Kaiju! Jaegers! CANCEL THE APOCALYPSE!!!!

I won't pretend to be impartial. Pacific Rim is my favorite movie of the past several years. It's bold, brilliant, one of those huge wild rides I doubted studios made anymore. Guillermo Del Toro is such a unique voice, a gleeful young boy playing in these amazing sandboxes, who also happens to be one of the very best directors alive. Pacific Rim is Del Toro completely off the leash, unchained to a degree he's never been onscreen before. Fuck the box office. Seriously, fuck it. The backers of the film have made money, gobs of it. Much of that came from marketing, tie-ins, the comic etc etc. The first movie in this series was never going to be a gigantic commercial powerhouse. It's too weird, too different. But again, that's ok. All it needed was to exist, to cut those amazing promos, pique just enough curiosity that all the kids who couldn't persuade their parents to let them see it in a theater would seek it out on demand, HBO, whatever. Once they see it, they love it. Those kids will be a few years older in 2017, with money to spend and packs of friends they'll drag to theatres night after night, week after week. Pacific Rim 2 will be huge. People are going to be astonished when the movie comes out. Congratulations to Legendary Pictures for having the balls to do this right, to invest time and money over a period of years. It's good business and better art. Raise a glass to Stacker Pentecost. The Kaiju are baaaaaaaaaaaaack.

Of Gods and Monsters

There's a scene, partway through Gareth Edwards' rather brilliant new Godzilla, that reveals much of the filmaker's project in this unexpectedly essential updating of a classic. You've seen it in the trailers. Ken Watanabe and Aaron Taylor-Johnson are talking. Johnson; "A monster." Watanabe; "No, a God." I trust that you can figure out who they mean. It's an interesting moment both for the content and for where it appears in the story. We've gotten a glimpse, at this point, of a giant monster in action, although as we later discover it's the least of the three in this film. Godzilla himself has yet to lumber onscreen. So why make worshipful noises now?

Many critics have pointed out, accusingly and otherwise, Edwards' similarites to a young Spielberg. Certainly there are similarites in some of their stylistic quirks. Delaying the monster's first appearance, shots of wide-eyed youngsters gazing upwards, beams of light piercing fog etc. But, Spielberg's great weakness has always been a lack of thematic coherence in most of his filmography. He's a brilliant visual storyteller, but I don't know if you can point to many of his films and say that they're about anything other than exactly what they appear to be about. I don't mean this insultingly; Most every other director walking the planet would kill for that career, and Spielberg is one of the most accomplished and influential filmmakers who's ever lived. But, there's a certain lack of depth to a lot of his movies, and that will continue to weigh on critical opinions of his career (assuming that matters). Edwards does not and will never have that problem.

Back to Watanabe's line in Godzilla: Edwards puts it there because he wants to make very clear the true topic of his film; Man's utter insignificance in the history of this planet. We are a blip, the flickering flame of a solitary candle. The Muto are a hurricane, come to extinguish us forever. That we survive is by the grace of, yes, a God. So, I suppose, Edwards is not stating a thesis so much as asking a question; When the storm comes, whether that be in the shape of drastic climate change, world war, or pre-historic giant monsters, what is going to save us? Can we depend on a miracle defender? And if not, what do we need to do in order to make sure we're never put in that position?

The best allegorical films function on multiple levels, and Godzilla is first and foremost one of the best and most unique monster movies ever made. Edwards' tone here is elegiac, mournful, although whether he mourns for the vast human toll taken by the monsters, or for the passing of the monsters themselves is very much an open question. Nevertheless, this isn't a movie that revels in destruction (paging Mr. Bay….), but one that recognizes the terror on display. Godzilla is unequivocally a hero, but he's not what you'd call surgical in his combat with the Muto. Lots of people die in this movie, and Edwards' greatest accomplishment may be to acknowledge that fact while still crafting a thrilling adventure.

To be clear, the adventure I'm talking about belongs to the big green dude. We're given human characters, but they're too cursory to be worthy of much analysis. Aaron Taylor-Johnson is very handsome, very buff, and very, very blank. Elisabeth Olsen, one of the best young actresses in cinema, is similarly asked to do little beyond fawn over the little tyke she's very clearly too young to have mothered and scream at the sight of various beasties. She does both of these things well, but I do wish the writers had found material worthy of her talents. A lot of other ringer-level actors show up for a few minutes to do expository things, but Edwards clearly doesn't give a shit about them, and around the time the first Muto planted a huge claw on the side of a pit, I started to feel the same way.

Edwards' filmmaking carries much of the hugeness to be found in a Michael Bay joint, but tempered with a patience and sense of visual craft that reminded me of nobody so much as the great Korean auteur Wong Kar Wai. There is a sequence, of men leaping from a plane and into a burning night, that is the most lyrically beautiful thing I've seen this year. Indeed, many stills from this movie could serve as framed posters. Watching, we recall that the essence of cinema is photography, and that the best directors exhibit a healthy respect for cohesive imagery. In the climactic fights the camera moves with precision, holding off on fully revealing the monsters until it's time to stop doing that, at which point it reaaaaalllly stops doing that. Everything is shot with a sense of scale and geometry, to allow the viewer to feel how f-ing huge these things are, and where they are in relation to each other and everything else. I fondly imagine that people raised on Bay's epileptic Transformers flicks may find Godzilla somewhat novel, even puzzling.

