Review #781: 'Godzilla' (2014)

Flicking the memory of Roland Emmerich's disastrous 1998 Godzilla movie away with it's mighty finger, Gareth Edwards' 2014 re-imagining is an altogether mightier and maturer beast. The biggest question stemming from message boards and critic reviews alike, is whether the colossal lizard is seen, or even glimpsed, enough. Anyone who saw 2013's incredibly dull monster/machine pile-up Pacific Rim will surely be aware that more is not necessarily better, and CGI is soulless without a heart. So my answer to that question would be a yes, as although Edwards teases us perhaps one time too many, when the beast finally roars, it's spine-tingling.

The screenplay by Max Borenstein, based on a story by Dave Callaham, opts not to have the King of the Monsters the result of nuclear testing, but one of many ancient creatures laying low, feeding on the energy from the Earth's core. In 1999, scientists Ishiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) and Vivienne Graham (Sally Hawkins) discover the skeleton of a giant creature in a collapsed mine, and two pods. One pod has broken open and left a trail leading into the sea, and the other remains dormant. In Japan, unusual seismic activity causes a nuclear power plant to leak radioactive steam, killing the wife of plant supervisor Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston). Fifteen years later, Joe's son, bomb disposal expert Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), returns to Japan to find his father still obsessing over the unexplained events that led to his wife's death.

This sounds like a lot of plot for a movie primarily about giant, rampaging creatures. The director previously made Monsters (2010), a low-budget, very human drama about a world facing an alien invasion, only the focus was on the romantic relationship between it's two leads. Edwards clearly isn't interested in simply blowing shit up for our amusement, he wants us to care for the people dodging the flying cars and falling skyscrapers. It's an admirable approach, and is careful not to serve up stock chin-stroking villains or supporting characters you are waiting for to croak, but does make the mistake of offering one-dimensional archetypes as our protagonists. We have our square-jawed lead, our brilliant but possibly mad scientist, and even an expository ethnic character to make sure we're keeping up with the plot.

There's also the problem of Taylor-Johnson, who although is a perfectly likeable actor, does not have leading-man chops. This combined with his thinly-written character makes it incredibly difficult to get caught up in his long journey back to his loving wife (Elizabeth Olsen) and child (Carson Bolde). But while the film may often move at a snail's pace, it is never boring. Though the titular giant takes his time before popping his head up out of the water, there's two other bat-like creatures causing havoc, usually seen from the ground-up or on news reports, heightening the tension by creating a sense of realism. It's a very modern-day Gojira, developing it's own mythology yet appeasing fans of the beast's many incarnations, and no doubt frustrating those wanting to see an epic CGI smack-down. For a truly satisfying experience, just check out Ishiro Honda's 1954 original.


Directed by: Gareth Edwards
Starring: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen, Bryan Cranston, Ken Watanabe, Sally Hawkins, David Strathairn, Juliette Binoche
Country: USA/Japan

Rating: ***

Tom Gillespie

Review #729: 'Inception' (2010)

Inception wasn't the only time English writer-director Christopher Nolan has blown our minds with a big-budget summer blockbuster - two years before, he made The Dark Knight, which destroyed most people's pre-conceptions of what superhero movies should be made of, and showed you that movies designed to make a lot of money can work your brain as much as your heart-rate. Inception also blows the minds of it's characters, themselves barely able to keep up with the multi-level dream universe they create. It's a film that revels in it's own heavy exposition; finding visual thrills in discovering the possibilities of consciously walking through a dream, or showing you the beautiful art of dream-stealing.

It follows Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), an exiled criminal who makes his money from corporate espionage jobs bankrolled by rich CEO's. Only, Cobb applies his craft by entering people's dreams, extracting information left over by the dreamer's subconscious, usually within a locked safe or protected by projections of that subconscious. After a botched job, Cobb's target Saito (Ken Watanabe) offers him the chance to redeem himself and to go home, only the task is not to steal information, but to implant it, known as 'inception'. Saito wants Cobb to implant an idea into the head of Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), the heir to an energy conglomerate. Cobb alone has ever achieved inception, but it is a near impossible task, especially with the psychopathic projection of his dead wife (Marion Cotillard) stalking his subconscious.

It's a dangerous and bold thing for a mainstream director to have confidence in it's audiences intelligence. If there's a main problem with Inception, it is probably that things get a little too baffling at times, as the crew delve deeper and deeper into the levels of the dream, and new rules start to apply. There is a lot of information to process here, and the film spends nearly its duration trying to explain it to us. But Nolan is a fantastic writer, and most directors would lose the audience without such expert storytelling ability and great dialogue. Thankfully, Ariadne (Ellen Page), an architecture student recommended to Cobb to design the dream world, plays as a proxy for the audience, learning as we learn.

Ariadne is one of a bunch of experts lined up for the job - Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is Cobb's right-hand man and the brains behind the job, Eames (Tom Hardy) is a skilled in-dream impersonator, and Yusuf (Dileep Rao) is a chemist who provides a knockout drug so powerful that the dreamers cannot be shaken awake. There's also Tom Berenger, Michael Caine, Lukas Haas and Pete Postlethwaite in the mix, making this a huge ensemble. As expected, Nolan keeps tabs on them all, never allowing you to forget about anyone or about what the role they have to play. It's a miracle he even managed to line up such an impressive group of actors, let alone make sure no-one gets lost amongst the thick plot.

