Movie Pseudo-Review: Jurassic World (2015)

I was 14 when I saw Jurassic Park (1993) in the theater. I loved it, of course, and couldn't wait for the inevitable sequels. When The Lost World: Jurassic Park came out in 1997, I saw it with a girl I liked (and married four years later). Although I generally enjoyed the film, it didn't have nearly the impact as the original, and I felt that the San Diego sequence significantly detracted from it.

I'm not entirely sure that I even saw Jurassic Park III in the theater in 2001 or if I first saw it on DVD. By that point, my expectations weren't particularly high. It was entertaining enough, and didn't have anything as stupid as its predecessor's San Diego scenes, but it was disappointing compared to the first film.

Thus, I was somewhat wary when I finally saw the Jurassic World teaser trailer. Sure, it looked pretty cool, but what were the odds that the fourth film in a franchise that had a sharp dip in quality with the first sequel would be any good?

Actually, the odds turned out to be pretty good.

Fortunately, Jurassic World turned out to much better than Lost World or Jurassic Park III. Surprisingly, I even enjoyed it more than Avengers: Age of Ultron. Sure, it's not quite as good as the original Jurassic Park, but how many films could claim that?

Rather than do one of my usual reviews, I think I'll list a few things that really stood out to me. Expect some spoilers ahead:

The Setting
Jurassic Park is set on Isla Nublar while The Lost World and Jurassic Park III are set on Isla Sorna (aka, "Site B"). The first island was meant to be the "showroom" while Site B was where the significant research was done. Although the first movie's pristine, soon-to-be-open park is a lot cleaner than the abandoned and decaying facilities seen in the second and third movies, all three movies have essentially the same setting; an isolated location where a small group of people find themselves at the mercy of uncontrolled dinosaurs. This worked well once, but it was feeling pretty stale by the third movie.

Jurassic World took a different approach. InGen, the company founded by John Hammond sometime before the first film, faced financial ruin and was eventually bought out by Simon Masrani. In fulfillment of Hammond's dying wish, Masrani established Jurassic World on Isla Nublar. The public portions of the amusement park take up the southern half of the island while the northern part contains research facilities. The abandoned Jurassic Park site, which remained effectively untouched since the 1993 incident, also happens to be located in the northern half of the island. By the time of the movie, the park has successfully operated for ten years.

It's refreshing to see the franchise change its setting from an untested and empty park with barely contained animals, or an abandoned facility where the dinosaurs are entirely free to roam, to a well-established and heavily populated park (one where the presence of children isn't an anomaly). It's also apparent that the new owners have learned from their predecessor's mistakes. Instead of electrified fences, animal paddocks use solid concrete walls. On top of that, the facility is proactive in managing risks, including running drills and maintaining a special team for containing escaped animals.

Although we know that there will be dinosaur-related mayhem, part of the fun is watching the well-oiled machine of Jurassic World break down through mistakes, misjudgments, and years of complacency.

Simon Masrani

A movie billionaire CEO that
doesn't deserve to be eaten.

Masrani (Irrfan Khan) easily could have been cast as a villain, or at least as a cynical money-grubbing CEO like Hammond's nephew, Peter Ludlow in The Lost World. Instead, he's a very likeable character who explicitly wants both his park's visitors and the animals to be happy. Although he makes some misjudgments, he's generally cautious; an oddity in disaster films like this one. This is most apparent when he first sees the park's future attraction, the Indominus Rex (a hybrid of multiple dinosaur species and several modern animals).

Instead of gleefully rubbing his hands together and monologuing about how much money the new attraction will bring into the park, he immediately becomes concerned about the animal's apparent aggressiveness. He asks his operations manager, Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) to bring in Jurassic World's behavioral researcher, Owen Grady (Chris Pratt), to evaluate the animal and the security of its pen.

When the Indominus inevitably escapes and starts eating park personnel, Masrani personally flies a helicopter loaded with an armed team to kill the animal. Sadly, pursuit of the Indominus leads to the escape of dozens of pterosaurs, which attack the helicopter and destroy it. Masrani's popularity with his employees becomes obvious when we see that several control center employees are left stunned or in tears when video feeds show their boss go down.

InGen's Dinosaurs versus Current Paleontology
At the time of Jurassic Park's release, the depiction of the dinosaurs was considered to be reasonably accurate (with notable exceptions such as the size of the velociraptors). By the release of Jurassic Park III, it was widely accepted that dinosaurs such as velociraptor would have been covered in feathers. The 2007 discovery of quill knobs on well-preserved velociraptor forearm bones is considered to be definitive proof of this.

