There’s a scene in Jurassic World Dominion I’ve been thinking about since it came out. Bryce Dallas Howard is alone […]
There’s a scene in Jurassic World Dominion I’ve been thinking about since it came out. Bryce Dallas Howard is alone in the jungle, easing herself into a pond while a Therizinosaurus lowers its head over her. I had to look up which Jurassic World it was. I had to look up the damn dinosaur. But I remember how slowly she goes under. I wanted her to get under faster, but was afraid that if she moved any faster, it would hear her.
I saw Godzilla Minus Zero last night. Within the first five minutes, all I could think was, “How is this movie this fucking good? It just started.” Takashi Yamazaki has made an awe-inspiring monolith of a movie. I haven’t felt that kind of awe in a theater in years. And the more I thought about why, the more I kept coming back to that shot of Claire in the water. What those filmmakers understood in that moment, Yamazaki understands for an entire movie. Sometimes the most exciting thing you can do is hold the fucking shot.
I think a lot of what’s gone wrong with American blockbusters comes down to the editing. Back when you had to physically cut film, trying another version of a sequence took time and money. Digital editing gave filmmakers the freedom to try things, tighten a scene, find a rhythm they might never have found otherwise. Somewhere along the way, a whole lot of people decided that rhythm needed to be faster. The later Bourne movies are where it becomes obnoxious to me. Two guys are fighting in a room, and it’s such a fucking gumbo of edits I can barely tell who threw the punch. Plenty of people like that stuff. I’d like to see the fight.
I grew up on The Real Ghostbusters, Garfield and Friends, and Masters of the Universe. Those shows could move, but they let things breathe. Old Disney movies could take a very simple idea and deliver it at exactly the pace a kid needed to feel it. Bambi calls for his mother. She doesn’t answer. He calls again. Somewhere in that silence, it sinks in. Disney trusted a kid to sit through that. Hell, they trusted a kid to sit through it sad.
Then I look at something like Regular Show or Teen Titans Go!. A joke lands, there’s a quick cut to a reaction, and here comes the next gag before you’ve finished laughing at the first one. I get the appeal of that in a cartoon. What drives me nuts is going to a theater and feeling like somebody edited a two-hour, $200 million movie for a fucking child with no attention span. Everything on the screen is fighting to keep me looking at it. Wild imagery, rapid cuts, another joke, another explosion. All it’s trying to do is keep you from looking at your phone with pizzazz.
That’s what I mean when I say we’ve gone from making movies to making content. I can walk out of some of these blockbusters to take a piss, come back five minutes later, and feel like I haven’t missed any of the plot. A fortune was spent on those five minutes. Try leaving the room while Claire is in that pond.
What I miss about American blockbusters is that they used to give me a sense of how big something was by showing me how small I’d feel standing next to it. Steven Spielberg could do that with a cup of water on a dashboard. Before you ever saw the T. rex in Jurassic Park, you understood what it weighed.
Disney’s the biggest offender for me, and Universal and Warner Bros. can be just as bad. I love Batman and Spider-Man. I love Star Wars. That’s why it pisses me off when a movie figures the sight of the Millennium Falcon will do all the work. I already know what it means when those gates to Jurassic Park swing open. Put them in a trailer, build a ride around them, sell me the T-shirt. I’ll probably be a sucker for all three. But what’s the thing some kid seeing the new movie for the first time is going to carry around thirty years from now? Somebody had to come up with that cup of water.
Maybe that exhaustion is part of why a movie like Obsession can break through. After all that noise, I’m happy to spend a few seconds looking at Nikki’s face, trying to figure out what she’s going to do. Let me put a little energy into watching a movie. I like the feeling that I could miss something.
Which brings me back to Godzilla Minus Zero. It feels like an old movie to me, and that has very little to do with it taking place in 1949. Kōichi survived the war. He finally has a family. He has to decide what he owes the people who need his help when answering that call could cost his daughter her father. What happens to her if he goes? What happens to her if everybody stays home? Yamazaki gives me time to have those thoughts. Then he can cut to King Ghidorah descending on a city, and I’m still thinking about that little girl. He can move swiftly from the people to the catastrophe because he took his time with the people in the first place.
There’s a reason that fear runs so deep in these movies. When the original Godzilla opened in Japan in 1954, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were less than a decade in the past. People sitting in those theaters knew what it meant to look up at the sky and fear for an entire city. In Minus Zero, I’m watching a family try to decide whether it’s safe to build a life again. There’s something painfully timely about that, and it stays with me even when I’m looking at one of the most spectacular things I’ve ever seen on a screen.
And holy shit, what a spectacle. Godzilla Minus Zero is the kind of movie IMAX was built for. Give me the Dolby sound. Hell, give me the D-Box seat and shake the shit out of me when Godzilla shows up. Even with Ghidorah in the picture and every excuse to let two giant monsters pound on each other for 45 minutes, Yamazaki knows when to let Godzilla leave. I get enough time to take in the scale of him, and then I’m back with the people who have to figure out what to do before he shows up again. I’d forgotten how much of the fun of seeing the T. rex in Jurassic Park was the time I spent wanting to see it again.
I love J.A. Bayona’sFallen Kingdom and am excited he might return to direct the next Jurassic World, but somebody at Universal ought to ask Yamazaki what he’d do with those dinosaurs. I’d buy that ticket in a heartbeat.
Walking out last night, all I could think was, What happened to movies like this in the States? We used to make them. Now I can sit through two hours of expensive shit flying across a screen and walk out feeling nothing. Yamazaki gave me time to worry about that family. When he cut back to Godzilla, I was still worried about them. That’s what all those cuts and jokes designed to keep me entertained have been cutting short. Godzilla Minus Zero gave me the whole fucking spectacle, and I felt something. I felt something. That used to be why I went to these movies.
