Review: "Godzilla"

Director: Gareth Edwards
Runtime: 123 minutes

The second that Godzilla's iconic roar blasts out of the speakers, you know that you've just witnessed the glorious rebirth of one of cinema's most famous movie monsters. After decades of silly ups and downs, Gareth Edwards' new reboot knows how to remind us all that Godzilla will always be king. If only the rest of the film were worthy of joining him on the throne. Edwards and co. create some stirring sequences, and they also keep the tone balanced between serious and silly. However, a lackluster protagonist and an uneasy focus on various members of the ensemble proves to be a considerable hurdle that the film is barely able to clear.

Faults and all, though, Edwards deserves credit for his handling of the towering monsters (yes, there's more than just the big guy). Restraint isn't a word that comes to mind when talking about a film involving cities being leveled, but it's rather on point here. Edwards handles the big reveal of Godzilla (Gojira, if you're feeling formal) gradually. This is a summer blockbuster/creature feature operating in the vein of Jaws or Alien, where the buildup, and the gradual flashes are more important that showing something in its full glory. 

To accomplish this, Edwards and DP Seamus McGarvey capture most of the mayhem from the ground level. We get a bit of a tail sliding away, a claw-like arm smashing into the ground, or a glimpse of Godzilla's scaly back. It's an inspired choice, and ensures that we, as viewers, look forward to seeing the monsters, instead of quickly growing bored of them. And when it comes time to let loose, Godzilla steps back just far enough to deliver the ridiculous action the character's legacy promises. 

Of course, in handling most of the action from the ground level, this means we have to pay attention to some humans too. Despite a stacked cast that includes (hi, Juliette Binoche) Bryan Cranston (bye, Juliette Binoche), Ken Watanabe, Sally Hawkins, and  David Strathairn the roles aren't terribly interesting or fun to follow. Cranston, at least, has a genuinely compelling emotional core that's effectively set up in the 1999-set prologue. Cranston's character is obviously a stock character (he's the mad man/conspiracy nut who's actually onto something), but the development the film affords his character puts the role far above similar characters. Meanwhile, Watanabe has some fun dispensing loony revisions of atomic history and spouting vague philosophical lines about nature's brutal ability to restore balance.

Everyone else mostly just does their jobs, with the exception being Aaron Taylor Johnson as Cranston's military-trained son. Johnson is also playing a stock character, but his feels totally empty, and even lazy; Charlie Hunnam's role in last year's Pacific Rim looks rich and nuanced in comparison. And, unlike Hunnam, Johnson has no fun characters to play off of. When the story is following Johnson around, the movie becomes a little less interesting, and makes you wish the monsters would hurry up and start causing mayhem again. 

With this human component left half-baked, Godzilla sometimes struggles to engage as it keeps teasing you with the history of the monsters, as well as the mystery of what they're doing now that they've been awakened. Most of the ensemble are also far away from the center of violence, leaving us with only terrified extras to connect with. 

Yet even with the deficiencies in the human roles, Edwards is still able to pull out some powerful visual moments as he keeps you waiting for the big finish. A scene of fighter jets losing power and dropping into San Francisco Bay is smartly used to build the vague sense of dread as the monsters approach. Even better is a freefall sequence that sends Johnson and other soldiers plummeting into the ruins of San Francisco from 30,000 feet. Red tracers streak behind them as they pass through layers of clouds illuminated by raging fires. The mix of painterly wide shots and claustrophobic POV footage is awe-inspiring, and there's not a creature in sight. 

And when the big fights start coming, they are appropriately big and clumsy. Here, Godzilla is a force of balance, meant to wipe out the insect-like creatures attacking human civilization. Yet his role as nature's proxy has no clear regard for human life. In his wrestling matches at the end, the big reptile does his fair share of property damage, all because it's a means to an end (how he's ever going to pay back the city of San Francisco, I have no idea). In between the epic tussles, Edwards finds room to insert moments of satisfying cheesiness. I'll avoid details, but there are certain gloriously over-the-top fight moves that are designed to leave audiences both cheering and laughing. 

