Editorials
How Does ‘Godzilla’ Stack Up Against ‘Pacific Rim’?
A few days back a good number of readers took issue with my review of Godzilla, which was the kind of thing I would have hoped they would do after they had actually seen the movie. I stand by my review, but I want to point out one thing – it was mixed down the middle. The 2.5 out of 5 score was very deliberately meant to indicate that there was still just as much to like (for me) as there was to dislike.
In the comments, I was asked how this film compares with last year’s Pacific Rim. Good question. Both are giant Kaiju movies. Both are Legendary/Warner Bros. films. And both get a lot right. Mainly, they get their Kaiju right. As I noted in my Godzilla review, the new movie’s treatment of the big guy is fantastic. Not only are his scale and appearance imposing and powerful, but there’s a lot of strong character work going on in the pixels that animate him. You get what his objectives are and you can even understand his battle plan. Gareth Edwards does such a good job of getting you on his side that there are several moments during the end battle that will make you want to stand up and cheer, regardless of your feelings on the rest of the movie.
Edwards also does a fantastic job of setting Godzilla himself up. Seen only in fits and starts, from a series of fins protruding from the water to brief full body glimpses, he retains a satisfying sense of mystery up until the end. There, the film goes whole hog on the full body shots as Godzilla and one of the MUTOs wage war in San Francisco. Godzilla might wear you out with its human characters, but there’s no monster or battle fatigue.
Pacific Rim, on the other hand, wears you down a bit on both fronts. I believe that Rim would benefit from perhaps one less robot on Kaiju battle scene, just as I believe that the film suffers from a huge missed opportunity when it comes to developing its concept of “the drift.” The final version of the film explores surprisingly little in the way of character possibilities offered up by that conceit. It’s the perfect scenario to make the chances of overcoming external obstacles contingent upon the triumph over internal obstacles. There’s a little bit of that with Rinko Kikuchi’s character, but the movie could have gone full (as a friend once suggested) Strictly Ballroom here, with Hunnam and Kikuchi learning to work together – to dance – in a way that fuels their ultimate romantic entanglement.
While Pacific Rim has hugely broad characters, they almost sort of fit in with the old fashioned innocence of the film. It feels like Guillermo del Toro engineered the movie as something of a futuristic riff on those old WW2 propaganda reels, so the broadness feels earned (even if I personally find some of it grating). The characters in Godzilla are broad in a different way – they’re ciphers. There’s nothing cartoonish or exaggerated about them, which puts them miles away from the Pacific Rim universe. They are fairly bland. However, if the intent was to reduce their function to POV access points, they get the job done superbly. Since much of Godzilla is built around a slow, Jaws-like reveal, it helps to have plenty of different characters on the ground who can gape at his majesty without giving away the money shot every 5 minutes.
Pacific Rim boasts a higher quantity of Kaiju with varying designs and sizes. Its beautiful rainswept neon environment keeps them at arm’s length from our current reality. The destruction brought upon us by Godzilla and the battling MUTO’s feels much more recognizable, the terror more relatable. As I’ve said before – the monster stuff in Godzilla is fantastic. The set pieces are alternately suspenseful and grand and they don’t overdo it. The only fatigue you’ll feel from this movie is from the half-baked exposition that threatens to destroy all of the human scenes.
As far as preferences go, I’d have to see Godzilla again before I decided. While my review demonstrates a degree of disappointment, there’s enough praise coming from people I respect to warrant a second look. As it stands now, Pacific Rim beats it out for me as a movie – but the character of Godzilla himself is better than any single element of GDT’s film.
Maybe it comes down to this. If you like your Kaijus as beautifully anonymous cannon fodder, Pacific Rim wins. If you want them to be characters you can root for, Godzilla stands triumphant. Either way, if you like big lizards, you’ll probably be fine.
Having grown up in a religious family, Christian movie night was something that happened a lot more often than I care to admit. However, back when I was a teenager, my parents showed up one night with an unusually cool-looking DVD of a movie that had been recommended to them by a church leader. Curious to see what new kind of evangelical propaganda my parents had rented this time, I proceeded to watch the film with them expecting a heavy-handed snoozefest.
To my surprise, I was a few minutes in when Denzel Washington proceeded to dismember a band of cannibal raiders when I realized that this was in fact a real movie. My mom was horrified by the flick’s extreme violence and dark subject matter, but I instantly became a fan of the Hughes Brothers’ faith-based 2010 thriller, The Book of Eli. And with the film’s atomic apocalypse having apparently taken place in 2024, I think this is the perfect time to dive into why this grim parable might also be entertaining for horror fans.
