THE LITTLE BIG ONE

San Andreas, a by-the-books disaster movie in which Dwayne Johnson fights an earthquake, is exactly the movie you suppose it to be, except in one, absolutely crucial regard: it's weirdly allergic to fun. By which I guess I mean that "by-the-books disaster movie" suggests one particular register of sobriety and anguished emotions, where as "Dwayne Johnson popcorn movie" suggests something infinitely goofier and more charming and dippy, and at all junctures, San Andreas elects to be the former thing and not so much the latter. I wasn't enough of a fool as to actually expect a movie where The Rock punches the San Andreas fault back together, but I was hoping for something that was ever silly in any way. Spectacularly bad science aside, San Andreas isn't that.

Let me re-emphasise, that this is a very by-the-books disaster movie. In a genre that's particularly beholden to formula and common elements, San Andreas still stands out for the purity of its commitment to that formula. We have the couple about to get a divorce thrown together by the terrible events unfolding around them, a daughter readying to go to college when her life is thrown into disarray, a puffy scientist trapped with a designated audience surrogate, a slimy capitalist whose fate is ironically tied to his profession. The opening scene is a mostly stand-alone setpiece designed to show off the hero's particular skill set; the final scene involves an enormous American flag slowly whipping in the wind. It's almost a holy thing, I really mean that. Not since, good Lord, maybe Volcano back in 1997 have I seen a disaster movie so painstakingly eager to be the most prototypical disaster movie it could possibly be. Or at the very least, The Day After Tomorrow in 2004.

This is not at all meant to be a slight against San Andreas, which knows exactly what it is, what it's doing, and why. Disaster movies, like romantic comedies and slasher films, derive much of their pleasure from being predictable, and finding most of their individuality in their execution. And this is the slight against San Andreas, which is many things that aren't terribly complimentary - unbelievable in the extreme for one, unusually indifferent to deaths of human beings beyond its core group of named characters for another - but is worst of all for being preposterously not-fun. Since the all but forgotten days of The Mummy Returns, Johnson's screen persona has fully coalesced into a big meaty goofball, too campy to be a serious action star and too imposing to be a standard-issue comic character actor; isolated counter-examples in the intervening decade and a half like 2013's Snitch only demonstrate his considerable onscreen charisma and movie-star qualities thrives in an atmosphere of jokey flippancy. The screenplay by Carlton Cuse, from a story credited to Andre Fabrizio & Jeremy Passmore (though "writing" the "story" in a film like this is mostly a matter of plucking down plot elements like overripe apples), is absolutely not jokey, nor flippant, even when it seems like that would be the obvious thing to do with it: Johnson gets a grand total of one dumb one-liner.

Instead, we get standard-issue family drama presented with an extraordinary lack of irony: Ray Gaines (Johnson) is a helicopter rescue pilot with the Los Angeles Fire Department, and a wife named Emma (Carla Gugino) who is leaving him, and about to move in with a handsome architect, Daniel Riddick (Ioan Gruffudd). Ray does his best not to be a jerk about this, even when it falls to Daniel and not himself to bring his daughter Blake (Alexandra Daddario) up to Seattle. For Ray, in the time-tested way of action heroes, spends more time attending to work emergencies than his loved ones. Meanwhile, a pair of Caltech professors, Dr. Lawrence Hayes (Paul Giamatti) and Dr. Kim Park (Will Yun Lee), have a perfect opportunity to test out their earthquake-predicting model during a freak event in Nevada. Kim dies rescuing a child from the collapsing Hoover Dam, but in the process, he and Lawrence prove their model works, and Lawrence is able to use the data to discover that the San Andreas fault is about to blow. Like, now. Too soon for there to be any chance of evacuating the tens of millions of people who will be immediately affected by the gigantic quake, but enough time that he can get on the air with CNN reporter Serena Johnson (Archie Panjabi) to explain to the audience what earthquakes are.

The movie doesn't genuinely care about Lawrence, but Giamatti is the second-biggest name in the cast, so it keeps cutting back to him without ever finding a remotely organic or elegant way of tying its two subplots together (the solitary link is that, prior to heading to Caltech, Serena went on a ride-along with Ray's crew in the opening scene, as he fearlessly rescued a young woman from a fissure that foreshadows the quakes to come). This leaves San Andreas moving along only in the lumpiest sort of way, on top of how clumsily it juggles the two plots it's actually committed to: Ray and Emma flying, driving, and otherwise scrambling northward through the devastation of southern California on the way to San Francisco, where Blake has teamed with a pair of English brothers, sexy Ben (Hugo Johnston-Burt) and tween Ollie (Art Parkinson), after Daniel reveals how totally craven and Evil Movie Capitalist he is. For as the most brazen of all its clichés, San Andreas goes all-in on "architecture is the path to enormous financial success" as its villain's backstory and personality. But anyway, as Lawrence tells everybody to beware the even bigger second quake on the TVs that no longer work, what with the California power grid being gone, the estranged couple reunites on the hard road north, while Blake proves to be her father's daughter and manages to use wits and survivalist know-how to keep herself and the brothers alive through fires and floods and collapsing buildings.

The least we can say about all of this is that the visual effects and especially the sound work are pretty good, though the film suffers from some particularly weightless CGI (almost the first thing that happens in the whole movie is an animated car flipping down a hill like a tin can, and a mere two weeks after the heaving metal of Mad Max: Fury Road, it's even more depressing to watch than it might have been otherwise). It suffers much worse from director Brad Peyton, whose entire list of features preceding this have been worse sequels to bad children's movies (his Journey 2: The Mysterious Island was one of those very same movies where Johnson got to be good and campy and fun), and who comes to this film totally without the skills required to make large-scale destruction looking visually spectacular and exhilarating. There are scattered scenes that work tremendously well: Emma scrambling through a disintegrating skyscraper to jump on Ray's copter in the midst of an explosion of dust could stand with any mid-level tentpole movie in recent memory, and there are some aerial shots that show off the enormity of the destruction with an appropriately epic popcorn movie sensibility. But they are much outweighed by sequences that feel limited in scope and ambition. It's never persuasive that anything bigger than what the heroes can see with their own eyes - nothing here like the last time San Francisco was devastated onscreen in 2014's Godzilla, and the terrible grandeur of the action seemed bigger than human understanding. San Andreas is cramped, without the compensating factor of being more intimate with its characters by virtue of backing away from a broad canvas. It's scared of ambition and too flimsily-written for anything else, and while it's sufficiently noisy and pretty to exist as a big ol' summer picture of no distinction, it's definitely not the kind of thing that anybody will remember a couple of years into the future.

5/10

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: CALIFORNIA IS FOR EARTHQUAKES

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: we all know that San Andreas brings back the noble and intensely cliché-happy formula of the all-American disaster picture. What is perhaps a bit surprising is just how far back in history this particular lineage can be traced.

The greatest of all city theme songs, "San Francisco" ("...open your golden gate / You let nobody wait outside your door") feels like something that should have simply come into being spontaneously, not turned out as the result of something so crude as songwriters writing it. But that's exactly what happened: before it became one of the official songs of one of the world's great cities, it was written by Bronislaw Kaper, Walter Jurmann, and Gus Kahn as the theme for 1936's San Francisco, one of MGM's biggest productions that year, headlined by its A-listers Clark Gable and Jeanette MacDonald. It's common for even non-musical Hollywood production of that era to sport a big song (and with MacDonald in one of the lead roles, San Francisco can't help but start to drift into the world of the musical), but rare indeed for that song to be used in such a structural way as we see here: over the course of the movie, "San Francisco" starts out off as a brash declaration from the rough-and-tumble underclass of the Barbary Coast, the most long-lived outpost of the city's birth in Old West lawlessness, it gradually shifts into an audible signifier of the characters' humble, honorable pasts as they attempt to disguise and redefine themselves, and it finally ends the film in the same way it's been used for eight decades since: as an anthem for the pride and resourcefulness of the people of a city that survived and rebuilt in the face of one of the most destructive natural disasters in North American history, the earthquake of April, 1906.

For that is exactly the subject San Francisco takes for itself. Not the earthquake itself, precisely, though the very first thing Anita Loos's screenplay does it to remind us via a title card that at 5:12 in the morning on 18 April, the city was devastated by a major quake, and the second thing it does is to portentously roll back the clock to the stroke of midnight on New Year's Day, 1906. Thus the first three-quarters of the movie (which comes in just shy of two hours) take on a grim cast, as the reasonably conventional romantic drama that makes up the bulk of the drama clicks by without ever quite letting us forget that we're only months - weeks - days - from the onset of horror. But the movie is only about the earthquake symptomatically; its deeper concern is with the rugged survival instinct of its characters, the kind of people who'd set up shop in what was, in 1906, just s 57-year-old city and still very aware of its rough, brutal roots. The film is enormously guilty of making Sweeping Proclamations about the kind of people who live in a given place, but it's still one of the best combined tributes to and criticisms of the character of a community. You needn't go any further into the future than 10 months later to find Fox's In Old Chicago, a movie that's almost a carbon copy of San Francisco in its plot structure and characterisations, to see what this looks like when it's not going right. This picture might be corny as all hell and its depiction San Francisco might be clichéd, essentialist, and reductive, but it has the goods.