Although the climax gets a little too over-crowded in the final half an hour, and Nolan places us in the pretty dull setting of a snowy mountain, this is still innovative, stylish and exciting action cinema. It still abides by all the standard rules of the genre, but it dares to toy with them and to keep the action moving with intriguing sub-plots or simply delivering an exceptional set-piece (Arthur's no-gravity hallway fight comes to mind). It bends the mind as much as it bends the rules, and this is much about the strangeness of dreams and what it means to dream them. Nolan went on to deliver an ever better movie two years later with The Dark Knight Rises (2012), and I'm eagerly awaiting his upcoming Interstellar (2014). He alone has reawakened my faith in the 'big' movie, proving that films can deliver brains as well as bang for your buck.


Directed by: Christopher Nolan
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Ken Watanabe, Tom Hardy, Dileep Rao, Marion Cotillard, Cillian Murphy, Tom Berenger
Country: USA/UK

Rating: ****

Tom Gillespie

Review #422: 'Batman Begins' (2005)

Back in 1997, when the Batman franchise was given a thorough anal-raping and given cinema AIDS by director Joel Schumacher with the preposterous Batman & Robin, fans and audiences alike were left wondering if there was any hope left for one of the darkest and most complex 'superhero' characters in the comic-book world. Come 2005, up to this point, British director Christopher Nolan was still a relative maverick, having made indie breakthrough Following (1998), the mind-bending critical hit Memento (2000), and the solid re-make Insomnia (2002). Few realised that they were about to witness a re-defining of not only comic book adaptations, but blockbusters themselves.

We first meet Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) in a Bhutanese prison, where he is approached by the mysterious Ducard (Liam Neeson) who offers him a chance to learn to fight with the League of Shadows, a generations-old group that punishes criminality with an iron fist. As he trains, we learn about Wayne's childhood, where after falling into a well and developing a phobia of bats, witnesses his parents' murder. Returning to a Gotham believing him dead and in a state of utter tutmoil, he turns to faithful butler Alfred (Michael Caine) and Wayne Enterprises' weapons developer Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) to turn him into a vigilante crime-fighter and a symbol of a stance against crime. He finds his childhood friend Rachel (Katie Holmes), the assistant district attorney, caught up in a scheme ran by Dr. Jonathan Crane (Cillian Murphy) to get mob boss Falcone's (Tom Wilkinson) thugs off with insanity pleas.

Tim Burton's once-definitive Batman (1989) made the mistake of having the film's villain The Joker engulf the majority of the film, keeping Michael Keaton's Batman almost in the background. Nolan knows that this is Batman's story, and wisely keeps the focus on Bale's anger-fuelled, guilt-ridden, and honourable leading character. In the hands of Nolan, Batman's origins are given the complexity it deserves, shifting back and forward in time to reveal more pieces to his jigsaw. This is no wise-cracking, tights-wearing Batman; when we meet him, he is giving a bunch of prison thugs a thorough beating, snapped legs and all. With the hugely talented Bale in the role, his character is given the weight it deserves - this is Nolan's world, and it is violent, real, and usually pissing down with rain.

As the norm since this film's release, Nolan has managed to gather a hugely-talented ensemble cast (and mainly British). While there is no obligatory main villain that may be a problem in anybody's else's hands, Nolan has instead given us a criminal ring for Batman to fight, from Wilkinson's ruthless crime boss, to Murphy's genuinely unsettling Scarecrow, who likes to fire his hallucinogenic poison in his victims' faces before donning his 'mask' (leading some some fine trippy moments). There is also Ra's Al-Ghul (Ken Watanabe), who plans to destroy Gotham along with Neeson's Ducard by infecting Gotham's water supply. With Gary Oldman's cop Jim Gordon, and Holmes' Rachel Dawes also in the mix, it may seem dangerously over-supplied with characters, but Nolan knows fully well how to handle such a large cast, tying their stories together with fine precision.

Having seen The Dark Knight (2008) and eagerly anticipating The Dark Knight Rises (2012), this admittedly pales in comparison, being that The Dark Knight was a phenomenal leap forward in big-budget film-making and an iconic film that will no doubt be remembered as one of the best of its decade. Also, the action scenes here are quickly-edited and shaky to the point where it is hard to tell what is happening, but Nolan would step up in confidence with the film's sequel and the proceeding Inception (2010). But as superhero origin stories go, this is probably second only to Superman (1978), and a welcome kick up the arse for one of the most enticing comic-book heroes in existence.


Directed by: Christopher Nolan
Starring: Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Liam Neeson, Katie Holmes, Morgan Freeman, Gary Oldman, Cillian Murphy, Tom Wilkinson, Rutger Hauer, Ken Watanabe
Country: USA/UK

Rating: ****

Tom Gillespie