It's possible that the 2001 film was attempting to explain away the growing discrepancy between everyone's favorite kitchen-stalking terrors and current paleontological reconstructions with a brief line from Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill). When asked why he was still digging up dinosaur bones when there were living examples on Isla Sorna, Dr. Grant responded that "What John Hammond and InGen did at Jurassic Park is create genetically engineered theme park monsters. Nothing more and nothing less."

Genetically engineered theme park monsters
(also one of the greatest scenes of 20th century cinema)

More accurate, but not what gave an entire generation kitchen-based nightmares

When Jurassic World's trailer came out, the franchise was attacked by paleontologists for continuing to portray the dinosaurs inaccurately. Rather than introduce a huge inconsistency into the film series by updating the dinosaurs, the writers of the new film took advantage of statements made in Jurassic Park that the DNA of the resurrected animals wasn't entirely ancient. When Masrani confronts InGen's chief geneticist, Dr. Henry Wu, and accuses him of creating a monster in the Indominus Rex, Wu retorts:

You are acting like we are engaged in some kind of mad science but we are doing what we have done from the beginning. Nothing in Jurassic World is natural! We have always filled gaps in the genomes with the DNA of other animals. And if their genetic code was pure many of them would look quite different. But you didn't ask for reality, you asked for more teeth [my emphasis].

With that single line, Jurassic World explains why the films' animals haven't kept up with modern paleontology; at the genetic level they're Frankensteinian creations rather than true dinosaurs. In addition to a hodgepodge of dinosaur genetic material, Dr. Wu admits that the Indominus Rex's genome includes cuttlefish DNA to accelerate its growth rate and tree frog DNA to allow it to adapt to a tropical climate.

Owen Grady
Jurassic Park, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, and Jurassic Park III have two types of people: victims and survivors. The victims are generally random people or those who think they have everything under control. The survivors typically include at least one expert (e.g., Alan Grant or Ian Malcolm) whose skill or experience allow himself and a chosen few to avoid getting eaten.

Jurassic World's Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) introduces one more type into the franchise: the action hero. Grady is a Navy veteran and an expert on deadly animals, has earned the respect of a velociraptor pack (although they're far from tame), and is perpetually cool under pressure. The character is a cliche, but one that the Jurassic Park franchise could really use. Heck, Claire Dearing's nephew simply comes out and says what we're all thinking when Owen Grady is leading the raptor pack from his motorcycle: "Your boyfriend's a bad@$$."

I loved Dr. Alan Grant's character in the first and third Jurassic Park movies, but he definitely couldn't call himself a raptor pack's alpha.

Bad@$$, indeed

I'm looking forward to Jurassic World II.
A-

Marshmallow Peeps and Irrational Hatred

In their baskets this Easter morning, my children once again found one of their favorite candies: marshmallow Peeps. Fortunately, the Easter Bunny knew not to put any of those in my basket. He knows I have an undying hatred of Peeps.

Before the spring of 2003, I simply disliked them. Even as a child, marshmallows were generally too sweet for my taste and I didn't like their gritty layer of sugar. But in April 2003, Brigham Young University's newspaper, The Daily Universe, turned my dislike into something more.

To be honest, I never really cared for the paper. The Daily Universe obviously focused on the activities of humanities majors at the expense of the hard sciences. The paper would gloss over or entirely ignore impressive and internationally recognized accomplishments from BYU's engineering, physics, chemistry, and biology students and professors while articles about life as a [enter title of humanities major here] would make the front page. The journalist brother of a fellow engineering student actually told him that those who served as editors and writers for the newspaper had little interest in the hard sciences and paid almost no attention to what happened on our side of campus.

In April of 2003, I was a member of BYU's Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) team. At the time, we were developing some of the world's smallest airplanes, several of which were equipped with tiny cameras and could act as surveillance drones (this was before such things were ubiquitous). We had just returned from the annual Micro Air Vehicle Competition held at the University of Florida, having competed against 20 other schools, one of which was from Germany and another from South Korea. Despite stiff competition, we placed first in the design and surveillance portions of the competition and fifth in the endurance portion, giving us second place overall.