As is already clear, I suspect, the film's basic shape is identical to disaster movies for decades to come: we get to know the characters, we get (hopefully) invested in their hopes and dreams, and we are as wrenched as they are by the slashing interruption of death and destruction across the smooth development of a conventional series of dramatic and melodramatic plot beats. And for as much as the movie hangs a sign reading "mind the earthquake" around the movie right at the start, it's genuinely startling and confusing when the world finally starts to move - having seen the film twice, I managed to be caught completely off-guard even the second time. Before that all happens, though, we get a loving recreation of the Barbary Coast of decades ago, in which "Blackie" Norton (Gable) is the owner of the Paradise, one of the Coast's most beloved and glamorously tacky clubs. The film kicks off when he hires Mary Blake (MacDonald), a classically trained singer from Colorado who has been in San Francisco for several fruitless weeks, trying to make her fortune in California like so many hopefuls before and after. Mary's exquisite voice is too rich and big for the Paradise, and she's aggressively courted for a job by Jack Burley (Jack Holt), a member of San Francisco high society and manager of the Tivoli opera house. Complicating things, while Blackie and Burley feud over Mary's career, they're both falling deeply in love with her, and her attraction to Blackie gets in the way of her own best judgment for her career and her dignity. Complicating things even more, Blackie has been tapped by the rest of the Barbary Coast business owners to run for the city's board of supervisors, a position he takes not to help secure their crooked interests, but to help reform and rebuild the coast. And he thus makes a major political enemy in the form of none other than Jack Burley. While all of this swirls around, Blackie's childhood best friend, Father Tim Mullin (Spencer Tracy) tries to act as his conscience, but at least tries to make sure that Blackie can't drag Mary down into the mud with him.

The film benefits from a director with as tight a control of characterisation as Loos, and from director W.S. Van Dyke, one of those studio workhorses who has been almost entirely lost to history, but who could always be counted on for a drum-tight treatment of whatever story or genre was handed to him (his film with the longest shelf-life is undoubtedly The Thin Man, a crackerjack sophisticated comedy that resembles San Francisco only in that it is fearlessly well-paced and has a great central pair of performances). Having been gifted with a handsome reconstruction of 1906 San Francisco thanks to all of MGM's considerable resources, the filmmakers smartly fail to linger on it for the sake of sheer period spectacle, one of the most common mistakes of that studio's most prestigious film in that decade. Instead, the focus in on character and performance, with the result that the central trio of Gable, MacDonald, and Tracy are in great form: even stalled in the "beaming, moralistic Catholic" mode that he dealt with somewhat often at this point of his career, Tracy is up to some of his best work of the decade, while MacDonald is as good here as any anything she ever made outside of her defining collaborations with Ernst Lubitsch.

But Gable is the stand-out, given a tole that plays to every single one of his strengths, minimises his weaknesses, and guided by direction that encourages him to own the nastiness of his character rather than use his huge charisma to paper over it. Temperamentally and functionally, Blackie is a pure stock character, and there's nothing Gable can to do to fully eradicate that fact, but he does deepen it considerably. The actor and character mix sharp business acumen, borderline thuggish emotional bullying of Mary and Father Tim, and a goofy, sweet little boy attitude to love and the possibility of making the world a better place. He is a deeply enthusiastic figure, above all things, which makes his passions all the more moving (the way he cheerily snaps off the phrase "art-tistic achievement" is as good a line reading as any in Gable's career), and his blindly self-serving cruelty all the more horrifying, since we can so easily understand why his victims can be carried along with his pettiness.

Gable's performance is the thematic spine of San Francisco: the combination of can-do will and unsophisticated roughness that the film posits as the defining characteristics of the city's people. He makes such a life force on screen, in fact, that the movie can't quite cope with it: Loos's script, perhaps owing to jitters about glamorising bad boy behavior in the early Production Code era, obsessively ventriloquises Christian morality that it doesn't fully believe in, harping on Blackie's sinfulness and the danger he poses to Mary's very soul. But it feels very much not of a piece with the rest of the film, and the harder it tries to veer towards religion (which it does most strenuously in the final scene), the more inauthentic it feels. Doing good and being good isn't the film's true purpose: moral and spiritual ambiguity are where it's far more compelling and where it makes its strongest impact.

Gable, then, is one of the two reasons that San Francisco is more than an enjoyably polished studio picture; the earthquake itself is the other. It's not, maybe, the best effects work that could have been scrounged up, even in '36: the shaking sets feel an awful lot like shaking sets. But the sequence is a triumph of sound design (for which the film won its only Oscar, out of six nominations, including Best Picture) and even more of editing, which was overseen by John Hoffman for this sequence only. It's openly indebted to the Soviet montage theories of the late silent period, cutting between images with a frenzy that's impressive in the 2010s, and incomparably brutal and disorienting by the standards of the '30s. The savage chaos of the earthquake, the suddenness with which violence can strike, are both impressively communicated by this sequence; it is one of the triumphs of spectacular filmmaking in its entire generation. Even more so, given that it manages to achieve something that has evaded disaster movies since as long as they've existed (and this was by no means the first, though the genre began to take its most complete form beginning in the '30s): it depicts its disaster in an engrossing, spectacular way, while also making sure that we're not just exulting in mass death. The earthquake in San Francisco is utterly horrifying, showing how quickly and painfully human life could be snuffed out, and spending a great deal of time in the smoking, ruined aftermath, with Gable's glib Blackie turned into a shocked, dazed shell of a man as he moves through the devastation. It's closer to a horror movie than an action film, while also being as humane as any disaster picture on record. The passage of years would make onscreen devastation look more and more impressive and realistic with every new fad for the frequently-resurgent genre, but they'd tend to double-down on bland characters stuck in tired formulas (San Francisco is formulaic, but not bland), and this is one of those rare cases in which one of the earliest examples of a style is also among the very best.

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1996: In which little things like story and character aren't nothing next to some really, really cool CGI

1996 - The year that effects extravaganzas went supernova; the year that Hollywood finally figured out how to sell a movie on literally nothing else but the promise of spectacular explosions and other shiny nonsense, depicted with a level of technological prowess that had never before been seen. At least Star Wars had characters and a story and sentiments that people gravitated towards; such trivial niceties were at this point no longer required even as a fig leaf. In our tour of the 100-year history of the Hollywood motion picture, we have finally arrived at the present.

There was only ever one decision facing me when I arrived at '96: of that summer's enorma-hits, do I go with Independence Day or Twister? Favoring the former was its greater cultural impact and its key role in the forming of the Last Great Movie Star, Will Smith; favoring the latter was its greater reliance on CGI rather than practical effects, presaging the future far more clearly. The tiebreaker was that, ever since I first saw it as a teenager squarely in its target demo, I have found ID4 to be inexcusably awful bullshit, whereas I have developed some small level of deeply misguided nostalgia towards Twister these last five or six years, owing in no small part to it being a relic from the good ol' days when summer tentpoles thought that it was perfectly okay to have a running time under two hours. Which was the other tiebreaker.

So first things first, I have been cured of my nostalgia. While Twister holds up rather nicely against the noisy, busy, idiotically-scripted movies of today for all sorts of reasons - it's shorter, it uses visual effects when it must, not when it can, it has recognisable adult characters with adult problems, the supporting cast includes not just young Philip Seymour Hoffman, but also young Jeremy Davies - that does not excuse it from being a noisy, busy, idiotically-scripted movie in its own right. Worse still is how painfully derivative it is, and in what a weird way. This drama about storm chasers on the cusp of divorce tearing ass across Oklahoma in hopes of launching their new experimental tornado research probe is, of all seeming impossibilities, a knock-off of Jurassic Park, a film whose structure it copies in fairly explicit ways. This might well be because the novelist behind Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton, is on hand for scripting and producing duties (in the former capacity, he was joined by his then-wife, Anne-Marie Martin; Joss Whedon and Steve Zaillian were among the known script doctors, but you can't tell), though given that Jurassic Park the movie does not, for the most part, resemble Jurassic Park the book in the ways that Twister is cribbing from, that can hardly be the reason.

Anyway, a tornado movie taking stealing ideas from a dinosaur movie, down to the sound design (the film's tornadoes roar and snarl just like the jungle cats that were one element of their creation, and it's actually pretty effective) and Mark Mancina's score, soaked in John Williams-esque cues that can be practically mapped one-by-one onto the JP score. This is honestly rather impressive. I don't know if I'd be able to do it on purpose if you held a gun to my head.

But Twister also has plenty of opportunity to also copy the whole grand history of natural disaster movies. You did notice that I mentioned a couple on the cusp of divorce? They're Drs. Jo Harding (Helen Hunt) and Bill Harding (Bill Paxton), formerly a pair of the best damn tornado scientists in the business, until the split in their marriage sent Bill off to the Respectable World, where he managed to snag a job as a television weatherman, due to start in the very near future, and find the love of a smart, attractive professional woman, Dr. Melissa Reeves (Jami Gertz). He's finally been obliged to track Jo down on the very eve of his wedding to Melissa, to get the divorce papers signed that she's been sitting on for ages; it's unfortunately also the eve of a major storm system the likes of which haven't been seen in generations, and Jo and her team of colorful eccentrics are too busy prepping their new probe, based on Bill's designs - DOROTHY, which I'd call irritating movie-cute nonsense, but it's based on the NOAA's actual probe called TOTO - for her to waste time dissolving a marriage that died years ago. Luckily for Bill, Melissa is remarkably understanding in addition to being smart, attractive, and professional, and she's just as interested in following the storm chasers on their merry quest as he is.

