Holiday Movie Roundup: Godzilla Minus One, Rebel Moon Pt 1, Black Swan, Fifty Shades of Grey, Red Cliff (Spoilers)

In his busy holiday, I’ve made some time for movies. Here’s my thoughts on what I’ve seen.

Godzilla Minus One

There is really not much other way to say this: this is the best Godzilla movie ever made, and I don’t know that we even have a close second.

Why? Because they used the monster with actual pacing in a way that built suspense around his every appearance, and managed to make the film about the people and characters and plot without taking it away from the Big G in doing it.

The movie starts towards the end of World War II, with a guy who was slated to die as a kamikaze pilot — Koichi Shikihima by name — decides he’s not actually willing to die for a hopeless cause, and feigns problems with his plane in order to land on one of the remaining Japanese outpost islands. There, he’s left to witness a comparatively infant Godzilla come ashore and kill basically the entire airfield crew on the island, after he freezes from panic at a critical moment when he was told to use his plane’s gun on the beast. Godzilla was big enough it probably wouldn’t have killed him anyway, so the moment of fear likely saves Shikishima’s life. However, the survivor’s guilt and the cultural dishonor associated with refusing his dubious duty as a kamikaze pilot followed by his moment of self preserving cowardice afterwards leaves him deeply ashamed of himself when he returns to Tokyo after the war.

Japan itself is completely wrecked, and Shikishima learns that his parents didn’t survive the bombing raids. He finds himself taking in an attractive young woman named Noriko, whose parents also died in the bombing, and who has adopted a baby girl from a mother who also died. They wind up making up an awkward family by convenience, where they effectively become to the parents to this orphaned child that doesn’t belong to either of them biological, but comes to regard the two of them as her mommy and daddy. As they start to reassemble themselves, Shikishima takes a job clearing remaining sea mines from the war because it’s the best work available, and Noriko worries that he’s got a death wish due to his survivor’s guilt and won’t come back.

They encounter Godzilla at sea. The US’ nuclear weapons tests at Bikini have mutated the monster, as we all knew it would, and it’s much bigger and meaner now. This escalates to a place where Shikishima gets ashore to find Noriko, who is apparently killed saving him when Godzilla reveals that his atomic breath in this movie lights up like an actual low yield nuclear device.

The background undertones of the movie are very anti-nuclear and anti-war, making very clear that no faith in the wartime and postwar Japanese governments can be meaningfully justified. The latter is a necessary device to permit the movie to even be marketable overseas, of course, but it’s sincere nonetheless.

Various people come up with plans to try to kill people. One of Shikishima’s crew mates from the minesweeper expedition turns out to be a bit of a scientist, and he comes up with a plan to use freon coolants and fast-inflating life rafts to sink Godzilla and then raise him up from enough ocean depths that the rapidly changing pressures would kill him. Shikishima has his own plan: he digs up the last surviving mechanic from the island he finished the war on to rig up an experimental military plane to help the effort, but he also secretly asks that it be built as a kamikaze plane as well. With nothing he feels he has left to live for — he admits to falling in love with Noriko but could never bring himself to marry her because his own personal war wasn’t still over, and he reasons that their orphan child will be better off with a neighbor than with him by himself — he plans to hit Godzilla in the mouth after observing that the mines seemed to hurt him more from that area than naval weapons did.

It comes down to the end before we find that, when he flies the plane into the beast’s mouth to kill it (for now), his compatriot has given him an ejection seat and insists that rather than going to die, he should strive to live. Shikishima takes this as forgiveness, and does so. Then, when he comes back, having sent his neighbor a note to take care of his adoptive daughter, the neighbor is weeping as she bops him with a notification that Noriko survived the earlier Godzilla-induced atomic blast. Noriko, knowing his torment by now, asks him if his war is finally over, and he tearfully tells her that it is. It’s implied that they’ll finally get married and be happy.

…except that Godzilla isn’t really dead.

The end.

This was easily the most human story of any Godzilla movie I’ve ever seen. Before, they’d have some human interaction, but the people were usually just vocal spectators, except for truly weird movies like Godzilla vs Megalon, where they kept toys that came to life to help in the kaiju fights. This was the first one where the plot of the humans came first and the monsters actually came second, yet without shoving Godzilla entirely to the background.

