Yearly Archive: 2008

Ringed with popular anticipation in view of its producer’s involvement with the hit teleseries Lost, director Matt Reeves’ Cloverfield proves to be something more than the moviegoing customers might have expected.

The film is an American Godzilla, and I don’t mean the bloated Hollywood Godzilla of 1998. A larger-than-life disaster film, Cloverfield addresses the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, in much the same way that Inoshiro Honda’s Gojira, or Godzilla, of 1954, helped Japan to come belatedly to terms with the bombings in 1945 of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

And yes, I know: Giant-monster movies are dime-a-dozen fare, and so what do we need with another one? We don’t so much need another one, as we need somebody capable of doing one right – the way Fritz Lang did with Siegfried in 1924, or Honda with the original Godzilla. Cloverfield makes the cut, okay.

Such impossible menaces, after all, have served since ancient times to literalize humanity’s fears of threatening forces beyond reasonable control, from the Tiger Demon mythology of primeval Siam through the Germanic and British legends of Siegfried and Beowulf. (Robert Zemeckis’ 2007 version of Beowulf is more a matter of digital-effects overkill than of mythological resonance.)

Never mind that the American movie-import market had treated the 1954 Godzilla as merely another creature-feature extravaganza, drive-in escapism with trivialized English-language insert-footage and enough re-editing to diminish the myth-making allegory. In its authentic Japanese cut, Godzilla is a national epic on a par with Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai – same year, same studio. It took a while for America to catch on: The fire-breathing creature known as Godzilla is the A-bomb, re-imagined in mythological terms.

Yes, and it takes time for the popular culture to get a grip on a real-world disaster. Hollywood dealt at first with the 9/11 destruction of New York’s World Trade Center by dodging the issue, then gradually addressing the loss in such lifelike dramas as Spike Lee’s 25th Hour (2002), whose allusions to Ground Zero pointed toward an explicit depiction of the crisis in Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center (2006). There have been other such striking examples – but you get the idea. 

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