So we've got the traditional "danger and disaster help to heal a broken marriage" trope - spoiler alert, I guess, but I can't imagine the viewer who actually expects Melissa to last all the way through the movie (on top of all her other lovely characteristics, she has the gracefulness to quietly slink away rather than raise any kind of interpersonal tension; thus endeth Dr. Melissa Reeves, one of the most obnoxiously prim and pure and idealised and wholly impersonal Modern Women ever perpetrated by clueless male filmmakers) - anybody want to bet there's a "personal trauma leads to an Ahab-like fixation" story to go along with it? Heck, we get the nugget of that one even before the broken marriage, in a prologue set in 1969, where we see little Jo's father sucked out of a storm cellar by a massive hell-tornado, in what is surely one of the most unintentionally hilarious Dead Parent scenes in the entire history of cinema.

As it putters along, Twister's story evolves without any fussy nuance or surprise or imagination to get in the way of the reason we're actually here: watching box office titans Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton rekindle their romance. Or, y'know, the storm thing. And we at last arrive at the most important element in the Twister stew, the one that separates it from all its obvious forebears: director Jan de Bont, formerly a cinematographer of some really great action films and thrillers over the years - he worked several times with Paul Verhoeven, in the Netherlands and United States both, and did a marvelous job shooting Die Hard and The Hunt for Red October for John McTiernan - and whose sole directorial credit at that time was 1994's Speed. Which is, surely, the best of the five films he ended up making in a roughly curtailed career, but it still showcases all of his worst weaknesses as a filmmaker: a tendency to double-down on rampaging sound effects, to cut with jagged severity between shots that weren't really built to be crosscut that way, and to encourage his actors into bright, emotive, one-note performances, when he bothers to care about the humans in his movies at all. All of these tendencies are even more strongly present in Twister (just as they would continue on, becoming stronger still in e.g. The Haunting remake of 1999 - the worst, but also the de Bontiest of Jan de Bont's films), which helps to explain how one cast could contain two actors of such enormously divergent talent as Hoffman and Paxton both giving basically the same kind of performance.

The filmmaking of Twister was apparently just as chaotic and stormy as the content: de Bont was by most accounts an enormous dick to the cast and crew, leading to the entire camera team walking out (Jack N. Green, Clint Eastwood's guy at that time, stepped in as D.P., and the very Unforgiven/Bridges of Madison County feel of misty landscape painting is much the film's single most effective element), and this can absolutely be felt in the shrill acting, with only Hunt emerging as a terribly fleshed-out, authentic-seeming person (undoubtedly helped by a script that doesn't bother giving anyone else clear motivations), and the choppy staging. But this much has to be said: the director knew what he wanted, and where it absolutely counts, Twister is aces. Simply put, the whole thing is a pretext for hyper-dramatic storm sequences, cunningly spaced in the film so that they're always just far apart that we're starting to get itchy for the next one, and with a nice little gesture in the script that each one is a step bigger on the tornado Fujita Scale (which ranges from F0 to F5 - "the finger of God" says one character direly regarding the latter extreme, in a perfect moment of disaster movie corniness), so we always have the promise of stronger, noisier winds and inkier skies and higher stakes. And de Bont's bullying perfectionism, while it does absolutely nothing for the limp character scenes, absolutely results in some great weather action. The digitally-replaced dark grey skies are beautiful and terrifying, the CGI tornadoes hold up, for the most part, without a single hitch almost two decades on; but then, it is not a new observation that the carefully-chosen CGI of the '90s generally looks better than the "fuck it, lather the whole thing in digital gimcracks" of the '00s, or even all but the very, very best of the '10s. Not all the effects are great: that infamous flying cow looks pretty damn crappy nowadays, compounding what was already a terrible gag. But for the most part, the stuff Twister promised and delivered in '96 still delivers: enormous, roaring superstorms whose visual impact is awesome in the most exacting sense of that word.

To get to that awe, sure, you have to slog through some tired writing, staticky performances, and arrhythmic filmmaking, but what do you want: great spectacle or decent filmmaking? You may, perhaps, want both, and point to dozens of classic popcorn movies to make your case why you should have it, but we are in Contemporary Filmmaking now, and such concerns do not bother us.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1996
-Brothers Joel & Ethan Coen make their (relative) mainstream breakthrough with Fargo
-Arnold Schwarzenegger stars in Eraser, his one huge hit film that people always forget about
-Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet ignites a trend in modern-dress literary adaptations

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1996
-Mike Leigh's ensemble dramas of everyday Britons suffering reach their popular zenith in Secrets & Lies
-Olivier Assayas makes the cutting, inventive satire of the French film industry and international movie culture, Irma Vep
-Zhou Xiaowen's historical epic The Emperor's Shadow is the most expensive film made to that point in China

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1974: In which all the artistic revolutions in the world don't stop popular things from being popular

It is not uncommon, when people swan about cooing with praise for the New Hollywood Cinema and the exciting American cinema of the 1970s, to act as if the whole of the film industry was engaged in thrilling experiments that met with broad favor from audiences, who for once in history were interested in being challenged and enlightened by extraordinarily bold cinematic voices, till those poopypants George Lucas and Steven Spielberg ruined everything. This is untrue. This, indeed, fucking untrue: while it's the case that movies like The Godfather and even The Exorcist would surely never be such Zeitgeist-defining megahits in the 2010s (or the 2000s, or the 1990s...), and this is a sorry reflection on later generations of filmgoers, it's also the case that The Poseidon Adventure plausibly could be. And it was right up there on the top of the pile in 1972, right alongside The Godfather. The simple fact is that the movies we now heap money upon, as a culture (effects-driven action films with simple, cookie-cutter storytelling impulses and deliberately shallow one-trait characters), are also the movies that our parents and grandparents did. Only the effects have changed, while the traits enjoyed by the characters, largely, have not. When brainy, adult-themed dramas do well, it's always an exception, not a trend, and pretending that every Joe and Jane Moviegoer in the '70s was three-quarters Film Comment critic does nobody any good. It's not like the $307 million worth of Star Wars viewers in its initial release were being marched into theaters at gunpoint.

So back we go to The Poseidon Adventure, a movie that saved 20th Century Fox from extinction, and made veteran spectacle producer Irwin Allen all sorts of fun new ideas for how he could extend that film's salient characteristics and extraordinary success into film after film after film. It's certainly not that Allen invented the disaster film; Universal's Airport, in 1970, is what really kicked off that decade's iconic vogue for the genre, and there's never been a truly protracted stretch of time without a single major disaster picture of some extraction (for it is a genre that can cover many kinds of stories) in America since the 1930s.

But Allen machined the disaster film into a smooth, easily-reproduced formula; Allen perfected the "all-star ensemble cast" variant of the disaster film; Allen drove the disaster film to its greatest heights for a brief but intense span when many people and studios tried to compete with Allen. Nobody could out-Allen Allen; his films were the biggest of the big until suddenly and shockingly, they weren't. And Irwin Allen was never bigger than in 1974, when he produced The Towering Inferno, the second-highest-grossing movie of the year when the disaster movie was at its pinnacle (Earthquake and Airport 1975 also landed in the domestic box office top 10). Allen and the two studios collaborating to make the film (Hollywood's very first joint production between two majors), 20th Century Fox & Warner Bros., even managed to haul the film up to a Best Picture Oscar nomination. One which probably would have otherwise gone to Best Director nominee John Cassavetes's A Woman Under the Influence, because the Oscars were also the Oscars in the '70s, even though they sometimes pretended not to be.

The Towering Inferno is pretty broadly regarded as the best of Allen's disaster movie cycle; I absolutely do not find this to be the case. Not with The Poseidon Adventure sitting right there: for The Poseidon Adventure has a cast generally given towards campier, more excessive performances. And The Poseidon Adventure has a more outwardly fantastic premise, which makes it both harder to nitpick logical holes and factual inaccuracies, and easier to watch its life-destroying menace with a spirit of jolly escapism. The Poseidon Adventure, most importantly, is 117 minutes long, and The Towering Inferno is two hours and forty-four minutes and some. It requires maybe around half of that, and the rest is all the most vicious kind of padding. The film only needs that insufferable running time to give subplots to the huge number of more or less famous people in the cast, and while it wouldn't be an Irwin Allen joint without a mixture of hot commodities, new starlets whose career never quite turned out, and well-known Old Hollywood stars who could be gotten for cheap, it's damn hard to mount any argument that their presence serves any narrative or emotional function. Presumably, they exist for us to have a host of potential victims to root for and fear for; in practice, it's just that many more trite stock characters to keep track of amongst the state-of-the-art destruction porn cumshots.