Rating: 4 out of 5 (Excellent, and will likely stay rewatchable)

Rebel Moon Part One

This could be accused of being a Star Wars knockoff, although it actually draws from other things as well. There is an obvious rebels versus the Empire Motherworld backdrop to the plot, mixed with a bit of Seven Samurai sort of ensemble cast (albeit with an obvious Han Solo like rogue pilot who apparently wants to be a good guy), mixed in turn with a clear Thanos-Gamora relationship between Kora and the usurping Regent of the Motherworld. It’s directed by Zack Snyder, so there will be plenty of melodramatic slowdown involved.

The main twists are that the Han Solo figure really is a rogue and sells them out, and the implication that reads rather strongly like, “who has a greater right to kill Thanos than Gamora?”

It’s part one of two. It was entertaining enough. Not as good as the better Star Wars movies, but better than the weaker ones.

Rating: 3.25 out of 5 (Good, but not necessarily a classic)

Black Swan

Finally got around to watching this. No real point in recap, other than to say it was rather disturbing in its own ways, but I’m not sure how rewatchable this one is, either.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 (Pretty good)

Fifty Shades of Grey

I decided to watch this one out of morbid curiosity. I’m not really into BDSM, but even if I was, I’m not sure I would’ve been all that impressed with this. There was almost no real plot other than Christian Grey wanting to tie up and bone Anastasia Steele, and her being vaguely tempted to let him. There’s basically nothing else to the entire movie.

Grey comes off as entitled and creepy. Steele comes off as naive yet apparently is supposed to be smart, too, but has plenty of convenient knowledge about what everything he brings up means even though she’s a virgin going into the movie.

The BDSM scenes are fairly soft core, so if getting your kink on is the point you’re watching this movie for, you may as well just go to PornHub. And there frankly isn’t enough to the non sexual parts to be worth watching it for either. I almost stopped about halfway through and had to kind of convince myself to finish it. It didn’t really get better.

Rating: 1.5 out of 5 (It’s a Hollywood quality production, but a pretty bad and trashy one. Unless you’re really hankering for a guilty pleasure, I’d avoid, and even if you are, there’s better ways to do it.)

Red Cliff

A historical drama about the real life Battle of Red Cliffs from just prior to the Three Kingdoms era of Chinese history. There’s quite a few quite high end actors, including Tony Leung and Lin Chi-ling, who’s simply one of the more gorgeous Asian actresses I’ve ever seen and gets billed as a historical beauty who distracts the malevolent Cao Cao long enough for his enemies to capitalize.

The actual historical battle led to the continuation of a disunified China at the end of the Han Dynasty and is considered one of the more famous battles of ancient Chinese history. The film is mostly about the shenanigans and politics of Cao Cao and his enemies maneuvering to deal with one another, and the battle scenes are a combination of clever renditions of ancient warfare mixed with a bit of unrealistic but aesthetically pleasing hero fights. It was plenty entertaining.

Rating: 3.25 out of 5 (Fairly good)

Thanks for reading.

Mid December Roundup: Wonka, Dune Pt 1, 2067, Marriage Story, The Good Place

Since Ahsoka concluded, I’ve been in odds and ends in my streaming habits, but I haven’t been totally inactive. This is what I’ve been watching:

Wonka

I watched this as part of a team building exercise at work. Timothée Chalamet stars in the title role of the movie, as the highly whimsical chocolate maker in an origin story, set in a European setting of some sort. The background of things seems vaguely Dickensian in its general theme, postulating frequently that “the greedy beat the needy,” with a fantasy mishmash of anachronistic 1930s-like squalor ruled over by wealthy people, particularly three crooked chocolatiers and the policemen firmly bribed and in their sweet pockets. Wonka finds himself in virtual indentured servitude in a washhouse through sketchy fine print in what’s initially presented as a generous lodging offer while he’s poor that turns swiftly into a debtor’s prison. His main avenue to freedom is to sneak out and sell his chocolate, while the barons who collude to control the market seek to keep him down.

The music is fine. The whimsy of the thing struck me as, pardon the expression, a bit saccharine, and the whole production is intended to be more than a bit silly and light, and it accomplishes what it set out to do without major pitfalls. The title character is not nearly as dark as many of his earlier incarnations, and the show is definitely intended for a somewhat younger audience. Keegan-Michael Key as the crooked police chief is one of the more humorous parts of the show, although seeing him made up as a white guy was a bit surreal.

All this said? I don’t know if I’d want to see this again. It was okay for what it was, it did what it set out to do, but I’m likely to forget it in a year. It’s worth seeing once… and exactly once.

Rating: 2.75 out of 5.

