from the MUTOs. He discovers that all Godzilla wants to do is restore balance to the earth. He is a benevolent Godzilla… or something… because Godzilla feels like it and he’s fucking Godzilla.
Meanwhile, Ford’s wife is running around in a nurse costume waiting for his return in San Francisco (there’s no footage of her actually being a nurse. One-hundred-percent of her role is worrying about her child and waiting for her husband). There’s some Japanese boy with no lines who Ford saves to make sure the franchise has enough ethnic representation. There’s a black bus driver who successfully drives a bus full of children over the crashing San Francisco bridge. And every once in a while, a MUTO and Godzilla destroy a city.
Yes, there’s blatant sexist and racism in this movie. Heaven forbid an American adaptation of Godzilla would feature, say, a Japanese-American saving his hometown of San Francisco (not really far fetched, guys) or competent Asian people in general who aren’t acting as the Mystical Asian Man (I mean really, Dr. Serizawa looks off into the distance and says, “The arrogance of men is thinking nature is in their control and not the other way around.” No one in the real world talks like that or would have that kind of premonition). It’d be cool to feature a Godzilla movie where the women didn’t just run around screaming waiting for their men to swoop in and save them. In terms of appealing to age-old sexist and racist movie tropes, Godzilla unfortunately covers all bases.
But there was something greater to this movie that allows the viewers to leave all these problems behind.
Godzilla, in all reality, is about the insignificance of mankind.
Between Godzilla and the MUTOs, there is so little that people can do to stop them. They literally eat ICBMs. Their screeches can cause airplanes to drop dead in flight. They stomp through cities like a child would smash a sandcastle. The people scattering below them are no bigger than gnats. To these giants, humanity, as a whole, is irrelevant.
And that raises the bar for this action movie.
At a Jaws-like pace, Godzilla slowly reveals the MUTOs’ and Godzilla’s powers. The stakes slowly crawl higher. The military becomes more frantic, moving from ground forces to airstrikes and tanks to entertaining using a nuclear weapon to using one. All of their efforts are hopeless. A the heart of this movie, all that really matters is the emotion of the helplessness of humanity. That’s what this movie is really about—regardless of if the protagonist was male, female, Asian, White, or even privileged. I really don’t think Godzilla or the MUTOs would care.
So this film is two sided. On the one hand, this could have been film without human dialogue. The character “development” was a waste of time. On the other hand, the action—and emotion—attached to the horror of Godzilla was preserved. Indeed, in future Godzilla films, the writers would do well to emphasize the fate of humanity—and to forego the botched trope characters.