In my mostly negative review of Godzilla last week, I cited as a principle cause for my disappointment the relatively small role the King of the Monsters plays in his own movie:
[W]hile the requisite Final Battle with Godzilla is a fair amount of fun, it makes up a tiny portion of the film, which is mostly concerned with the MUTOs stomping their way across the globe (Honolulu, Las Vegas) toward the City by the Bay.
Indeed, until the closing act, Godzilla himself is strangely peripheral to the proceedings….Thus the central irony of Edwards’s film. Godzilla can handle everything the military hurls at him: ships, guns, planes, rockets, even a squadron of HALO paratroopers. The only thing that can cut him down to size is being relegated to a supporting role in his very own movie.
I was not alone in this contention, and it’s led to some interesting discussion of how little Godzilla is too little Godzilla. Over at Slate, Forrest Wickman points out that far from being some kind of unusual throwback, director Gareth Edwards’s decision to largely withhold Godzilla until late in the movie is in keeping with a longstanding trend of introducing principal monsters later and later, from Godzilla to Jaws to Alien to Cloverfield to Super 8. In a similar vein, Moviepilot quoted from an interview Edwards gave Screencrush in defense of the limited screen time afforded Godzilla:
When we sat down, we talked about what kind of movie we were thinking about and we talked about ‘Jurassic Park,’ ‘Jaws’ and a lot of Spielberg movies like ‘Close Encounters’. Also, ‘Alien’ and ‘King Kong’. And, they all have one thing in common: it’s about an hour into the movie before you see the creature…. So, that was always the consideration. To try and build slowly and tease and pull the audience in, and then when they get it, it’ll be more powerful.
A number of commenters to my review made similar points, including one who went so far as to cite the slow reveal of Harry Lime in The Third Man, a strong candidate for my favorite film.
But I agree with all of this. I’m entirely in favor of introducing a monster or villain slowly and inferentially. I even made that point it in my review. (“Edwards introduces the monster gradually—a glimpse here, a glimpse there—as Ishiro Honda did with the original Godzilla 60 years ago.”) My complaint is not that we needed to see more of Godzilla, it’s that we needed to see less of the MUTOs, who are, for all intents and purposes, the principle monsters of the film.