Why Godzilla Destroys The New X-Men Movie

GODZILLA

"Let them fight!" thunders Ken Watanabe. Hollywood's favourite token stern-Japaneseman has started Gareth Edwards' Godzilla as playing-God scientist rank in his own hubris, grown into wise environmental sensei warning humanity on their own hubris, before, finally, sounding out loud and proud as the voice of the Kaiju fanboi. Tired of the patient preamble of Edwards' artfully-mounted take on the big-lizard mythos, Samurai Ken and his who-farted acting-face demands Gojira finally for-fucks-sake be let loose on his monster-movie rivals: a pair of mating Mothra-by-way-of-Starship-Troopers MOTU ready to spawn a biblical plague of hideous hatchlings on the already-half-destroyed Pacific Rim.

Edwards has already shaded which beast will be the face, and which will be the heel: When the teeming masses of screaming humans see the MOTU, they run and wail and tear their hair and vomit in disgust; but when Godzilla enters frame, us puny people can only stand, mouths agape, stilled in silent awe.

If you're going to make a giant monster movie, the least that you can do is make the giant monsters in question convincingly giant. And Edwards - with only the low-budget, high-minded alien-invasion-as-race-parable, Monsters, in his back pocket - does wonders in this regard. His Godzilla is a film that understands scale, manages to capture the sense of enormity that comes with mass carnage, social collapse, destruction. Tentpole cinema's worst uses of CGI - Ang Lee's Hulk, Marc Webb's The Amazing Spider-Man, Marc Forster's World War Z - are those that turn the world into a video-game; that see phenomena both natural and man-made as merely recombinant pixels, and landscapes as but background for foregrounded figures to frolic through. When Iron Man or Transformers knock over a building, no one gives a shit; it's a barely-remembered part of barely-memorable movies.

Well this is gonna take a while to clean up now isn't it?

But Edwards understands the symbolism of a building falling; the weight of the spectacle; and the sheer human collateral that comes with death on a mass level. His great visual approach to this is to shoot POV shots: from behind the dirtied goggles of a skydiving soldier or the hazy eyeholes of a gasmark; out the foggy window of a school bus or the cracked glass of an abandoned skyscraper. Through these frames-within-frames, you get only a piece of the visual puzzle; a glimpse at a mere part of the giant monsters, nothing skewing the scale of cities by setting dinosaurs amongst them. When Edwards picks through a crowd to home in on the face of a child, gazing up, it recalls Jurassic Park, but the light/sound/sensation spectacle of the whole is probably more reminiscent of Señor Spielbergo's work in his unfairly-maligned (and actually pretty great) War Of The Worlds. And when he uses flares to illuminate the vastness of his titular monster, or to have the paint the sky, streaming red from the legs of men who've just let out a plane, Edwards isn't just making memorable images, but painting with light.

In this, Godzilla - oh-so-fucking gladly - barely resembles the boiler-plate blockbusters of a 'Summer' season that spits out an endless array of identikit Marvel entities out to maximise branding. It's, instead, a thoughtful disaster-movie, building its functional plot around familiar disaster-movie lines: a young husband (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) - who just happens to be an army-employed expert in analogue nuclear ordinance - is caught in the fray of nuclear-terror-made-giant-lizard-manifest, separated from hot wife (Elisabeth Olsen, goodwill from Martha Marcy May Marlene resounding eternal) and young child, desperate to get back home.

The young-John-Lennon's serendipitous place in the drama has familial repercussions: his dad (Bryan Cranston's wig) has long been a kaiju truther; his mum (Juliette Binoche, second reel only) having tragically died in a nuclear reactor 'accident' in Japan that's rife with contemporary relevance. There's also Watanabe, solemnly intoning things like "Nature has an order! A power to restore balance!"; Sally Hawkins, bringing something to a sciencey-type-expert role that has little written into it; and David Srathairn, who gets an amazing hero's-reveal-by-way-of-inspirational-speech introduction then summarily goes away.