Really, it's not entirely fair to the characters, nor to Stirling Silliphant for taking on the impossible task of writing them (he adapted not one, but two books on virtually identical themes: Richard Martin Stern's The Tower, and Thomas N. Scortia & Frank M. Robinson's The Glass Inferno, each of them optioned by one of the collaborating studios). It's just a bloated movie that goes on and on about everything for far too long. Re-watching it,* I was both amazed and discouraged to find that its very best thriller setpiece, involving a man, a woman, and two children agonisingly clambering across a chasm of twisted metal and rebar that used to be a stairwell, takes place before the halfway point; the remainder of the action often as takes place in draggy, overly pacey setpieces that don't demonstrate the filmmakers having any knack for drawing out a sequence to drive the tension up to unendurable levels (Allen directed the action himself, leaving the human material to poor hack John Guillermin, who for his sins was made to direct the epochally terrible Dino De Laurentiis King Kong remake as his very next movie), but instead that they have a sorry tendency to strain those sequences till they pop like an overinflated balloon.

The film takes place in the newly-built (in fact, not quite finished) tallest building in the world, which has naturally been built in San Francisco, one of the most earthquake-prone cities in the New World. But it's not an earthquake that the 135-story Glass Tower needs to be afraid of, but the petty corruption of untrammeled capitalism: to shave a few percentages off the budget, wealthy magnate Jim Duncan (William Holden) has encouraged his contractors to keep to the city's building code, and not to the amped-up demands made by the tower's architect, Doug Roberts (Paul Newman), who wanted to double-down on everything to make absolutely certain that this most outlandish, unprecedented of buildings would be safe from every eventuality. One of those contractors is Duncan's son-in-law Roger Simmons (Richard Chamberlain), who went cheap on the wiring, and wouldn't you just know that the stress of providing power to such an enormous structure needs more than the minimum. Mere hours before the gala near the top of the party at which the building is to be officially opened in front of the leading lights of Frisco, a fire starts in an 81st floor storage closet. And as a dozen or so people who I'm not going to bother recapping, because absolutely none of them matter as anything but fire fodder, go about their business, the fire spreads and spreads, until the fire department is called in, under the leadership of Battalion Chief Mike O'Halloran (Steve McQueen), to fight the most desperate blaze they'll ever know, under the most disastrous circumstances. For as the film passionately informs us, fires in buildings that are more that seven stories high are virtually impossible to fight effectively. It is important - so important! - to not build indulgent buildings that are deranged firetraps. This message has been brought to you by Irwin Allen, getting all bizarrely preachy in the last scene.

Okay, so I'll mention one cast member: legendary dancer and generally suave motherfucker Fred Astaire, playing a charmingly broke conman and winning the sole competitive Oscar nomination of his career for, apparently, not being dead yet.

So I am torn: as pure spectacle, The Towering Inferno is the tops. Glorious modelwork, beautifully-shot fire effects, elaborate sets, some beautiful matte that look just fake enough so that you can really appreciate the craftsmanship, the whole nine yards. It's certainly the most handsome and accomplished of the year's disaster pictures (as far as "handsome" goes, it takes overlooking the horribly dated style of the Glass Tower itself, which looks like an insanely complicated liquor cabinet), and we cannot think for a moment that Allen wasn't committed to showing every penny onscreen. It is top quality eye-candy; and so much of it! I won't go over it again, having already said it once, for I would not want to be like The Towering Inferno. But fucka-lucka-ding-dong, it just goes on and on.

Despite the best efforts of most of those involved, the film never takes off as more than just a remarkable collection of glossy violence: the cast is decent, and McQueen in particular does the best job I could imagine of portraying a man reacting to the worsening situation around him with clarity, strength, and a weary thread of humor, but I have to wonder how fair it is to call this all "acting". By the end of the film's first third, character has fallen by the wayside, and all that's left is meat puppetry, with some talented and some not-as-talented faces occupying space in front of the camera and screaming in terror as needed, but not giving much of an inner life to the proceedings. This doesn't keep some of the more grueling, inventive deaths from feeling simple meanspirited - I am particularly distressed by the way that the ultimately very minor role of a middle-aged adulteress played by Susan Flannery is dumped from the movie (like a lot of disaster films, The Towering Inferno loves its moralising: especially in the respective fates of the repentant Duncan and the craven Simmons). Do we really need to see this rendered in such loving detail? I contend that we do not, for the film doesn't have the strength of character to follow through and present itself as a meditation on arbitrary, horrible, unpredictable death. The Poseidon Adventure, a cartoon adventure, does not suffer from this. The hilariously awful killer bee movie The Swarm, Allen's next picture, is so feverishly inept and divorced from anything resembling the lived experience of genuine humans, that it doesn't suffer from it either. The Towering Inferno is just realistic enough, just plausible enough, that it opens up some dark doors that it has no interest in peering into, and it leaves a sour note over much of the film.

But I concede that it's exhilarating. There's no elegance in the jerry-rigged screenplay, hybridising two books and forced deal with petty dick-measuring by McQueen and Newman that leaves the back half of the film wildly imbalanced (it also forced The Towering Inferno to introduce the technique of "diagonal billing": on the poster and in the credits, McQueen's name comes first read from the left, but Newaman's comes first read from the top). And there's even less interest in the characters it presents, and there's none at all in the visual compositions, so generic that I can't even come up with anything to say about them. But the fire feels horrifyingly real and present; the sight of it destroying actual sets is every bit as impressive, if less poetically shot, as the "burning of Atlanta" sequence from Gone with the Wind; the sound design, though occasionally a touch metallic and hollow, roars and explodes in a way that movies just did not roar and explode in '74 (I frankly prefer it to the more technologically accomplished Earthquake, though of course I have never heard it in the original, rare Sensurround mix); the score by a young John Williams has early feints towards the lush Romanticism of his most iconic scores from the late '70s and early '80s, and gives the film a soaring, passionate feel that it would otherwise totally lack. It has the goods, even if it doesn't really know what to do with them. But that's beside the point. In 1974, this was eye-popping, revolutionary stuff, and the sheer massiveness of the project and its devotion to showing never-before-seen wonders was obviously more than enough for audiences to get a kick out of it, wonky pacing and flat story and all. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1974
-Paramount releases Roman Polanski's acidic thriller of corruption and wickedness, Chinatown
-Martin Scorsese makes his sole "woman's picture", the ode to old Hollywood and new feminism Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
-The fabled BBS Productions releases its final movie, the outraged Vietnam documentary Hearts & Minds

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1974
-The New German Cinema welcomes an important new voice with Wim Wenders's Alice in the Cities
-Lina Wertmüller directs the Marxist parable Swept Away by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August in Italy
-With an almost limitless freedom to do whatever he wants, John Boorman chooses to put Sean Connery in a red speedo and has a giant flying stone head disparage the penis in the British sci-fi misfire Zardoz

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REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - THE RETURN OF THE KING

Of all possible outcomes for the new American-made Godzilla, one that I wasn't prepared for at all was that, at the macro level, it would have exactly the same structural problems that the last Godzilla film, 2004's Godzilla: Final Wars did. To wit: in a movie just a smidigen north of two hours, the best stuff tends to bunch up in the back half, and the whole thing would be immeasurably improved if the second quarter was either severely reduced or cut out altogether. And not, as many of the film's more impatient naysayers have been bitching, because Godzilla '14 has too little of its titular daikaiju, or that director Gareth Edwards keeps teasing action sequences that he then pulls back from with a little wink. I actually think the film has just about exactly the right amount of Godzilla to accomplish what it's trying to do, in fact. But we'll get back to that.

And it's not because Godzilla is more interesting than people, either. On paper, the idea of spending a lot of time with the human characters affected by Godzilla's massive, destructive presence is a worthy one. Some of the 28 Japanese films to feature the creature have done exactly that, to good effect, and some have not; some of the films that mostly shortchange the humans as anything but observers have been good, and some have not. It's all in the execution, and there's the problem, and the other way that this Godzilla resembles Final Wars: the issue isn't that the human subplot exists, but that it exists for such a long time while also being so trite and unimaginative and propped up on genre clichés in ways that the filmmakers seem unaware of.

There are a couple of significant problems with this Godzilla, but the most obvious one is simply that, out of a reasonably full cast of characters, played by a remarkably overqualified roster of actors, the film is mostly interested in the least compelling one, played to worst effect by the most consistently underwhelming member of the ensemble. I refer to Aaron Taylor-Johnson's soporific Ford Brody,* recently released from the U.S. Navy, where he served as a bomb disposal specialist; as depicted in the screenplay by Max Borenstein (from a story by Dave Callaham), Ford falls into the exact worst spot between being too generic in his personality to be at all pleasant to watch for any length of time, while being far too specific in his professional skill set to be a reasonable analogue for the audience staring with amazement and horror at the giant creatures that threaten humanity in this go-round. Taylor-Johnson's physical carriage and aimless line readings only serve to call maximum attention to how deficient Ford is as a character, and the result is a profoundly useless central human, even by Godzilla movie standards.We spend so much time learning about him and his family to give us a "hook" for when the monster action starts; instead, he's an active detriment, the tedious, boring, and functionless thing we have to wait for while in between the good parts. It would be tremendously easy to remove his wife Elle (Elizabeth Olsen, given only little to do, which is still more than any other female cast member has) and young son Sam (Carson Bolde) from the movie entirely, and redistribute Ford's role to two or three various soldiers throughout, and take out all the most draggy and meandering parts of the film, just like that.

