1. I posted about this on my A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones, and even before I made the connection with ASoIaF about ten seconds before I did so, I was thinking today about how Godzilla is presented here the way I like dragons to be presented in stories — as a total upending of all human endeavor.
2. It’s just such a pleasure to hear and see Bryan Cranston again, particularly since the Breaking Bad finale left a bad taste in my mouth. That’s not his fault — he’s a magnificent actor. Listen to how his voice is constantly breaking and being repaired, like, as an ongoing process effected through force of will. Watch how his eyes shift back and forth at the end of that opening speech, as though he’s so consumed by what he’s saying he can’t really decide how, or if, to focus it.
3. This is the kind of tonal commitment I like to see in genre work, provided it doesn’t devolve into self-seriousness. And I’ll admit, that line is thin, and subjectively drawn. But playing Godzilla as a horror movie, which it originally was, seems as valid a place as any to take the assumptions of the genre work in question and hit hard with them.
Use of Ligeti’s ‘Kyrie Requiem’ was… unexpected.
Yeah, that sound cue is a li’l WTF, guys. I mean okay, Kubrick didn’t use Ligeti appropriately either– he failed to obtain permission prior to release –but his usage wasn’t as much a gesture of putting on the Serious Hat as it would seem to be here.
Like you say, it’s a matter of wait and see as to whether it works. I trust in Cranston, but his claim that this will obliterate any memory of ‘Zilla ’98 is perhaps wishful boasting. Glad to see him taking an odd role like this after BB, though. C-c-c-c-c-combo breaker!
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