Our advisor, Dr. Bowman, was very proud of the team and called The Daily Universe, encouraging them to interview us about our work and the competition. He had a preliminary phone interview with one of the writers and expected that the team members would soon speak to one of their reporters. But the team was never contacted and the phone interview served as the sole source of an April 7, 2003 article that appeared around page 15 of the day's paper. The 585 word article included no photos and mentioned no other names beyond that of our advisor.

A mere two days later, the entire top half of the front page of The Daily Universe was taken up by an article on life as a male ballet student (yes, this was considered to be front page material). The 992 word article had a large, full color photograph and included interviews with several dancers. Needless to say, the difference between this article and the treatment the MAV team received further proved what we all suspected about the University paper. We were annoyed by being upstaged by an article on men in tights, but we thought we could take it in stride.

But the very next day, a small color photo of a yellow Peep appeared just above The Daily Universe's title, along with the line "Peeps heat up Easter traditions" and the page number of the article. On the referenced page was found an enormous color photo of a marshmallow Peep. I still remember that absurd picture; a disgusting, stale, gritty mockery of a chicken stretching nearly 3/4 of the page's height. The 753 word article included interviews with several students and alumni on the role of Peeps in their Easter traditions.

An article on chicken-shaped marshmallow novelties was accompanied by an image almost twice as large as any of the MAV team's airplanes, showed more interest in actual individuals, and ran 168 words longer than a perfunctory story about engineering students' accomplishments in an international competition involving experimental technology. Peeps. The tacky and barely edible seasonal treat.

I hate those things

In the end, we could only assume that the editors' bias allowed an article about an inanimate object with no real connection to BYU to receive more attention than one about students studying a field in which the paper's staff happened to have little interest. While I'm certain there was no offense intended, the absurdity of the episode annoyed me to an unprecedented degree. (It's a good thing I missed their 2004 article on Peeps; I simply stopped reading the paper after 2003.) Eventually this annoyance focused not on any human being, but entirely on the face of the whole incident: Peeps.

Yes, I have a fiery hatred for Peeps.

(But, even if I hadn't been on the MAV team at all, I still would have thought the article was stupid.)

This Day In History: "Underway on Nuclear Power"

The USS Nautilus (SSN 571) was the world's first nuclear-powered submarine. Although officially launched in January of 1954, further construction and testing was required before she could be put to sea. On this day in 1955, Nautilus finally announced that she was "Underway on nuclear power."

By May, 1955, Nautilus broke the records for longest submerged cruise and highest sustained speed for a submarine. In February of 1957, the submarine reached her 60,000th nautical mile; i.e., the distance cruised by Jules Verne's Nautilus in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. On August 3, 1958, she became the first vessel to reach the North Pole.

SSN 571 made her final voyage in 1979 and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1982. The submarine is now an exhibit at the U.S. Navy Submarine Force Library and Museum near Groton, Connecticut.

2014's Christmas Movie: The Magic Christmas Tree (1964)

The Christmas movie tradition continues. Like last year, I started the month by inflicting a Christmas-themed movie on the Warhammer 40,000 gang. Despite repeated warnings beforehand, Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny (1972) earned a lot of groaning and cries of despair. For the evening of Christmas itself, my mother and I watched the RiffTrax take on The Magic Christmas Tree (1964).

The movie is awful, of course. Not Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny awful, though, which is the cinematic equivalent to the time I had an ingrown toenail treated in Mexico and the doctor didn't think local anesthetic was necessary. No, The Magic Christmas Tree is more like the esophageal motility and pH study I had a couple years ago. The one where they put a probe up my nose and down my throat.

Good times...

Again, Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett of MST3K fame try their best to get us through this movie. Before the feature presentation, though, they treat us to some vintage toy ads, at least one of which my mother remembered. They follow this up with a hilarious cartoon from 1933 called The Shanty Where Santy Claus Lives. I suppose I should rephrase that; the cartoon itself isn't funny in the least. It's one more example of the "wacky animated characters sing and perform slapstick comedy to a jaunty tune" genre of shorts that were so common in the early '30s. It's the riffers' jokes that make the film worth watching.

The film proper starts during Halloween when a husky kid named Mark convinces his two friends to check out the rundown house on the hill. (Once Mark is referred to as "husky", Nelson, Corbett, and Murphy can't help but to constantly refer to that particular character trait.) The home is owned by an older woman who the kids believe to be a witch.

At the same time that the friends are approaching the home, the woman is trying to get her cat, Lucifer(!), out of the tree. The friends eventually chicken out, but Mark eventually comes face to face with the woman. She convinces/frightens/bribes him to get the cat down. I honestly don't remember why he ends up doing it since the film has more padding than almost any movie I've ever seen and my attention started to wander.