The issue, I think, is that the film wants to serve two masters: the structure of a Japenese genre film (which tend to focus more on process and problem-solving than a single protagonist's "hero's journey" arc) is very dissimilar from the structure of a Hollywood tentpole (which focus on heroes' journeys to the point of distraction), and Godzilla tries to resolve them in a way that probably cannot happen. A more talented, or at least seasoned director might have been able to disguise the seams, but Edwards hasn't the facility of touch to do that. For the most part, he shows all the same strengths and limitations he displayed in his debut and only previous feature, 2010's Monsters: entrenching too deep in character moments that aren't clicking, shifting awkwardly between that material and some absolutely sublime construction of mood, setting, and tension throughout.

And I don't use the word sublimity by accident: as much as the human A-plot lets it down, the parts of Godzilla that work put it on par with any blockbuster of recent years. In all his wild cribbing from as many different Godzilla films as possible (to the point that it feels a bit like fan service in some respects: the reveal of Godzilla's atomic breath in particular is staged with an unmistakable tone of "oh, you all know what's coming next, right? and could you possibly be any more excited?"), Edwards picked up the most important lesson of all from the original, 1954 Godzilla: the horrible, devastating fact of the monster is more important than the immediate presence of the monster. Or SPOILER ALERT I PUT IT OFF AS LONG AS I COULD, BUT THE REST OF THE REVIEW IS DANGEROUS NOW rather monsters, plural. Godzilla '14 is at its very best when it is at its most grandiose, casting its giant creatures in roles that owe a debt to H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos as much as to anything in the Japanase daikaiju eiga: Godzilla and the pair of vaguely insectoid MUTOs exist on some plane of awareness where humanity simple doesn't exist at all, fighting their ancient battle as profound forces of nature that can only be reacted to, not predicted and not stopped. If every generation of Godzilla film places its own fears into the movie, 2014's edition suggests neither the spectacle of nuclear warfare, nor the more modern concerns of 9/11 and the Fukushima meltdown, both of which are alluded to (the latter far more directly than the former), are the dominant terror of the modern world. It is instead about the fear of outright apocalypse, with destructive forces beyond understanding or control swallowing everything without even the decency to notice the human beings dying along the way.

And oh, how human beings do die. This is, in some ways, the PG-13 CGI blockbuster I've always longed for: one in which death isn't sanitised but presented as an awful, active thing. A scene with a derailed airport monorail shows several people sliding, screaming, to their deaths; dead bodies are scattered around the site of a trainwreck. Even at the height of the climactic monster battle, the collapse of skyscrapers is presented with an eye towards horror rather than the amoral spectacle of a Man of Steel. What Edwards has done, not just better than most disaster-porn summer movies, but even better than any previous Godzilla director, is invest the movie with the right sense of scale: the monsters, when we seem them, feel genuinely huge (even at their most masterful levels, the Japanese films never feel like they're showing anything but a man in a six-foot suit among four-foot buildings), and even when we do not see them, but merely the results of their devastation, that devastation has real scope and impact, a soul-sapping feeling that holy shit, how could something like this happen? Edwards and cinematographer Seamus McGarvey - responsible for some impressively moody wide shots that are among the highlights of his career as I know it - crank out scenes of carnage, death, emptiness, and despair by the fistful, mixing up the exact methods used to build those feelings enough that the film never falls into a pattern of unrelenting intensity that begins to feel repetitive and dull. Though having done such a good job exploring the essential non-humanity and world-ending power of the monsters, the film spoils everything with a garishly ill-advised final five minutes that make the jump from "Godzilla the antihero force of nature" to "Godzilla the superhero with triumphant fanfare", contrary to everything that has been built up for the preceding couple of hours.

In between the peak of the apocalyptic grandeur and the valley of the Brody family nonsense (Brody, incidentally, is one of several more-or-less explicit lifts from the Spielberg filmography throughout - the family name in Jaws, of course - with my favorite being a "foggy car window owing to the occupant's panicked breathing" gag taken from Jurassic Park), the great bulk of Godzilla is largely an ordinary though unusually slow-paced summer movie. It has a murderer's row of worthy actors - Bryan Cranston, Sally Hawkins, Ken Watanabe, Juliette Binoche, David Strathairn - given far too little to do: the men come out better than the women (Hawkins and Binoche combined don't even hit 15 minutes of screentime, I'd wager), and Cranston is the only one who actually gets to do anything that I'd comfortably tag with the word "acting", though after a fashion, I like the degree to which all these famous faces slide by without making an impact; it reflects the film's own awareness that the actions of titanic monsters are beyond the ability of normal people and celebrities alike to do anything but gawk and run, or gawk and die. Alexandre Desplat's score has a couple of memorable cues (which, unfortunately, are also the most overtly "gongs and chimes" orientalist), and sadly, no lifts at all from the great Ifukube Akira, whose music still rings in my ears any time I hear the word "Godzilla"; but there's enough personality to even the most generic cues to give the film a bit more sonic depth than is typical. There's also a completely off putting re-use of a composition that appeared in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and cannot help but feel like it belongs there and nowhere else.

The monsters, meanwhile, though they get only a little screentime, are pretty great - the CGI, anyway, is close to flawless, even if I have my moments of doubt in the design. The MUTOs, though sleek and terrifying, don't feel like something that could have evolved. Godzilla itself is magnificent the lower we go on its body (one of the best scenes, and one that does the best work of driving the idea that these are unfathomably large organisms, shows its massive feet clomping down like mountains), with something close to my ideal amount of stocky, powerful musculature and strength without being puffy and fat, under a layer of ragged, spiky skin that feels like the design of the Millennium Series suits (1999-2004) without any of their sometime curious mistakes (no magenta spines here!). The face, I am not crazy for. No, not even the face. The snout. It is like a bear's snout, not a lizard's.

Still, the sheer weight and size that the filmmakers suggest about these creatures and their enormous destructive capability matters more than anything about their particular shape. The fight between Godzilla and the MUTOs is a damned impressive thing, brutal and animalistic without being impersonal in any way (the partially performance-captured Godzilla has far more inner life than the last all-CG version of the character, from the dreadful 1998 Emmerich/Devlin Godzilla), among the most creative fights in the series - Godzilla's finishing move, in particular, is a work of art as far as rah-rah fanboy moments go.

Anyway, all that leaves a film that is generally all-around good and just not quite special. It is methodical and willing to be about enjoying the mood more than cumshots, unlike virtually everything else in modern popcorn filmmaking; but it's got too much that holds it back in in the two-thirds of the movie where the mood doesn't really manifest itself over undernourished character scenes. The spectacle and terrible gravity are great; I bet they'd have been even greater in a movie that could have trimmed maybe 20 minutes of human deadweight off. Anyway, the notions are great even if the execution is a bit stiff, and I think it proudly occupies its space as one of the better-not-best films in the Godzilla franchise. No American-made Godzilla movie could ever say that, before.

7/10

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HEART OF ARKNESS

Darren Aronofsky has, we are told, been nursing the idea behind Noah for fifteen years, or basically immediately after making his feature debut with π. It was only the spectacular and unexpected success of his 2010 Black Swan that finally convinced a studio to give him the giant sum of money needed to make it, because if there's one thing that obviously equips a man to make a tremendously costly Bible epic, it's the skills he learned in making a movie where a ballerina imagines having destructive lesbian hatesex with her alter ego.

I do not know what drives a man to nurture this concept for so long, but it clearly wasn't religious faith. And it also clearly wasn't an irreligious tendency leading him to critique the faith of others. I'm not sure what that leaves, but Noah isn't the kind of movie that's interested in being easily pegged down. The one word that best describes it above all others is "weird"; if we allow ourselves two, I would go with "fucking weird".

At any rate, it's vintage Aronofsky: where Black Swan and The Wrestler both suggested a certain flattening-out of his aesthetic into something reasonably conventional and even realistic at points, Noah jumps headlong back into the metallic colors and expressionistic cutting of his early, idiosyncratic ones. It is not the film's signature moment, nor by any means its most characteristic, but the scene in Noah that unquestionably has stuck the most in my brain is a montage, against a pungent, cherry-red sunset, of silhouettes of murder and war, with a quick succession (like, "two or three frames per image" quick) of profiles of soldiers from the Paleolithic right up to the 20th Century attacking, and a quick succession of profiles of their victims falling back in death agonies. It is garish and brave and stupid and wholly visionary, in the sense that it makes an emphatic point using image and editing and sound without any need to rely on words, and it is a moment that made me think two thoughts at the exact same time: "I am so thrilled that Aronofsky is back in his gonzo phase without a hint of apology" and "Wow, I'd forgotten how goddamn annoying Aronofsky's movies are."

But you know who doesn't care what I or anyone else thinks about Darren Aronofsky's filmmaking? Darren Aronofsky. Good, bad, or ugly, Noah is a transcendently personal piece of cinema, telling a weird version of the iconic story that, while not contradicting a single word of the Torah, ends up a piece of overheated fantasy in ancient Hebrew drag, colliding ideas from the religious text, the rabbinical texts elucidating the religious text, and the author's own mind, and turning out something that's half '50s Bible movie, half Lord of the Rings (the rock angels are a dead ringer for the Ents in The Two Towers - oh, yes, there are rock angels), half Soviet Montage, half work of grimy historical realism that finds Aronofsky and his longterm cinematographer Matthew Libatique parading around a series of muddy greys in between the more dazzling, chromatic fantasy landscapes and evocatively deep shadows of the Ark interior.