Whether or not Warner Brothers decides to pursue a sequel, at the very least they've made an American Godzilla that can stand on its own (as well as erase the memory of the 1998 film). Most of that credit, however, belongs to Mr. Edwards, who has smartly brought the resourcefulness of his indie background to this big-budget extravaganza. The human elements get progressively weaker the further it goes, but Edwards still manages to hold our attention thanks to his inventive ways of never showing more than necessary. Faults and all, when this Godzilla roars, it's pretty damn hard to look at anything else. 

Grade: B-

Review: "Oldboy"

Director: Spike Lee
Runtime: 104 minutes

There's nothing inherently wrong with an American remake of an acclaimed foreign film. Though there's hardly a notable catalog of successful Hollywood remakes, successes aren't impossible. Just two years ago, David Fincher delivered his take on Sweden's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Despite sharing similar problems with the original (which stem from the novel), Fincher's version was a vastly superior work of pure craft. Go back a few years more, and there's Martin Scorsese's The Departed (based on the Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs), which took home Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director. So what's the verdict on Spike Lee's Oldboy, a remake of Park Chan-wook's acclaimed South Korean thriller? 

The short answer is that no, Lee's version doesn't hold a candle to the original. But to dismiss it for that reason alone would be foolish. And, in fairness, Lee's version does have its merits, even though they feel superfluous in the shadow of the Korean version. Even when Lee and writer Mark Protosevich deliver, the results are but a shadow of the previous iteration. 

It doesn't help matters that Oldboy gets off to a jarringly sloppy start. From the frenetic editing to the rushed line delivery, the film's establishing scenes, in which Joe Doucett (Josh Brolin) drinks, fights with his ex-wife, and drinks some more, are hacky and amateurish. Joe's starting point in the film makes sense on paper, but Brolin's first moments feel like bad rehearsals. Things get a little better once Joe is captured and imprisoned in a mysterious, window-less room, but the filmmaking and acting remain disconcertingly subpar. Watching Park Chan-wook and the great Min Sik-choi chronicle the maddening years of imprisonment was visceral and unsettling cinema. Lee and Brolin's take quickly slides into tedium. Even as Joe learns, via his cell's TV, that he's been framed for rape and murder, the psychological component remains out of the film's grasp.

Only when Joe is mysteriously thrown back into the world does Lee's film start to improve, and even then the improvements seem like a lackluster reward for one's patience. Joe, understandably, struggles to put together the scraps of his former life (20 years is a long time to be kept in confinement). Old friends barely recognize him, but one (Michael Imperioli, whose character only exists within his bar and apartment) finally takes pity on him. Joe also befriends a young nurse named Marie (Elizabeth Olsen), who becomes determined to help him because the plot requires it. A version of Olsen's character exists in the original, but she was introduced in a way that felt in line with the narrative. Olsen, sadly, is brought in through a clunky intro that revolves around her position as a nurse. Even in the details that Oldboy keeps the same, it still fumbles with the moment-to-moment execution.

If it seems like Lee's film has nothing to offer, that's not quite the case. One of Park's film's best known scenes is its brutal hallway fight, in which the protagonist fights off dozens of henchman in a single crowded, brutal shot. Lee changes the scene's setup to the point where it almost feels like a video game, but it works. With this breathless, stylized crescendo of assault and battery, the director starts attacking the material with conviction. Everything afterwards is far from perfect, but there is, thankfully, a consistent increase in overall quality from here on out. 

Where Lee and company really make an impression is in the last half hour. In a pair of smartly-executed flashbacks, Lee elegantly overlays images of the past on the present. Even more striking is the director's handling of the story's shocking and disturbing climactic twist, doled out largely in a single, knockout camera movement. Everything - the directing, the writing, the imagery - finally coalesce into the movie that this remake should have been. 

But even for the uninitiated, it may not be enough. There will be, not surprisingly, those who find themselves too repulsed to enjoy to twisted nature of the conclusion. Yet even those who find it riveting will still have to contend with the mixed bag that precedes the final act. It's hard to find anything consistent or noteworthy for so much of Oldboy, that it threatens to completely sever one's engagement with the story and the characters. 

Even District 9 star Sharlto Copley, as Joe's shadowy tormenter, isn't enough to hold it all together. As much as Copley digs into his outrageously stylized character, he feels like he belongs in a 1950s Bond movie. Despite his muscular build, Copley's sneering Adrian is the sort of sinisterly effeminate type that Hollywood used to love parading in front of audiences with a wink and a nod.