Mark succeeds in getting Lucifer down, but he loses his grip and falls. When he wakes up, the world has transformed from black and white to color a la Wizard of Oz, while the old woman is now wearing a literal witch's hat. (Note: do not attempt to emulate a classic movie in your zero-budget film, as it only reminds people of how much they would prefer to be watching that movie than this one.)

Despite her literal witch costume, the old woman says that she's a good witch and wants to reward Mark for getting her cat out of the tree. She gives the boy a box containing a magic ring. Also inside the box is a seed that will grow into a magic Christmas tree when it's buried with the wishbone of the Thanksgiving turkey, the ring is spun around the wearer's finger nine times, and three magic words are spoken. Or something. The whole thing is ridiculously convoluted and is the butt of several of the riffers' jokes. I was surprised that none of them suggested that the three magic words would be "klaatu, barada, nikto".

Well, it's more of a "color" film than it was before 

A cheap calendar effect shows us that most of November has passed and the next thing we know, Mark is planting the magic seed. Well, "next thing we know" is a bit too generous to the film's editor. Marvel as Mark pulls the seed out of his drawer! Thrill as the husky boy explains to his pet turtle what he's about to do! Sweat with anticipation as Mark puts on his slippers, crawls out his bedroom window, eventually finds a place to plant the seed, slowly digs a hole, plants the seed, spins the ring, and says the magic words! All in real time! Seriously, the time it takes for Mark to actually plant the seed is given more screen time than major plot points later in the film.

By the next day, the tree is fully grown. The movie then "delights us" with the endless sequence in which Mark's dumb-as-dirt father struggles to get his lawnmower started, haphazardly trims the grass while "humorous" sound effects (mostly circus horns) fill the soundtrack, and then destroys the machine by running it into the 7 foot tall tree that sprung up on his property overnight. Unable to cut down the tree with a saw or an ax, dad decides the tree is there to stay.

Fast forward to the night of Christmas Eve. Mark's parents and sister (I guess, I don't think the character is ever introduced) find themselves entirely unprepared for Christmas. They don't even have a tree. The family goes out to find one while Mark stays home under the pretense that he has gifts to wrap. Once they're gone, the boy tries to figure out how to use the tree, which the old woman claimed will grant three wishes. The tree begins talking to Mark, its tone and unintentional innuendo providing the riffers with a wealth of material to work with.

Mark's first wish is to have "just an hour" of the kind of power that the tree has. No, the tree doesn't impose any time limits on his wishes, nor does it immediately act on his statement, preventing him from asking for more than an hour. The boy is apparently too stupid to realize that he could just as easily ask for a day, or a week, or a lifetime of near omnipotence.

Once given phenomenal cosmic power, Mark turns night to day (nobody seems to notice) and proceeds to play silly pranks on people. In fact, other than making a woman throw a pie into a baker's face, all he really does is make people's vehicles drive away from them, forcing them to "comically" run after them. A deliveryman, a cop, and several firemen all find themselves chasing after their cars or trucks in another excruciatingly drawn out scene.

"I wish I had never agreed to star in this movie" 

Mark, having utterly wasted his first wish on a single "hour of power" that he used to commit budget-friendly tricks, has to think hard for his second wish. When the tree says that it doesn't have all night since Santa Claus will soon be there, Mark decides that his second wish will be to have Santa Claus all to himself for a day. Not only does this selfish act conjure up Kris Kringle in the boy's living room, but it confines him to a chair located next to the magic tree. Mark declares that Santa will spend the day giving him whatever he wants, which leads to... nothing really. I'm certain I was fully conscious during this scene, but I have no idea what happened. I know Mark told the jolly fat man that he was there to give the little brat whatever he asked for, but in the very next scene the kid is nowhere to be found, leaving Santa to talk to an obnoxious magic tree.

Everything that follows this is tremendously confusing and makes the amount of time spent establishing the planting of the tree and the dad's first encounter with it even more absurd. Sure, when a couple minutes of footage and a line or two of dialog could have established that the seed had been planted, had fully grown in a day, and was indestructible, the filmmakers instead give us endless footage that suggests the editor was out for a coffee break. But when events that are essential to understanding the plot are involved, the movie skimps on the exposition. I suppose it could have been worse; Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny revels in overabundant explanatory dialog, all delivered in the most stilted manner possible.