There's so much visual and tonal excess that it would almost be possible to lose sight of the family drama that Aronofsky has fashioned out of the story, except for the operatic rage with which he and the actors portray that drama. Here, Noah (Russell Crowe) isn't just a personality-free patriarch, but a tormented man of principle who believes deep in his soul that he has been charged with stewarding the whole of creation though a massive apocalypse, and who is certain that he and his kin have no place in this new order other than to observe it and die, saving the planet from the ravages of mankind that have brought it so close to ruin (that is, incidentally, the whole of the alleged "environmentalist" message, and anyone who lets that offend them, out of all the wacky shit going on here, went in looking to be offended). It's a role written in bold, broad strokes and emphatic emotions, and Crowe breathes life into with the most robust, alive performance he's given in a decade or more.

And the rest of the characters are… that's part of the problem, ain't it? As much as Noah is enthusiastic about providing a totally modern experience in some ways, in others its as ossified and dusty as any plodding epic from the days of The Robe, and that includes its treatment of the supporting players, who with the possible exception of Ray Winstone as the unnuanced villain Tubalcain, the human king looking to steal the ark and replace Noah as the chief conduit for the unnamed creator of the universe, play stock characters with stock emotions. It's all well and good for Aronofsky's script to specifically indict the authority of old men who insist that they alone can correctly interpret the lessons handed down by God (and he so indicts), but it's hard to give the film any anti-patriarchy points when the best it can do for its female characters is to cast Jennifer Connelly as the Loyal Wife Who Is Clearer-Headed Than Her Husband (Who Cries), and Emma Watson as the Clever, Preternaturally Wise Young Pregnant Woman (Who Cries). And they're robust paragons of human drama compared to Noah's sons, Shem (Douglas Booth) and Ham (Logan Lerman), the latter of whom at least gets to shade some resentment into his bland meat prop of a role, but only in the film's last half.

The balance between the realistic, the heavily stylised, and the insipidly hokey is one that Noah proudly ignores: achingly corny dramatic touches and overwrought visual metaphors sit right alongside some brilliantly fragmentary, high-contrast dream images, effectively high-scale fantasy-style action scenes, and an outstanding sound mix (the damp wooden creaks and sleepy animal noises inside the Ark make for one of the most persuasive movie spaces in a long while). Undeliverable wooden dialogue gives way to some wonderfully tiny and humane character moments. Anthony Hopkins is more subdued than he's been in some years, and then starts babbling about berries for like, 40 minutes in the next instant.

It is messy as all hell, and wonderfully incoherent, pummeling along with enough momentum that it's not hard to overlook how utterly it fails to draw all of its shifting moods and thematic threads into any kind of conclusion. But at the same time, it doesn't disguise that failure, either. Anyway, I am very glad that I saw the movie, and I am also virtually certain that it's no damn good at all: but it's completely singular and an obvious passion project, and its sloppy weirdness has the merit of being very much unlike anything else out there.

5/10-ish. But number ratings are really not appropriate in this case.

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REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - GINO-COLOGY

The foremost of all the non-pressing questions I have regarding the 1998 American Godzilla - pro tip: there is no such thing as a pressing question about the 1998 Godzilla - is whether or not it's the worst film of the Godzilla franchise. And I suppose I should really first ask the question if it's part of the Godzilla franchise at all, since that seems to generally be something that fans try to downplay. But, in 1998, Toho certainly regarded it that way: they used 1995's Godzilla vs. Destoroyah to put their own monster in the ground to clear the way for a planned Tri-Star trilogy of movies, and they had an official copyright on the new monster design, created by Patrick Tatopolous, calling it Godzilla. That's good enough for me, even if a few years later, Toho legally had the copyright changed, renaming the creature Zilla and banishing it and its film from the mainline of the series. But that was all ass-covering after the film came out and sucked, and failed to make enough money to cover its production budget and staggeringly comprehensive ad campaign (which I can still remember with crystal clarity 16 years later: "His ___ is bigger than this ___" posters plastered against every flat surface that would stand still for long enough, and a tie-in with that long-gone Taco Bell chihuahua, the idiotic details of which I will recall after senescence has taken from me the faces of loved ones), though it did end up eking out a profit, despite its reputation as a flop. At any case, in 1998, this wasn't some misbegotten Godzilla spin-off, it was a proper Godzilla movie, and I will not assist in a corporate attempt to plunge those days deep into the memory hole.

Back to the question, then: is Godzilla '98 the worst film of the Godzilla franchise? It is, beyond any sane shadow of a doubt, the worst Godzilla film - so divorced from any remote connection to the 44-year, 22- film history of the character as it existed at that point that it's frankly incomprehensible why the studio even bothered to acquire the naming rights when they could have saved a quick $10 million by just calling it, I don't know, Iguanos, Lizard-Bitch of the Pacific. And prior to Toho's re-christening of the central monster, fans had long since taken to calling it G.I.N.O., Godzilla In Name Only. This is reasonable and correct. But "the worst Godzilla film" and "the worst film involving a thing called Godzilla" are not the same thing. And the films that involve a thing called Godzilla include the likes of All Monsters Attack/Godzilla's Revenge and Godzilla vs. Megalon, so it's not nearly as straightforward as case as Godzilla fandom likes to pretend.

But let's not miss the forest for the trees: Godzilla '98 is fucking wretched. It's easily the worst movie in the career of director Roland Emmerich, not exactly a man who has swung from peak to peak; Godzilla came right in between the clamorous Independence Day and the rancid The Patriot, and made both of them look at least decent in comparison. Of all the scripts that Emmerich and writing/producing partner Dean Devlin cranked out in the 1990s (their partnership ended after The Patriot, owing in part to just how badly Godzilla stumbled out of the gate), this is probably the worst, shamelessly aping the formula that put Independence Day over so well with audiences in '96, and hiding the creators' public contempt for monster movies not whatsoever. And yet the writing is hardly the worst thing in Godzilla, a movie that is even worse at dumb CGI spectacle than it as telling a coherent story with plausible characters. It's kind of exciting, really, just how low Emmerich and Devlin were able to go.

That all being said, the opening 25 or 30 minutes of the film suggest a mindless popcorn movie at least on the level of Independence Day. It's straightforward enough to start with: grainy video footage tinted yellow of lizards mucking about in French Polynesia as nukes explode and a tinny version of "La Marseillaise" plays. So, French nuclear testing mutates some kind of marine reptile. Got it? Good. And then the plot begins as so many real daikaiju eiga have begun, with a fishing vessel being destroyed at sea by something very large. Hell, for the first five minutes, it doesn't even seem like a passable piece of junk food; it even feels like a movie.

Which stops pretty much the exact second that we cut to Matthew Broderick singing along with "Singin' in the Rain" in the most alarming douchey way possible. Broderick, our oddly-cast hero, plays Niko Tatopolous (named for the monster's designer, y'see), a biologist studying the effect of radiation on Chernobyl earthworms. He's busy electrocuting them and digging them out of the ground, in that order, when the U.S. government comes along to spirit him off to Tahiti; seems that a very large animal has been spotted, and its gigantic tracks are lousy with radiation. By the time the research time pieces all of that together, it's already moved onto Panama, and by the 20-minute mark, the creature is lumbering around in water outside Manhattan, where it makes a suitably half-seen first appearance as a giant humped back in the water and massive legs storming down the street. Any question of "what" is now officially dumped in favor of "how the hell do we stop it?", with Niko ending up in New York and thus being spotted on TV by his ex-girlfriend Audrey Timmonds (Maria Pitillo), now working at channel WIDF as a wannabe reporter and personal assistant to the loathsome news anchor Charles Caiman (Harry Shearer).

It's right about at this point that the film invisibly shifts from being a modestly (very modestly) effective mystery about the exact details of what Godzilla is in this film - Emmerich and Devlin have the basic decency not to pretend that we aren't all well aware of what's going on in broad terms - and starts to become an unpleasant slog through the worst that effects-driven American cinema of the 1990s has to offer. It's right about now, after all, that the basic shape of the plot starts to reveal itself, and it becomes clear that this wants to be a '70s-style disaster film more than a monster movie, and will largely dedicate itself to this task with lugubrious intensity, starting with the fact that we now have our Broken-Up Couple to be Reforged in the Fires of Adversity. It's also at this point that we become aware of just how much time we're going to spend in the company of some truly awful performances and characters: for Pitillo, this was meant to be the big breakout moment in a career that had been quietly simmering for some years, but it only serves to showcase how profoundly limited an actor she was. Not that the version of Audrey presented in the script was going to be redeemed by any performer who might possibly be interested in taking the role: she's an obnoxious cipher with one whole personality trait and her big contribution to the plot consists of making the worst possible decision at a moment when it's obvious what a terrible decision it is. But Pitillo exacerbates the character, with a petulant, bratty series of expressions and line deliveries that make the character seem like the biggest pill imaginable. And let us not pick on the one person whose career puked out because of the movie: if her Audrey is a simpering nothing, then she is but the ideal romantic lead for Broderick's ghastly, lukewarm Niko, and there's a lot more of him in the movie than there is of her.