So as much as Oldboy deserves credit for ending with its best foot forward, it's a hard movie to endorse with much enthusiasm. When Lee's sensibilities actually click with the material, there are tantalizing hints at the great, American-ized remake that could have been. Unfortunately, those moments make up too little of this middling, yet competent, retread of a film that's already something of a cult classic. As is often the case, you're better off simply watching the original, especially since Netflix finally uploaded the original South Korean version with English subtitles. 

Grade: C+

Review: "Martha Marcy May Marlene"

Ever since No Country for Old Men, the art house can't get enough of ambiguous endings. It's as if the Coen brothers' adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel opened indie cinema to the possibility that small, challenging films could take things a step further, and have endings that lacked concrete resolution. The latest indie film to try its hand at this trope is T. Sean Durkin's Martha Marcy May Marlene. Does it implement the device successfully? Well...let's get to that later.

For all intents and purposes, Martha is a psychological thriller about Martha (Elizabeth Olsen, sister of Mary-Kate and Ashley), a young woman in her 20s who tries to reconnect with her remaining family after escaping from an abusive cult. Set in the Catskills, it's tempting to label the film This Year's Winter's Bone, although I'd rather not insult Durkin's film with the comparison. At the very least, Durkin and co. can boast that they've made an indie thriller with actual tension, even as it jumps among the present, the past, dreams, and reality.

Whatever flaws there may be in Durkin's film are at least in some way compensated for by the film's biggest asset: young Ms. Olsen. From the opening scenes, Olsen's big eyes let us know that even though we don't know where she is, she wants to get the hell out of there. Durkin's film doesn't provide a lot of answers (how did she get involved in the cult? how did she find them?) but Olsen's performance is a strong enough glue to hold the movie's non-linear structure together. As a writer, Durkin isn't necessarily a master wordsmith, and his attempts to show Martha's struggle to function in society sometimes come off just as awkward to us as they do to other characters in the film. Thankfully, with Olsen (along with Sarah Paulson as her older sister Lucy), these bumps in the writing are generally smoothed out.

As a character study, the film sometimes tends towards the shallow, albeit compellingly so. There seems to be plenty of fertile ground to explore why Martha would have been drawn to Patrick's (John Hawkes) cult, yet it's never really touched on. There are some vague references sprinkled over the dialogue that give hints about Martha and Lucy's past, as well as the early death of their mother. Still, Durkin doesn't explore these avenues as fully as he could (and probably should) have. Thankfully, the film is at least given some balance by the good work from the cast, and Durkin's ability to create an unsettling sense of paranoia. It's not quite on the same level as Take Shelter when all is said and done, but certain scenes have a tension that's almost palpable. Never going back further in time than Martha's first days in the cult may limit the depth of Durkin's character study, but at the very least it provides a compelling, free-form narrative structure. Durkin also never gives easy answers through dialogue, which helps the film maintain the level of mystery that the writer/director is clearly aiming for.

And, despite the occasional, fleeting moments where the film doesn't fully engage, Martha moves along at a generally effective pace, although elements like Lucy's husband Ted (Hugh Dancy) don't entirely fit. Dancy is fine in his role, but with so much territory between Lucy and Martha to cover, you have to wonder why the script chooses to focus on this three-way relationship alone, without ever delving further into the sisters' past. Aspects like this get the film in some trouble by the time the credits are over, because aside from Martha, no one really feels like much of a rounded character. John Hawkes brings an eerie presence to Patrick, but because the film is so thoroughly oriented around Martha's perception/memory of these characters, it never feels like there's much more to them.

So, finally, we come to the ending. It's vague, to be certain, but does it work? To an extent, yes. It certainly fits in with the narrative's structure and flow, but at the same time, it leaves the film feeling a bit too much like a sensationalized slice-of-life story. And with an ending that fails to make any sort of point (to contrast with, say, No Country's), the ambiguity comes off as slightly forced, leaving the film aimless, rather than satisfyingly open-ended. All that the film ends up saying over the course of two hours is reduced to "readjusting after living in a cult is tough" (shocker!), with nothing else of greater depth or nuance thrown into the mix. That's not to say that the film is ruined by the ending; its strengths certainly outweigh its flaws. However, add these flaws up, and the result is a very good film that could and should have been a great one.

Grade: B/B+