Anyway, the tree sadly informs Santa that he can't be freed until Mark comes back. Mark is next seen in broad daylight in the woods with what appears to be a pellet gun. Presumably it's Christmas day, Santa missed his annual trip, and the extent of Mark's demands from Santa has been... a pellet gun? So, not only is this kid a selfish brat, but he's immensely stupid to boot, squandering effectively limitless power on stupid tricks and a single toy he could have gotten for any given Christmas.

While wandering around the woods, Mark runs into a giant who declares him to be his slave because the boy is so selfish. Huh?

Up to this point, we had indeed seen a witch, pointy hat and all, a magic, wish-granting tree, and Santa Claus himself. But with those few exceptions, nothing else about the world of The Magic Christmas Tree has led us to believe that child enslaving giants roam the woods. Thus threatened, Mark reneges on his behavior, wishes that it were the day before (this line is the only real indication that this part of the movie takes place on Christmas day), and that his previous wishes had been undone. The disappointed giant declares that he'll have to wait for another selfish little boy.

Having thus learned his lesson (i.e., that selfishness leads to enslavement by giants), Mark wakes up in black and white land to find the old woman looking over him. As we all suspected, he had been knocked unconscious by the fall from the tree and all the color sequences were a dream. Nevertheless, his actions had gotten Lucifer out of the tree and the woman wants to reward him for it. The boy balks initially, afraid that he'll start the whole cycle over again, but instead of a magic ring the woman offers him milk and cookies.

On a side note, while the cheap Christmas novelty that passes as the magic ring gets a lot of attention, it has little to do with the magic tree itself. All Mark does is spin it several times before saying the magic words, which just seems overcomplicated.

This movie further confirms what I suspected with Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny; MST3K did the best of the bad Christmas movies with Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964) and the Mexican-produced Santa Claus (1959), leaving the worst films in the public-domain for RiffTrax to mock. I assume that Mike Nelson and the gang prepare for each RiffTrax episode the same way they they prepared for MST3K; by watching each movie multiple times and writing down the jokes as they came to them. I can't imagine those guys make enough money off RiffTrax to justify doing that to themselves.

F (the movie is an atrocity, but the riffing is top notch)

Music Review: Wonders (The Piano Guys)

Five months is definitely the longest I've ever neglected this blog. Unfortunately, I've not had a whole lot to say on any non-40K subject. However, the Piano Guys have given me something to write about with their new album Wonders.

I first heard about the Piano Guys when somebody linked to their video for "Cello Wars"; an entertaining take on John Williams' most famous Star Wars themes: "The Imperial March", the Force theme, and "Duel of the Fates". It wasn't until much later that I found out that the well-known pianist (at least in Utah) John Schmidt, who I had seen perform at BYU, was the group's piano player.

After seeing the videos for "Titanium/Pavane", "The Cello Song", and others, I was eager to buy their first album, The Piano Guys. They followed this up with another series of videos, including the fantastic "Rockelbel's Canon" (still one of my favorite videos), which ended up in their second album, The Piano Guys 2.

The Piano Guys are still going strong with their latest album The Piano Guys 3 Wonders, which was released earlier this month. The album includes:

"Story of My Life": The Piano Guys are apparently fans of One Direction, having done at least two versions of their songs (the other I'm aware of is "What Makes You Beautiful"). Most of the reason why I like this track is because, like so many of their other works, I can't help but to mentally associate it with their video, which was designed to be a tearjerker.

"Let It Go": Of course they did a cover of "Let It Go"; who didn't? What makes their version unique is how they've mixed it with a classical piece, specifically Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons: Winter".

"Ants Marching/Ode to Joy": I have to admit that I was completely unfamiliar with the Dave Matthew's Band's "Ants Marching" before hearing the Piano Guys' version. If it weren't for the Piano Guys or Weird Al, I would know practically nothing about popular songs or bands. Once again they've mixed it with a classical piece, "Ode to Joy" from Beethoven's "9th Symphony".

"Father's Eyes": A rare song from the Piano Guys; the vast majority of their work is instrumental with occasional non-lyrical vocals in background. Although I like the track, the singer's voice is a bit too high for my tastes.

"Kung Fu Piano: Cello Ascends": This is another cover of a modern work that incorporates a  classical piece. In this case it's an arrangement of "Oogway Ascends" from Hans Zimmer's score for "Kung Fu Panda" (hey, something I recognize!), mixed with Chopin's Prelude No. 20, Op. 28. The video for this was actually filmed on the Great Wall of China.