Looks, I'm not saying the movie is perfect. The script is largely useless, the plot nonsensical, the lead performance thoroughly wooden. You'll realize all of these things after the credits roll, after you've had some time to recover from the experience of being played, piano-like, by one of our new masters. What matters is that this film is a magificent feat of imagination, made by one of the most gifted artists currently working. Its vast technical virtuosity comes in service to a story about nothing more or less than the fate of the Earth, and the insignificant, delicate little humans who think they can control it. Edwards is evoking the slumbering Titans deep within Earth's surface, showing us the consequences of their anger. With such stakes, can you blame him for aiming over man's head?

Hannibal

This is the fourth time I've sat down to write about Hannibal. When pontificating about a new piece of art, I always try to let it sit for a few days. To turn it over in my brain at odd moments, explore it from weird angles, attack from the corners. Usually this works. By the time there's a cursor blinking in front of me, I've formed some sort of opinon. That isn't to say that my ideas and conceptions can't evolve after I've begun writing, because of course they can. But I try, always, to write from a place of careful consideration, to have given the piece respect and attention, and to know more or less what I think and want to say. About Hannibal, I think and say this: It's the best TV show I've ever seen, and I'm not sure I ever want to watch it again.

I went in expecting cliches. Thomas Harris has never been a particularly good writer, and the bluntness of his storytelling choices hamstrung each of the many adaptations. Silence of The Lambs (novel, not film), has a certain lurid, fever-dream intensity that translates well to celluloid, and the movie is elevated by terrific acting and Jonathan Demme's artistry as a visual craftsman. It's worth watching, but the plot itself is rote. Ridley Scott and Bret Ratner managed to variously and creatively bungle two more movies, neither of which comes from a novel I'd advise wasting your time in reading. The best of the films remains the first, Michael Mann's wonderfully atmospheric Manhunter. But, then again, Mann has long been one of the few auteurs able to elevate crappy writing through the force of his vision. Long story short: Two of the books and three of the movies (the less said about Hannibal Rising, the better) suck, and the good ones are more of a "has redeeming qualities" kind of good. Plus, the whole shtick felt played-out in the nineties.

So what did Bryan Fuller do? In the words of Marsellus Wallace, he went medieval on your asses. Hannibal is brutal. Truly, utterly, brutal. And gorgeous. Haunting, funny, smart and deeply curious about human nature. That last bit is what I most want to discuss. Hannibal, above all, is a brilliant show about psychology.  Consider that the majority of characters are either shrinks, or vastly experienced in the twisting perversities of the human mind. This has two effects: First, it requires the show to treat its characters with immense respect in order to remain credible. These are smart, meticulous people chasing Hannibal, and they're really fucking good at what they do. To stay ahead of the pack, Hannibal must be brilliant, bold, and resourceful. I hate idiot plots. This is miles away. Second effect: The show is unique in that it considers the consequences of violence on those who commit, are victimized by, and study it.

Binge watching season 2 over the past couple of weeks, I've been struck by the amount of murder tableaus that feature what you might call the "Life Cycle." Mushrooms growing out of flesh, flowers blooming in a chest-cavity, a totem of bodies. The totem, centerpiece of the season 1 highlight Trou Normand, is especially emblamatic of the show's overall project. The violence that created it is, in the mind of Larry Wells, his true legacy. He thinks that these horrific acts make him powerful, magnificent. Instead, as it ends, he's just a sad old man dooming himself to watch his line die. The show respects his grief, even as it expects us to be repulsed by him. Any television program can show us gruesome murder and expect to create feelings of horror and disgust in the audience (Fox's worthless The Following springs to mind), but so very few can carefully and intelligently dissect the consequences of living a violent life, while appreciating and delving the effects on both heros and villains.

That dissonance, between action and consequence, is the primary weakness of the titular friendly neighborhood cannibal. The show has caused much internet chatter to the effect of Hannibal Lecter being a perfect man. I see where the ladies are coming from. Handsome, sophisticated, enthusiastic about tailored suits etc etc. But what does he want? What is the goal underlying his streak of murders. Not cannibalism, or not only that. If Hannibal simply wanted to harvest human flesh, there are a lot of quieter and more discreet ways he could go about it. General sadism? This is probably an element of his personality, but he's too controlled, too careful for it override caution as we've seen in the second season. Gamesmanship? Again, that's part of it. Hannibal has something of the matador in his twist of a mind, something explosively ostentatious. But still, an insufficient explanation. We don't know, we can't know. Hannibal is a shark in tailored seersucker, utterly other, but following an internal logic we can't understand even as we must respect it. We see the trail of corpses, and shudder. But the haunting thing is the thought that this guy may not even be crazy. He might just be ahead of the curve.