Reviews Too Late: Solemnity

While I was traveling, I caught up with some recent pop-culture blockbusters (by watching them on airplanes), and now I have a question: Where did all the damn solemnity come from?

When you watch a genre film, there are certain things you have a right to expect from that genre.  And when you find that these things are not only missing, but replaced with a lot of tedious claptrap presented with the solemnity of a state funeral, I think you’ve got a right to complain.

Let’s look at Godzilla 2014.  There’s some first-rate acting by the first-rate Bryan Cranston, as an anguished nuclear engineer suffering from the loss of his wife and home.  (The first-rate Ken Watanabe is also in the film, but largely wasted.)  The main characters are well drawn, psychologically complex, and sympathetic.  The story is fairly original, as movies about giant radioactive lizards go.   The special effects are incredibly impressive.

What the movie doesn’t have is what you go to a Godzilla movie for.

Firstly, you go to see a Godzilla movie to see Godzilla, but in this latest interaction the title character gets very little screen time.  You only see Godzilla for maybe ten minutes.

But more importantly, you watch Godzilla to see him kick the living shit out of the Army and lay a major city to waste.  That’s what Godzilla is for.  I mean, he may also fight Mothra or Megalon or whatever, but the reason he’s there is to thrash the armed forces and flatten a lot of skyscrapers.  And that doesn’t happen in the 2014 film.

So what we have is a very well-done movie that completely misses its own point.  And is also dreadfully, dreadfully solemn and portentous.  It’s more solemn than a Biblical epic, more solemn than a late Bergman film.

Godzilla even dies at the end, and then returns from the dead.  Just like Jesus!

Solemnity isn’t out of place in film, of course, but you’ve got to have something to be solemn about: some revelation about the human condition, some statement to make about the universe.  A revised version of a classic movie lizard doesn’t qualify.  The CGI version of a guy in a rubber costume does not justify a solemnity equal to that of the revelation of stone tablets from Sinai.

This is pop culture.  Let it be what it is.

Which brings me to X-Men: Days of Future Past.  Holy cripes, this one is serious.  Though it borrows the plot of The Terminator, pretty much, with a character sent back in time to prevent an assassination, it’s really about genocide, with side trips into Professor Xavier’s drug addiction, the sacrifice of mutant warriors in Vietnam, Beast’s depression, Mystique’s obsession, and Richard Nixon as a sympathetic character.

You watch superhero movies in order to see people in long johns thump each other.  DoFP gives us mutants vs. big robots, but it’s just not any fun.  It’s all so pontifical and grim.  The special effects don’t cause awe and wonder, they’re just there to pound us into submission with their massive self-importance.

It’s not like there’s a huge, important message here.  “Big evil fighting robots are bad” is not a proposition that will keep philosophers up late at night.  “Let’s all have tolerance for super-mutants” is not a cause that will bring a million people to demonstrate on the Washington Mall.  Whyfore all the angst?

I blame the Dark Knight.  Now our heroes all have to be grimdark an’ stuff.  I think this fine essay on manpain shows you how tedious all that is.

And then there’s the movie that actually prompted this essay, My Name is Modesty (2003), a low-budget film based on Peter O’Donnell’s Modesty Blaise.  Apparently the film was made— and went straight to video— because the studio wanted to keep the rights to make a future Modesty Blaise film, with Quentin Tarantino, that was never actually made.  Which makes perfect sense, if you’ve ever been in the picture business.

Even granted that the film had no budget, a single set, and was shot in 20 days, the film is a disappointment.  It doesn’t deliver what you’d expect from a Modesty Blaise film, which is a lot of style, glamor, intrigue, and action based largely on eccentric weapons skills.  That’s because Modesty isn’t yet Modesty Blaise— the film is a prequel to all the comic strips and novels.  She only turns into the kickass heroine in the last ten minutes, after spending the rest of the film narrating her life story while being held hostage by a gang of thieves led by Jaime Lannister.

Isn’t that an exciting idea, boys and girls?  Having someone narrate her backstory for almost an entire film?

But Modesty’s backstory is treated with utmost solemnity, as if this were the childhood of the Virgin Mary or someone equally important to the universe.  It is, after all, the whole point of the film— it’s the backstory to another, possibly better, film that never got made.

Modesty Blaise, like the X-Men, like Godzilla, is a classic pop culture artifact, but somehow that isn’t enough for some people.  They want their pop culture wreathed in the bells and smells and self-importance of religion, or the Great Books, or the most pompous kind of High Art.  They want it all invested with Meaning.

Modesty Blaise isn’t High Art, she’s a great character!  Godzilla isn’t Jesus, he’s the King of the Monsters!  The X-Men aren’t the 47 Ronin, they’re super-powered people in tights!

Let pop art be pop art!  Let Godzilla be Godzilla!  Let him smash Tokyo!

I’d totally pay to see that.