"Summer Jam": I believe this may be one of the album's original pieces. It's upbeat and kind of fun, but rather forgettable.

"Batman Evolution": Definitely one of the highlights of the album. After opening with Danny Elfman's theme from Batman (1989), the Piano Guys sample music from the campy '60s Batman TV show, followed by another bit of Elfman's score, and then Hans Zimmer's and James Newton Howard's Batman theme from Batman Begins (2005)/The Dark Knight (2008). They finish off the track with a brilliant mix of Elfman's and Zimmer's/Howard's themes. The '60s theme is noticeably absent here, but it would almost certainly feel out of place if it had been included.

"Don't You Worry Child": Another actual song; this time it's a cover of one by Swedish House Mafia (no, I'd never heard of them). Interestingly, the Piano Guys have given the song an Indian-feel and have replaced the song's original words with Hindi lyrics. This may be one of my favorite pieces from the Piano Guys, probably because the singer, Shweta Subram, has a beautiful voice and because I'm a sucker for songs with foreign lyrics (most of my favorite Josh Groban songs are in Italian or Spanish).

"Home": This is a cover of Philip Philip's song (I haven't heard of this guy either, am I that out of touch with modern pop culture?). For people like myself, they've thrown in a bit of Antonín Dvořák's Symphony No. 9 in E Minor ("New World Symphony"). This piece starts out a little slow after the energetic "Don't You Worry Child", but it picks up near the end. And anything with Dvořák has to be good.

"The Mission/How Great Thou Art": This is a mix of a theme from the film The Mission (1986) and the well-known hymn "How Great Thou Art". The music is beautiful, of course, but it's best heard while watching the video, which was filmed at Iguazu Falls and at the foot of the famous Cristo Redentor statue in Brazil.

"Because of You": After some Sunday afternoon music, the Piano Guys give us something more upbeat. I don't know if this is a cover of something or one of their original works.

"Pictures at an Exhibition": This is the Piano Guys' rendition of the "Promenade" melody, variations of which are repeated throughout Modest Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition". It also happens to be one of my favorite classical works. While staying faithful to Mussorgky's original, it gives it a much more modern sound.

Although a fan of their previous two albums, I thought that Wonders was stronger than Piano Guys 2. It has more memorable tracks, a lot of variety, and some of their best songs.
A-

By the way, it's always a good idea to watch the Piano Guys' videos. For several of their arrangements, the visuals are a lot of the fun (most particularly for "Rockelbel's Canon").

Movie Review: Godzilla (2014)

I rarely see movies in the theaters anymore. I don't like crowds, I don't like having to follow someone else's schedule, and I don't like the prices. In the rare cases when I do go to the theater, it's usually weeks after a film's release when there are less people.

However, I've been a Godzilla fan for about 25 years. And I've been waiting to see this movie since it was officially announced in 2010. When I realized that Godzilla (2014) was going to be released a) on my Friday off and b) when most people are in school or at work, I decided to see a movie on its opening day for the first time in years.

The opening credits consists of footage taken of a highly classified event from 1954. For years the world was convinced that the US Government's activities in the Pacific during that time consisted of extensive nuclear testing intended to prove new bomb designs and to intimidate the Soviet Union. However, brief images of an enormous aquatic creature and an atomic bomb with a hastily painted crossed-out monster on the casing show that a lot more was going on than nuclear brinksmanship.

Fast forward to 1999 where Dr. Ichiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) of Project Monarch, the secretive organization that was involved in the 1954 event, is taken deep into a collapsed mine in the Philippines. The elevated radiation levels are suspicious enough, but the enormous fossilized bones and the two cocoons confirm his fears. Although one cocoon is intact and appears to be entirely dormant, the second was obviously breached shortly before its discovery. The freshly dug tunnel leading away from the cocoon puts Project Monarch on high alert.

Whatever was in the cocoon makes a beeline for Janjira, Japan, producing seismic waves that has chief engineer Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) worried about the safety of the nuclear plant where he and his wife (Juliette Binoche) are employed. Soon the reactor has been breached and the plant goes into lockdown, trapping Brody's wife behind a shielded door in a lethally radioactive hallway. As Brody mourns, the ground begins to shake even more violently and the plant collapses into a crater with a roaring sound that's unlike any caused by an earthquake or structural failure. The Brodys' son, Ford (played as an adult by Aaron Taylor-Johnson), has the misfortune of seeing the collapse from his schoolroom. Janjira is immediately evacuated and is permanently abandoned.