Dune Part One

I have now gotten in a third watch of the first Dune movie. We know the new one is green lit to release early next year, so I felt it worth trying again. I’ve come to a simple conclusion: this is the best science fiction movie since Revenge of the Sith. And I’m definitely including Rogue One among the list of its inferiors. (Side note: I have come to the conclusion that even the famous Rogue One hallway scene does not actually hold up very well, for the fact that Vader gets close enough to the rebel holding the Death Star plans in his hand to literally stab him and never thinks to use the Force to pull them away, even though he’s just done so to disarm all the other rebels in the hallway. Still a highly entertaining movie and obviously the best Disney Star Wars movie, but it has… issues.)

This movie is, for lack of a better term, art. Most other sci fi movies are done for popcorn or maybe to make a vague point or cash grabs (the many failed attempts to revive Alien and Terminator) or just general “hey, we’re tough and gritty” (the Riddick movies come to mind here). Various streaming services have done their own sci fi movies and come out pretty much forgettable. (One of the others will come later in this roundup.) I was perhaps a bit reluctant to embrace Dune the first time or two without being sure if the second movie would ever get out, but now I’m there.

Rating: 4.25 out of 5.

The Good Place

This is probably my favorite overall sitcom of the 21st century. While The Big Bang Theory and Frasier deserve honorable mentions, The Good Place stands out for its humor, depth of characters, and far greater depth in the subject matter it tackles without forgetting that it’s supposed to be funny than any other sitcom, ever. While following a motley crew of four souls through the afterlife, it weaves a tale that draws from Kant, utilitarianism, Christian theology of heaven and hell, and at the end in bittersweet fashion, the Buddhist concept of Nirvana bringing peace at the end.

The first season ends in the best plot twist in the history of sitcoms. I will say no more so as not to spoil it. But I will brook no arguments on this being at the top of the leaderboard for shockers in sitcoms.

The second season, while the humor is strong, is a bit of a mishmash in terms of the plot and where it’s going.

The third season ends with an excellent reflection of the state of morality in a very complex world.

The fourth confronts us with a very sobering thought on whether unmitigated paradise is something we would ever truly want, and whether even perfectly good times wouldn’t get dull when they’re never ending and there’s no balance to them — culminating in an unforgettable scene where all of the residents of the actual Good Place (the show’s allegory of heaven) are reduced to happy-drunk zombies whose will to go on has gone out, but are still consigned to eternity. It’s a sobering reflection on the concept of paradise.

All of it makes for literally the only sitcom I have ever felt worth watching again from beginning to end.

That said, it ended at the perfect time. If it had gone longer than it did, it would’ve been nearly impossible to keep this quality level going, so they ended it exactly when they should, and the ending is a bittersweet bit perfect goodbye to the characters.

2067

Atime travel movie that attempts to be very high in its concept and just doesn’t really pull it off. The plot is very new-age sci-fi: the Earth has basically exhausted natural resources to a point that the last useful plants on Earth have, for the time being, apparently gone extinct, which means that humanity is on the clock before artificial life support fails and we go extinct as well. A cockamamie plan is created to send someone forward in time to a period when Earth has been revitalized, in hopes of finding a cure for the blights that are plaguing the present time.

It comes off very contrived, tries too hard to be mysterious without really pulling it off, and the end surprises, while not being 100% predictable, are still 90% predictable. Could’ve been a Doctor Who episode half as long and would’ve been better at being weird with the Doctor’s offbeat charm, because it takes itself a little bit too seriously.

Forgettable actors. Awkward handling of time that isn’t nearly as clever as it tries to be. Also tries to be gritty and comes off a bit pretentious.

Rating: 2 out of 5.

Marriage Story

As a guy who’s been divorced a couple of times now, this was a hard movie to watch.

The couple that seems perfect together suddenly discovers that they’re not, and that — as perfect couples that seemingly never fight often are — it was coming at the cost of one of them burying their needs for the benefit of the other, and it comes apart when that person is no longer able to do so.

They can still remember all the wonderful things they loved about each other, but they can’t go on. He’s New York, she’s Los Angeles. He’s Broadway, she’s Hollywood. There was a strong overlap, but they were still from different worlds and could only be in one. And once the one who came from the other got homesick, it was inevitable that it would fail when the one whose needs were being met didn’t want to budge from what had seemed like a perfect life.

Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson are really good in this. I don’t know that I want to watch it again, but it’s also hard to hold that against them.

Rating: 3 out of 5.

Thanks for reading. Happy holidays of whatever sort you celebrate.