The human drama is boundlessly insipid, worse than in any of the Japanese Godzilla pictures, but even that isn't a patch on the comedy that has saturated every moment of the film. I have no patience for the arch-serious, visually dark and ultra-urban style of so many contemporary popcorn movies, but it's instructive to go back in time to see what that aesthetic is in response to: because God almighty, but the 1990s had some awful comic relief going on. Quips, jokey asides, irreverence where it's entirely unwelcome; and Godzilla has some of the worst. It's not merely that there are jokes that aren't funny and shouldn't be there; it's that the film acts like things are jokes which don't even have the apparent construction of jokes. Example: Niko Tatopolous's name is mispronounced by the anti-Godzilla military leader, Colonel Hicks (Kevin Dunn, the only human being in the movie doing anything that feels like halfway decent acting), so the scientist corrects him. "Whatever", says Hicks. Is this funny? Is there anything about this that qualifies as a joke? The way it's staged sure as hell seems to think it is. Or the infamous "That's a lot of fish" line, spoken in front of a mound of a lot of fish. The best I can do with that one is that it's an attempt to copy the Jurassic Park "pile of shit" moment, which is an actual joke for two reasons: it's kind of a play on words, and it has a swear in it. "That's a lot of fish" is nothing. It burbles out onto the screen and waits there patiently, until the moment dies of embarrassment. Most of the film's jokes follow the same trajectory.

This is, mind you, run-of-the-mill stuff. These are the basic problems true of most Emmerich movies, and many other tentpoles of the late '90s. What makes Godzilla so much worse than all of those is that it doesn't even have the goods as a trashy action film; it's shockingly incompetent, actually, ending up as one of the most leaden, painfully boring movies of its generation (its 139-minute running time is a crime against cinema if ever there was one). There is, to begin with, the simply inability to make Godzilla a real threat: when a film is a fantasy, like this, it becomes important for the filmmakers to establish the baseline reality of the fantasy world, so we can believe in it. That can't happen when the reality is as slipshod and inconsistent as it is here. I have no new observations: the fact that sometimes the monster shakes entire city blocks when it walks, and yet can get within yards of a man with headphones on without him noticing; the monster's tendency to change size, dramatically, not merely from scene to scene, but sometimes in consecutive shots. I mean that in the most literal sense: there are moments where its head is barely larger than the taxicab it's chasing, and then it suddenly can fill the entire entryway of a spacious New York subway station, in the span of just five seconds.

When the monster can't even be presented in a consistent way, and with so many shots of it interacting with objects seemingly hellbent on making that fact clear, there's no real way to believe in it or care about it, and that's what makes Godzilla such a damned easy film to nitpick: the way a trained biologist keeps using "he" to refer to a monster that is pregnant and reproduces asexually leaps to my mind, but it's almost too easy to pick out details. That doesn't just make the film dumb, it makes it not fun, since the creators' contempt for it is so apparent. I think that, more than anything, is the dominant feeling of the movie; Emmerich and Devlin took the project to have free reign to do anything they wanted, and proceeded to not give a shit. The cramped, human-sized staging of all the action, emphasising how reprehensibly uninteresting the humans in the movie are; the unendurable scene with baby Godzillas in Madison Square Garden, a scene that could only possibly be more of a rip-off of Jurassic Park and its raptors if David Arnold's score openly borrowed from the earlier film's kitchen sequence. And since it does borrow the music from that sequence, I guess this could not be any more of a Jurassic Park rip-off, and a particularly lazy and ineffective one it is, too. And since I have mentioned the music, it wouldn't do to pass up mentioning how often the score and the action don't match up: particularly when we and Niko get our first good view of Godzilla, and the music is all awe-inspired and Spielbergian, and the action of the film involves the giant animal being a kill-crazy deathbeast of pure horror.

Hell, the writers even go so far as to portray the mayor of New York as a craven blowhard named Ebert (Michael Lerner) with a simpering aide named Gene (Lorry Goldman), in tribute to the film critics who despised - and rightfully - the previous Emmerich/Devlin pictures, and then don't show Ebert getting crushed by Godzilla. In fact, he lives right to the end, to endure a tremendously unfunny comeuppance involving a thumbs down. When you skip that moment, you're simply not invested in making a crowd-pleaser whatsoever.

Which leaves us with just one thing to talk about, but it is maybe the most important thing, and I have intentionally left it: Patrick Tatopolous's monster design. It's not Godzilla. That's just fact. It is a different animal altogether, one that is not a dinosaur-shaped metaphor but an attempt to mimic the physiology of iguanas, if iguanas were hundreds of feet in length and bipedal.

In and of itself, totally irrespective of the thing it so utterly does not resemble, I have to be honest: I actually like the design. That makes me a horrible person, I know. But taking the filmmakers at their own goals, it's actually pretty effective, with the exception of its strangely overlong, very rectangular lower jaw. But I like the sleekness, the coloring, and the way it moves; during a scene set in Central Park at night, it clambers about like a Komodo dragon, and I will admit myself most impressed by both the idea and execution. The CGI used to bring the creature to life is decidedly spotty (it generally gets better as it goes along; the initial stamped through New York is especially terrible, with the monster possessing no apparent weight), but when it's good, it's as good as anything else from 1998; the baby Godzillas are quite terrible and fake-looking, but the whole 25-minute sequence containing them could and should be removed from the movie anyway, so it's not really a problem.

I might even go so far as to say that I like the American Godzilla enough that I kind of which that Godzilla '98 had kicked off a sequel. Not, for the love of God, one that had anything to do with Emmerich and Devlin. But in the hands of somebody who actually wanted to make a giant monster movie - and with another name attached - this particular giant monster has some merit to it, I think. Just not in the epic steaming shitpile that tried to foist it on an instantly-hostile public.

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ASH AND YOU SHALL RECEIVE

The opening image of Pompeii is an extreme close-up of a body covered in the ancient ash that exactly preserved its shape, against a black background, the sinewy camera movements letting us see every angle and the 3-D camera accentuating and exaggerating all the crags and shapes in glorious detail, using the best and brightest new technology to reach unprecedented new heights in the art of ogling dead bodies. Says it all, really.

The other thing that says it all: before the opening credits have finished running - and this is a movie without a pre-title sequence, mind - we've already been treated to two entirely different top-down shots of a pile of dead bodies all tangled up with each other.

Not that Pompeii is death porn, or anything else that might be outrageous enough to make infamous instead of merely a pleasantly crappy CGI epic. I'm more amused by the perpetual re-occurrence of the peculiar sin of dramatic works set in Ancient Roman times, which is that on the one hand, the storytellers seem downright puritanical in their zeal to condemn the Romans as unforgivable hedonists whose taste for tasteless, extravagant entertainment extended so far as to make the violent death of fellow humans ready fodder for a pleasant day at the theater. And then, of course, the work of drama we're watching (it's a trend that's older than cinema) goes out of its way to make all of the licentiousness of Rome look really exciting and lush, and frequently - certainly in the case of Pompeii - gets much of its entertainment value out of making a spectacle of people die. Hypocritical? Obviously, but not in a way that's particularly rankling. You can't go around expecting truly dumb art to have a unified, coherent ideological thrust, and there's not much whose obvious dumbness comes as pre-sold to us as a movie directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, the only filmmaker alive for whom his video game adaptations generally qualify as his aesthetic peaks.

But there's no reason to be snarky, when it comes right down to it. Anderson's films might be bad, including Pompeii, but they have a certain awareness of their own badness and refusal to live down to it, as it were. Compare it to fellow Class of '14 sword-and-sandal film The Legend of Hercules, if you want to see a genuinely awful movie with nothing to recommend it. Whatever failing he has a storyteller and chronicle of human emotions, Anderson at least knows from garish, indulgent CGI action; at the very minimum, he gives good 3-D spectacle, playing up everything that is splashy, kitschy and tacky in all the most glorious ways. We do not go the films like this for Gravity-style immersion; but there is much to be said for the direct, simple appeal of having somebody throw shit right the hell at your face, and there's not a lot of things that throw more shit with more gusto than an exploding volcano, after all.

Now, the caveat is that the actual eruption of Vesuvius and the subsequent destruction of the titular city that is pretty much the sole thing that anyone attending a film titled Pompeii is going to be interested in seeing, while pleasantly overbaked and noisy (in fact, I have to concede that the film has a pretty great if not necessarily surprising and imaginative soundscape), is buried at the tail end of a movie that is mind-blowingly dull, except for the director's zeal in staging scenes so that things are always very prominently in front of other things. The movie's nominal plot plays like a Telephone Game corruption of Gladiator: in the Roman-held portion of the distant Britannia, a venal general kills the living fuck out of a rebellious tribe of Celts; a young boy among them plays dead long enough to strike back, and is made a slave for his troubles. Years later, the boy, grown up to be a gladiator named Milo (Kit Harrington) but known only as the Celt, is the best pit fighter in Londinium, and it it in this capacity that he comes to the attention of Pompeiian gladiator promoter Graecus (Joe Pingue), away from the heart of the empire and hating it intensely. In no time at all, Milo is on his way to Pompeii, along the way catching the eye of young noblewoman Cassia (Emily Brown), daughter of civic leader Severus (Jared Harris). At this time, Severus is trying to make a deal with an important Roman senator, Corvus (Kiefer Sutherland), who only has an interest in making leering, carnivorous faces at Cassia whenever she enters the room, and it just so happens that he was also the general responsible for killing Milo's family. In the span of just a day and a night, Milo meets, antagonises, and befriends master gladiator Atticus (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), meets Cassia a second time and falls deeply in love, and comes to the attention of Corvus, who will not even let a sea of ash and burning pumice stand between him and his desire to murder Milo in the most violent way possible and clear the way to rape Cassia.