Fifteen years later, Ford is a US Navy ordnance disposal technician living in San Francisco with his wife and child. Not long after coming off active duty, the US consulate in Japan informs him that his estranged father has been arrested trying to enter the quarantine zone around Janjira. After retrieving his father and returning him to his apartment near the abandoned city, Ford finds articles on the disaster posted all over the walls, as well as an eclectic collection of books; the oddest being a text on the use of echo-location in animals.

The very next day, Ford finds himself entering the quarantine zone with his father under protest. Although the area is supposed to be extremely radioactive, Joe's Geiger counter finds no trace of radiation. The two return to their former home and find Joe's computer disks on which he has recordings of the seismic wave that was detected prior to the disaster. Joe and Ford are captured almost immediately thereafter, but instead of being outright arrested, they're taken to the former site of the nuclear plant where a enormous project is underway. As Joe is being questioned, Dr. Serizawa realizes that they've found one of the only survivors of the Janjira disaster who knows anything about the events that led up to the collapse of the plant. 

Unfortunately for Joe, Ford, and the Monarch team, activity within the huge cocoon growing in the location of the plant's destroyed reactor is reaching its apex. The radiation emitted by the ruined reactor has been completely absorbed by the creature inside, which has been feeding on it for the past 15 years. When it emerges, the insect-like, electromagnetic pulse-emitting Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism (MUTO) immediately destroys the surrounding research facility, unfurls a set of wings, and flies off in search of the MUTO that had been hibernating inside the intact cocoon found in 1999.

With the cat out of the bag, Dr. Serizawa reveals the truth; the newly hatched MUTO is but one example of an ancient creature that lived long before humanity. These creatures fed off of radiation, which was more plentiful on ancient Earth, and became dormant when the background radiation levels dropped off. With the advent of the atomic age, some of these creatures were awakened, one of the first being an enormous reptilian "alpha predator" that Serizawa calls Gojira. Although believed to be destroyed in 1954, Serizawa suspects that it may only be hidden deep in the ocean and that it may be humanity's only hope for eliminating the MUTOs.

Godzilla (which is how everyone but Serizawa pronounces the word) may have been inactive for 60 years, but it doesn't take him long to detect the presence of the MUTO and to track it down to its first stopping place in Hawaii. Unfortunately for Ford, the airport where he's supposed to catch his plane back to San Francisco is where Godzilla and the MUTO will have their first encounter. As is standard for a Godzilla film, the rest of the movie focuses on the ever-increasing futility of humanity's efforts to control the unfolding events.

I enjoyed this movie quite a bit. The special effects are amazing, the cast is good (especially Ken Watanabe and Bryan Cranston), and the subject is treated with a seriousness that I hadn't seen outside of a Japanese Godzilla film.

It's the latter item that really sets Godzilla (2014) apart from Godzilla (1998). It was very obvious in the latter film that Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich had no respect for Godzilla as a character. The movie features ridiculous characters like "Mayor Ebert" (a painfully obvious parody of Roger Ebert), a buffoonish military represented primarily by a belligerent commander and his stuttering subordinate, protagonists that can't decide if they're in a comedy or a disaster film, and a giant iguana that looks and acts nothing like Toho's creation. The big iguana was such a disappointment for Toho that the 2001 Japanese film Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (I love how literally they translated the title) incorporated the American monster into Godzilla canon by stating that New York had been attacked in 1998 by some creature that the Americans had mistaken for the real Godzilla. By 2004, Godzilla: Final Wars had renamed the American monster "Zilla". When Zilla attacks Sydney, Australia, the real Godzilla promptly knocks him into the Sydney Opera House and apparently kills him with his atomic breath (the 1998 Godzilla's lack of atomic breath was widely panned by Godzilla fans).

By contrast, it's obvious that faithfulness to the source material was foremost on the minds of the makers of the most recent film. Not only does the creature physically resemble Toho's famous monster suits, but the latest Godzilla behaves in an identical manner to his Japanese counterpart. He is more like a force of nature than merely an animal. Although more or less indifferent to humanity, Godzilla is the hero of the film by virtue of opposing another, more destructive monster.

