Tuesday, December 24, 2013
Oh Godzilla!
This trailer actually makes this movie look like it will be worth watching. As anybody who has followed this blog for any length of time realizes by now I love science fiction and End-Of-Civilization flicks. Perhaps less well known to you is the fact I love monster flicks provided they aren't too dumb or otherwise frustrating. Notice that this theme of the end of all things or at least a grave threat to the continuance of civilization comes up once again in a major American movie? What drives this deep-seating interest and anxiety? Food for thought to be certain! Anywho, play this teazer full-screen and crank up the speakers.
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The end of days is a grotesque theme that embodies the serious fears and anxieties of a society. Depending on what the mechanism is that ends civilization, one can ascertain what those fears are. In this case, you have a monster and ironically, it's not a new one.
ReplyDeleteBack in the 50's when Godzilla first appeared on the silver screen (co-starring with Raymond Burke, no less) the fears of society were rooted in the culture shock that the novelty of the bomb provided. Of course, the original film is a Japanese production and the horrors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima were fresh within the minds of the populace. Godzilla was the tool used to personify the effects of radiation and the moral outcome of the unscrupulous use of the bomb. Raymond Burr was added to the cast in order to make the movie more palatable to the American audience.
This third offering of the original Godzilla theme (discounting all the Godzilla versus movies) shows how much a familiar, and often spoofed, artificially created creature could be redefined as a representative of modern problems. What could those problems be? Quick answer: the amorality of science.
Science has become the monster that Schopenhauer once warned that it could become. He warned us that the conditions for scientific knowledge have a negative moral impact, because they lead us to regard each other as individuals separate and alien to one another. Therefore, without the ability to envision another person as an extension of self, there is no morality and thus, no reason to consider whether science should or shouldn't.
We constantly alter the natural world with disastrous consequences: the loss of wetlands; the killing of species to the point of extinction; the manufacture of newer "better" products that destroy water tables, poison the soil, and incur slave labor; the depletion of natural resources; the manipulation of animal and plant genes; the altering of strains of bacteria and virii; and most of all the shitting in our communal nest by changing the climate, worldwide.
This is our foremost fear--that the natural world is going to bite back. Regardless of the world's financial instability or wars that could destroy the world begun by radical extremists, if our environment is not sound or protected, then there would be no possibility of recovery.
I'm looking forward to this movie, as I think Godzilla is actually on our side. I never did like to see such a fine specimen of reptilian excess go to waste.
PS I just found out that Brian Cranston co-stars. Wo0t!
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