Originally penned by gaming journalist and The Walking Dead: The Game co-writer Gary Whitta, the spec script for The Book of Eli was already making waves back in 2007 when it appeared on the coveted Blacklist. It wasn’t long before Columbia and Warner Bros. snatched up the rights to the project, hiring From Hell directors Albert and Allen Hughes while also garnering attention from industry heavyweights like Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman.
After a series of revisions by Anthony Peckham meant to make the story more consumer-friendly, the picture was finally released in January of 2010, with the finished film following Denzel as a mysterious wanderer making his way across a post-apocalyptic America while protecting a sacred book. Along the way, he encounters a run-down settlement controlled by Bill Carnegie (Gary Oldman), a man desperate to get his hands on Eli’s book so he can motivate his underlings to expand his empire. Unwilling to let this power fall into the wrong hands, Eli embarks on a dangerous journey that will test the limits of his faith.
SO WHY IS IT WORTH WATCHING?
Judging by the film’s box-office success, mainstream audiences appear to have enjoyed the Hughes’ bleak vision of a future where everything went wrong, but critics were left divided by the flick’s trope-heavy narrative and unapologetic religious elements. And while I’ll be the first to admit that The Book of Eli isn’t particularly subtle or original, I appreciate the film’s earnest execution of familiar ideas.
For starters, I’d like to address the religious elephant in the room, as I understand the hesitation that some folks (myself included) might have about watching something that sounds like Christian propaganda. Faith does indeed play a huge part in the narrative here, but I’d argue that the film is more about the power of stories than a specific religion. The entire point of Oldman’s character is that he needs a unifying narrative that he can take advantage of in order to manipulate others, while Eli ultimately chooses to deliver his gift to a community of scholars. In fact, the movie even makes a point of placing the Bible in between equally culturally important books like the Torah and Quran, which I think is pretty poignant for a flick inspired by exploitation cinema.
Sure, the film has its fair share of logical inconsistencies (ranging from the extent of Eli’s Daredevil superpowers to his impossibly small Braille Bible), but I think the film more than makes up for these nitpicks with a genuine passion for classic post-apocalyptic cinema. Several critics accused the film of being a knockoff of superior productions, but I’d argue that both Whitta and the Hughes knowingly crafted a loving pastiche of genre influences like Mad Max and A Boy and His Dog.
Lastly, it’s no surprise that the cast here absolutely kicks ass. Denzel plays the title role of a stoic badass perfectly (going so far as to train with Bruce Lee’s protégée in order to perform his own stunts) while Oldman effortlessly assumes a surprisingly subdued yet incredibly intimidating persona. Even Mila Kunis is remarkably charming here, though I wish the script had taken the time to develop these secondary characters a little further. And hey, did I mention that Tom Waits is in this?
AND WHAT MAKES IT HORROR ADJACENT?
Denzel’s very first interaction with another human being in this movie results in a gory fight scene culminating in a face-off against a masked brute wielding a chainsaw (which he presumably uses to butcher travelers before eating them), so I think it’s safe to say that this dog-eat-dog vision of America will likely appeal to horror fans.
From diseased cannibals to hyper-violent motorcycle gangs roaming the wasteland, there’s plenty of disturbing R-rated material here – which is even more impressive when you remember that this story revolves around the bible. And while there are a few too many references to sexual assault for my taste, even if it does make sense in-universe, the flick does a great job of immersing you in this post-nuclear nightmare.
The excessively depressing color palette and obvious green screen effects may take some viewers out of the experience, but the beat-up and lived-in sets and costume design do their best to bring this dead world to life – which might just be the scariest part of the experience.
Ultimately, I believe your enjoyment of The Book of Eli will largely depend on how willing you are to overlook some ham-fisted biblical references in order to enjoy some brutal post-apocalyptic shenanigans. And while I can’t really blame folks who’d rather not deal with that, I think it would be a shame to miss out on a genuinely engaging thrill-ride because of one minor detail.
With that in mind, I’m incredibly curious to see what Whitta and the Hughes Brothers have planned for the upcoming prequel series starring John Boyega…
There’s no understating the importance of a balanced media diet, and since bloody and disgusting entertainment isn’t exclusive to the horror genre, we’ve come up with Horror Adjacent – a recurring column where we recommend non-horror movies that horror fans might enjoy.
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