The filmmakers also understand a key principle that Devlin and Emmerich do not; if you want an audience to take something as absurd as a giant radioactive reptile seriously, you need to surround it with realistic people and events. Although the characters aren't continuously dour, there are no comic relief characters in Godzilla. Even better, the director and writers have completely omitted that most annoying of disaster movie elements that I'm certain is taught in Film 101: the completely unnecessary human villain. There is no popularity-seeking mayor endangering the populace, there's no sinister organization trying to maintain its secrets long after the monster is loose, and there's no mad general willing to nuke a populated city to destroy the menace.

Yes, Godzilla does have Project Monarch, but the organization's motives are in nowise sinister, despite Joe Brody's obsession. Once the MUTO hatches, the military steps in and 60 years of secrecy are quickly ended in the interests of warning nearby populations. And yes, there's a strong difference of opinion between Admiral Stenz (David Strathairn) and Dr. Serizawa on how the monsters should be dealt with (as usual, nukes are involved). Serizawa believes that Godzilla is 'a force for balance' and that interference is futile. However, the Admiral makes it clear that his interest is in preserving the lives of millions of people. With so much at stake, he simply cannot share Serizawa's faith in an unpredictable force like Godzilla and trust that he won't turn on humanity immediately after dispatching the MUTOs.

Contrary to expectations, Godzilla doesn't use cheap tricks to make the audience side with Serizawa. Admiral Stenz is shown to be sincere in his motives, logical in his conclusions, and conservative in his strategies. The disagreement isn't portrayed as a matter of right versus wrong or scientists versus the military, but as a serious dilemma in which neither side is obviously right or wrong. In other words, Godzilla gives us a more realistic portrayal of human behavior and motivation than so many other movies that aren't about giant radioactive monsters.

If I had one complaint about Godzilla it's that Godzilla himself doesn't get quite enough screentime (the MUTOs get a lot more attention). Like Jaws (1975), the director keeps the monster in the background for much of the film and saves the real monster versus monster action for the very end. But the few appearances we do get are glorious. I love Pacific Rim (2013), but not a single scene in Guillermo del Toro's love letter to kaiju eiga compares to the first time we see Godzilla let loose his iconic roar.

That scene, and at least two more that I won't give away, put such enormous grins on my face that my cheeks hurt for hours afterward.
A-

Book Review: The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks

Late last year I reviewed Max Brooks' 2006 novel World War Z, the follow-up to The Zombie Survival Guide, published in 2003. While the bulk of the Guide consists of tips for surviving a zombie apocalypse, my favorite part is the "Recorded Attacks" chapter, which illustrates that the zombie virus, solanum, has been infecting humans for thousands of years. Thanks to limited human interaction between continents and secret zombie-fighting groups like the Japanese Shield Society, the world had avoided a global pandemic (until World War Z, that is).

The Zombie Survival Guide contains just over 60 recorded events, ranging from an African outbreak in 60,000 B.C. (as recorded in cave paintings), to a case in the U.S. Virgin Islands in 2002. Theses events are presented clinically, like Brooks' other publications, which actually makes them more effective.

In keeping with the current trend of releasing graphic novels as tie-ins to popular books, in 2009 Brooks published The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks, which contains illustrated adaptations of 12 of the Guide's historical events. I'm not certain how they chose which stories to include, but it seems that most of the stories in Recorded Attacks are those that the Guide presents with the most detail or that are the most "historically" relevant. However, I suspect that at least a couple were included because they were particularly gruesome in illustrated form.

The comic books I grew up on were a lot different

Recorded Attacks primarily lets the pictures do the talking. The illustrator, Ibraim Roberson, using a limited palette of black, white, and gray, ably depicts the horror and the tremendous amount of gore that we only imaged in the previous books.

What text we do get is used to set the seen or to clarify what we're seeing. It consists mostly of blurbs lifted from the Guide's Recorded Attacks chapter and thus carries the same cold, factual tone as the previous book. The contrast between the matter-of-fact text and the visceral images is extraordinarily effective.

A Word on Content
Obviously The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks is filled with images of violence; it's a graphic novel about zombie attacks, after all. The illustrations may be in black and white, but the lack of color does little to reduce their impact. Additionally, Recorded Attacks contains a few scenes of non-sexual nudity. One involves the "corpse" of a young woman that is removed from a shallow grave (she quickly attacks those who disinterred her) while another shows a partially dressed woman chained up in the hold of a slave ship along with dozens of other slaves.

I would strongly recommend this book to zombie fans, particularly those who enjoy the horrifying ghoul-plagued universe that Max Brooks has created. And it should go without saying that I can only recommend it to mature adults who are not easily offended.
A-