Reviews Worth Reading
It is a movie with no individual voice and, appropriately enough, it treats language as an impediment to be renounced. Language in It is either an echo or agent of fear. The bullies and auxiliary villains perceive language as intractable from their dominance.
The Thing’s lack of a stable form worked for Carpenter, who was able to squeeze a pure and palpable uncertainty out of never knowing who or what the Thing exactly was. But in Heijningen’s version, it seems to be more a matter of horror tradition than the transcription of a bold idea.
The pay-off is stalled beyond normal human tolerance, as though Godzilla was a nervous groom who simply won’t commit to marriage until he has enough buildup. Even advertising the closeted meanings of such serious-contra-seriousness idioms native to the giant monster bash as nature vs man and the brutalities of war, the dialogue in “Godzilla” asserts itself to such meaning like a crowbar asserts itself to a jammed service door. This is when it remembers to have dialogue at all.
Cloverfield manages to encourage us to hold on to those we love and enjoy any day that isn’t the last day of our life. It manages to do so on the run, which it owes to a snappy script and Miller’s motor-mouth, his comedic tension, his well-meaning worry.
Gojira is all performance. Yes, the monster film’s propensity for overacting is here to some extent, but its images still reflect the power that must be innate in the language we cannot hear, which cannot be ignored any more than Serizawa can ignore the child’s prayer over the radio, calling him to fight destruction with destruction.