Beware fandom. All you have to do is peep the uproar that has
surrounded Rombie’s remake of Halloween from the get-go to see
that you’ve got to be careful where you tread. From nearly all
accounts (except my own – I haven’t seen it yet) Halloween 2007
sucks donkey dingus, but it hardly matters, because to the
legions of righteous fans of the original, it was wrong from the
start.
Fans can kill a blockbuster, for sure. A gross in the low
hundred million range doesn’t mean much when you spent that much
manufacturing and marketing (excepting the fact that very few
studio movies actually lose money for the studio – rest assured
everyone involved still gets paid.) So when you combine huge
dollars with a concept that your core audience is going to
reflexively hate, what do you get?
I donno, business as usual in Hollywood I guess. It’s kind of
like how I take longer and longer to get to the point when I
write. Don’t fight it, feel it! Anyway, sometimes fandom gets it
wrong, and the critics for the most part get it wrong, and the
only people who get it right are the studios and I. For the sake
of symmetry we’ll need to go back many years (about ten years
total) as I defend the virtue of both Godzilla and Hulk.
It ain’t easy being green.
Hulk was not a sure misfire. Hulk has
a number of lives, including the comic book (varying levels of
greatness) and the TV series (which attracted an entirely different
legion of fans). Hulk was a potential big-screen bonanza that set
many mouths a-drool. How were they going to pull it off? Would it be
as good as X-men? Better? Then two bombs were dropped. Ang Lee to
direct. Sure Lee turned Chop-Socky into Chateau Briand for the
masses with Crouching Tiger, but – wha?
Then … Eric Bana takes the lead. Most people still wonder who he is.
In truth, director Lee’s focus on the emotional and intellectual
underpinnings of the story fits the pulp uncomfortably, and maybe an
hour is a bit too long to set the story up, (about 45 minutes too
long) but once that green ball gets rolling, look out! Of course the
effects are astounding. Bana does a fine job playing the hangdog
scientist out of control, Nolte is terrifying as the brain-damaged
villain, there could be no better Thunderbolt Ross than Sam Elliot,
and I personally would watch Jennifer Connelly sort laundry.
But the main reason Hulk doesn’t deserve the slagging it gets is
because it captures perfectly the hulkness that any kid who ever
read the comic has felt, and the joy of unbridled rage and power
that those kids wanted to feel. For any time you’ve ever felt
powerless against a bully, bad driver, horrible parent, or whatever
makes you scream against injustice, Ang Lee has given you celluloid
release.
If you need to point to one scene, it’s when Hulk fights the tanks
in the desert, becoming a huge, snarling blur of fury. Jumping,
pounding, tearing the gun turrets off and spinning, flinging them
miles away. Crushing, yelling, reeling and pummeling tons of steel
again and again.
Hulk will smash!
Nothing better.
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Godzilla’s not bad either.
Yes, it is hampered by a pedigree of much lower stature
than that of Hulk. It’s a frickin’ ‘roller-coaster’
starring Matthew Broderick and Jean Reno, for crying out
loud. It’s also an unnecessary ‘re-imagining’ of another
untouchable classic, but let’s leave that all aside and
call Godzilla what it really is, a highly entertaining
monster movie with awesome effects and all the needed
grace notes, while remaining true to the message if not
spirit of the original.
After an ominous titles
sequence that gives us all the back-story we’ll need,
we’re treated to that most revered of all monster movie
tropes, the slow build-up to what we really want – to
see the monster! And when we get there, what a sight big
G is to behold, an ugly 20-story tall iguanodon rendered
in then state-of-the-art CGI. Godzilla commences to
trash NYC in ways that now make us wince for other
reasons, but then dropped many jaws by combining
hyperrealism with the surreal miniature work that makes
the Toho series so charming. |
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The acting talents of no less than
two Simpsons alumni mix in with a delightfully rainy atmosphere that
almost washes clean some of the more stupid elements (Reno and the
Siskel/Ebert homage among others) while pulling us towards yet
another stunning, heart-rending monster death that gives full credit
to the giant monster genre.
Giant monster lovers unite and shed a tear for the unduly hated and
terminated Godzilla! Lovers of Toho Godzilla can have it all; a
great American monster movie that gets it almost all right and never
actually touches the original. Haters should note that the ‘real’
Japanese classic hadn’t even been seen in true form in the US when
Godzilla ’98 came out, and also remember that the Toho series
quickly degenerated into a goofy cartoon series that was almost
universally reviled as it marched on toward Baby Godzilla et al.
Even though geeky kids just like me the world over loved it, and
still do.
Fandom kids who need to be more like me loved the ever more silly
Toho movies, and now need to remove their hipster attitudes and love
all forms of Godzilla, and love all movies about big green mean
things, because sometimes we can get it wrong.
Er … Hulk will smash!
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