The dialogue is heavy on exposition and light on comedy, but Edwards displays a directorial drollery that's delightful. When the female MOTU awakens in Area 51, she sets about razing nearby Vegas, only the lobotomised pokie-players therein are too fixated on gambling to notice the 'Las Vegas: Under Attack' news bulletins playing on the casino's TV screens. And when she's on the move, randy and ready to be impregnated, there's a glorious scene where ATJ lays down, back on railroad tracks, as the MOTU strides over top, sack of radioactive eggs glowing overhead.

Whether played for humour, terror, or awe, the shots in which Godzilla has human and monster inhabiting the same frame are brilliantly done. Rather than the eternally-jittery, hysterically-edited house-style of blockbuster cinema, the film is remarkable for the fact that, in its carefully-composed frames, Edwards is allowed to be an actual filmmaker, rather than just the steward of a piece of intellectual property. The result is 2014's best piece of popcorn-cinema so far.

Mate, you've got a little something on your face...

X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST

If the great promise of science-fiction is to imagine the unimaginable, then X-Men: Days Of Future Past fails dismally. Granted the opportunity of creating a dystopian distant-future, Bryan Singer can only cobble together the most shopworn clichés.

"The future! A dark and desolate place..." Gandalf grandly intones, and viewers are plunged, past the ranks of barcoded slaves trudging in file, into something resembling my own personal comic-book-movie hell: a bunch of cut-out caricatures in silly costumes each superpowering about -there's a dude with ice, some silver guy, a fire bro, a Mandingo cliché with dreads, a woman whooshing about through portals, a sexy psychic healer who just walked outta Juno, and, worst of all, a 'warrior' savage in warpaint and shampoo-commercial tresses - in the eternal shadows, whilst an army of evil robots try and smite them unto oblivion. Remember how bad all the future-rave-cave stuff in the Matrix sequels was? It's like that by way of The Last Airbender, with Singer's digital "camera" hurtling through walls so many times that the fact that it's a godawful CGI pixel-swam is verily rubbed in your face.

Yet, where Days Of Future Past fails dismally at conjuring the unknowable, it fares far better at a more-earthly task: summoning 1973. From Richard Nixon's curls to Super 8's ratio to bellbottomed hems, the distant past is far more evocative than the distant future. After Captain Picard fills in viewers with some expository back-story, Hugh Jackman's box-office-staple Wolverine - who, with his douche-chills facial hair and cigar-chomping makes a superpower out of being a total tool - is sent half-a-century back in time, to theoretically 'align' Singer's early-'00s X-Men movies with Matthew Vaughn's  2011 origins-tale X-Men: First Class, a College Years vision of fledgling mutantry given unexpected gravity by the presence of James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender, acting their asses off whilst dealing with dialogue punched out by the tired simian fingers of that millionth chimp at the millionth Marvel typewriter.

Now you either let me sing that Eiffel 65 song or I WILL shoot you.

It also means we get more of high-kickin' heroine Jennifer Lawrence as some semi-nude blue shapeshifter named Mystique, a name so hilariously-bad it sounds like a budget celebrity fragrance line you can buy in K-Mart. Every time she morphs back-and-forth into various figures is, frankly, embarrassing; yet another eyesore of eyerolling CGI. Far from the mania of O. Russell, Lawrence is pretty awful, and if all her screentime was given over to Evan Peters' budding blur - a figure of manic hilarity who stars in an ultra-slow-motion, bullet-time set-piece that feels like a high-end Vodka commercial, yet comes off like a Buster Keaton set-piece - then Days Of Future Past would be exponentially more enjoyable. Instead we're left with much mediocre moral handwringing, and lots of Fassbender levitating whilst commanding bits of metal to whoosh around like some maestro conducting a fleet of invisible digital-effects-artists to do his bidding.

Given the opportunity to create the future, Singer fails badly; and given the opportunity to meld together two separate cinematic takes on the franchise, well, how he does depends on how you felt about ­X-Men and X2. The time-travel gambit could've let him lock in the storylines from the 'future' of the movies he's already made, but instead he detonates a retcon bomb: the action, here, wipes the slate so clean that the distant-future goes from dystopia to utopia in a blink, and old, dead heroes are let rise from the grave. It positions the franchise as free to jag off in any direction, and with any contracted actors, it pleases. Though only the nerds being fan-serviced will 'get' whatever Egyptian-clichés villainy the obligatory post-credits teaser is foreshadowing.