Walking out of the latest version of GODZILLA, my son surprised me by saying it was one of his three favorite movies ever.
Now, when I was a kid, giant monster movies were my favorite thing in the whole wide world. I stayed in Saturday afternoons to watch all the giant monster movies, even the boring ones like Vs. The Sea Monster, the kiddie ones like Gamera Vs [Everything] and the shitty ones like Yonggary. I even sat through the musical number of Reptilicus. I didn’t know anyone else who liked them and I knew nothing about words like kaiju or whatever. I watched the movies. I watched the TV shows. I daydreamed about stomping through a city, smashing everything in sight.
But my kid has always had zero interest in this stuff. Does he care about a giant egg washing up on a beach, or miniature women who sing to colossal moths, or a burning flying saucer that turns out to be a spinning turtle? Hell no.
But he does love post-apocalyptic landscapes, and this was a movie for him.
Lots of people like looking at Ruination Pron. Me, too. The latest Godzilla movie is for us.
A lot has been made that the big G doesn’t show up until 60 minutes into the film (although you see glimpses in the first few minutes). What you do see is a lot of shit after it’s destroyed. Wrecked skyscrapers. Smashed cars. Collapsed towers. You even get glimpses of a Japanese town left to decay for 15 years. It’s like something out of a post-apocalyptic video game.
My kid… well, he’s kinda sensitive. Seeing a car with a smashed fender makes him sad. Throwing out socks, even if they have holes in them, is like a betrayal. So, when there’s a smashed cityscape on the screen, it really affects him.
That’s why this is the movie for him. Yeah, there are some monster fights, most of which are pushed to the end of the film. Yeah, there are people running around, stumbling into the monsters’ paths through sheer coincidence. Yeah, there are female characters to be: a) a source of manpain b) helper to the exposition character or c) human symbol of everything our fighting boys are risking their lives for. Yeah, the cinematography is gorgeous.
But the real appeal of the film is the ruination. Bring your favorite urban explorer.