All I can say is, thank God for Kiefer Sutherland. Which I'm pretty sure is a phrase I've never even thought of saying before. His unhinged, lip-smacking venality in the role of the melodramatic over-the-top bad guy is by an incredibly vast margin the best part of the human side of Pompeii, keeping the film situated securely in the tradition of gaudy theatrical extravagance where all the best Roman-era genre pictures tend to live. Certainly, the deck is stacked much in his favor, with Harrington (looking like a dollar store Eric Bana) and Browning (looking like somebody's out-of-control attempt to make a brunette Princess Zelda on deviantART) proving the most watery and unconvincing romantic leads since... well, I've already gone and reminded myself that The Legend of Hercules exists, so I have to cool it with the hyperbole. But they absolutely suck, and it's bitterly hard to deal with the movie in the long passages where we're expected to care more about them looking blankly at each other in what the keening score promises is lust than the surprisingly adequate staging of Pompetii, with its not-unconvincing costumes and surprisingly invisible CGI. To say nothing about the emphatic destruction of same, a sequence which Anderson and his team of writers insistently keep interrupting with dramatic interludes involving Corvus's surprisingly dogged pursuit of the lovers even as buildings are literally falling down on top of him. Not since Billy Zane ran through a sinking Titanic while brandishing a pistol has a disaster movie villain been so hellbent on being the one to kill his rival in the midst of an act of God.

All that being said, though, the film is mostly just silly and dim, with just enough awareness of where to hit us with a miniature earthquake to keep things from sagging too much. And while Anderson makes terrible films, he's much more adept than e.g. your Roland Emmerich at telegraphing his own awareness that the whole thing is kind of cheesy and idiotic, and keeping the tone light that way. Pompeii is not any good, please don't get me wrong, but it understands that it order to pay for not being any good, it has to scrounge up some good moments of kineticism and just enough visual pizzazz to catch your eye as you're looking for something on TV to put off doing real work on a Saturday afternoon. Meeting the most unbelievably minimal threshold to justify its own existence doesn't sound like much, and it isn't much, but when so many films in this mold can't even manage to do that...

5/10

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REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - THE HAMMER OF GOD

This week, our marathon of Toho's daikaiju eiga takes us to a pair of movies that are not, in the general scheme of things, considered to be monster movies in any real way at all. But like the fella once said, "come on, it has a giant damn monster walrus. Don't be such a hard-on".

(Before anybody brings it up in comments: yes, this does mean I should have reviewed The Mysterians. And maybe one day I shall, but you gotta put the brakes on somewhere).

The first of these, and the one with far less of a claim to belonging in this series whatsoever, is 1962's Gorath, which is frequently cited as being the concluding chapter of trilogy of films directed by Honda Ishirō for Toho, beginning with The Mysterians in 1957 and continuing with Battle in Outer Space. The best I can say in defense of that claim is that Gorath probably exists in the same fictional world as the other two films, but does not in any way reference the events within them. If you need things to come in threes, though, there's no reason not to think of the films as a trilogy. But Gorath doesn't need to be though of that way: it's merely one of many early-'60s tokusatsu films made by Toho. Tokusatsu being a word used to denote anything with a heavy emphasis on special effects; the daikaiju eiga are all tokusatsu, though many tokusatsu were not daikaiju eiga, but closer to what we'd call, in English, science fiction.

Gorath is, in particular, a gloss on the same basic notion of the American When Worlds Collide, the most famous of all movies about how an interstellar event is about to destroy Earth, and we need to deal with that. Gorath doesn't have such a downbeat ending as its American predecessor, but it's a great deal more grim and sober throughout, a good fit for the Honda who had made Godzilla, the story of a prehistoric monster that breathes fire, such a wrenching tale of devastation and society scrambling to hold itself together in the face of annihilation.

Set in the far-flung future of 1980, Gorath opens with the crew of the Japanese spaceship JX-1, commanded by Sonoda Raizo (Tazaki Jun) diverting from their mission to Saturn to investigate an anomaly: an incredibly dense object much smaller than Earth but with 6000 times our planet's mass. The ship is able to relay vital information about this "star", given the name Gorath, back to Japan, but is caught in the object's intense gravitational field and pulled to its destruction. The heads of Japan's astrophysics program, chiefly Dr. Tazawa (Ikebe Ryo) and Dr. Kono (Uehara Ken), quickly realise that Gorath represents a threat far greater than any one nation's security, and after a great deal of effort, they succeed in making the Japanese government present a case to the United Nations that the whole world must band together to save the human race and the planet we live on. A second vessel, the JX-2, is sent to keep near to Gorath and send reports of its status, while Tazawa hits on the only plan that can save Earth: mount jet engines at the South Pole, hundreds and hundreds of them, enough to provide the billions of megatons of force necessary to push the planet out of the way of Gorath before the star becomes too close to survive the debilitating effect of its gravitational pull.

That's the science part. In the meantime, Honda and screenwriter Kimura Takeshi explore the ramifications of life on a doomed planet through melodramatic human stories: Kanai Tatsuma (Kubo Akira), a crew member of the JX-2, tries to reconnect with an ex-lover, Takiko (Mizuno Kumi) whose fiancé died on the JX-1; at the same time, Tazawa begins to fall for Sonoda's daughter Tomoko (Shirakawa Yumi). The intent, I gather, is to show off how people try to keep on striving and living in the face of the end of the world, and it doesn't precisely fail at doing that, though it hurts the movie an awful lot that Tatsuma is something of a grandiose jerk and the bad case of amnesia he comes down with in the back half is absurd even by the standards of a movie that straps several hundred jet engines onto Antarctica to move the Earth out of its orbit.

Gorath has very little in the way of a reputation, and that's not entirely fair: the plot is absolutely a little overbaked, sure, but there simply aren't that many films that situate themselves among human characters who know damn well that they and everyone they know are probably about to die, and observe what that must feel like. Awareness of impending doom is the film's recurring theme, right from the moment that Cmdr. Sonoda realises that the JX-1 is going to be destroyed (it's worth mentioning that in that scene, Tazaki gives what is undoubtedly the best acting to be found anywhere in the movie). Honda's sure handling of this material, emphasising the gravity and seriousness of every moment, means that even the most florid moments are underplayed with a melancholic air, and cinematographer Koizumi Hajime underlights most of the action just slightly, to give the entire film a peculiarly overcast feeling, pulling out just enough light and color that we don't quite "notice" it, though it vividly informs how the movie feels as we're watching it. The score by Ishii Kan is jarring and urgent without having quite the same drama as Ifukube Akira's work in Honda's best-known works, but it still manages to indicate more gravity than excitement.

If all this sounds like Gorath is more dour than action-packed, that's sort of because it is. It's a pretty solid thriller, to be sure, though the third act begins to loose the thread quite badly and it all becomes a hair silly; but for the most part, Honda is playing things low-key and severe, and outside of Kubo, with an unwieldy part, the cast follows right along (Shimura Takashi has a small part, but for once in his career, he doesn't stand out - the whole movie is full of people with the same sense of utter seriousness that he did so well).

It's absolutely a minor film, but rewardingly true to its scenario. Which is what makes it weird when it lurches towards pulpy sci-fi action at the end; most notably, with the introduction of Maguma, a giant walrus that menaces the Antarctic base solely because the Toho suits refused to let Gorath out without any giant monster, even one that looks as unforgivably crappy as this one.

Not the company's brightest moment, to be sure, and even in a film with as many redressed off-the-shelf model kits as Gorath, that stands out as a pretty awful piece of effects work (for the most part, in fact, Tsuburaya Eiji was able to make the cheapness of the models work; there's a certain warm handicraft feel to the space scenes). Perhaps if Maguma was a truly great kaiju, I could forgive how badly it was spliced into the plot; but I doubt it very much, and the wallop that the film's momentum takes in this moment is something it never quite recovers from (to their credit, the American distributors had the good sense to almost completely excise the walrus).

But Maguma's not the only problem with the last third of the film: the whole thing enters a very uninspiring "wrap up the plot" phase that fits not at all with the deliberate pacing and horror-speckled musings on mortality of the previous movie. The sequence of Tokyo flooding is terrific on the level of disaster porn, but it's not the level that Gorath was working on previously to this, and I can't shake the feeling that the film runs out, rather than comes to its conclusion.

Still, there's a lot that's pretty damn good, and the film deserves more of a reputation than it has. It's more cheaply-made than it perhaps ought to be, and the science is giddily bad, but the ideas being explored have weight and thoughtfulness behind them. It's a fine marriage of fun B-movie tackiness and grave B-movie sociology that works as well as I can think of it doing in any comparable film, and its optimism about humanity's ability to triumph over ideology and nationality to band together in times of danger is wonderfully refreshing compared to so many bruisingly cynical Cold War space movies. It's at least a little bit of a lost classic, and deserves better than to be remembered, if at all, as one of Honda Ishirō's many Godzilla-free B-sides.

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