Before 2020 if you were pondering the form of a coming apocalypse, odds are it would look something more like the trailer for Greenland than wearing a mask and staying at home. Thanks to Hollywood the next big-budget, CGI spectacle that may or may not make it to movie theater screens taps into the disaster genre yet again. A stuntman-turned writer-director of movies like Angel Has Fallen, Ric Roman Waugh directs Greenland, which will not only have you asking “why that title for this movie?” but why do we keep returning to the disaster movie altogether. It stars recent go-to disaster thriller guy Gerard Butler, whose secret service agent character has headlined three movies in the “Fallen” series, plus there are a few other favorite actors of genre TV and film involved. Check out the first trailer for Greenland below.
When you have made as many movies as have been in the Godzilla franchise (31, more than James Bond movies), you run the risk of making a sequel or reboot that ends up like Independence Day: Resurgence, or Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, or Man of Steel, or Alien: Covenant. For some moviegoers, a quick fix with lots of CGI in one of their favorite universes is good enough. Godzilla: King of the Monstershas many things in common with these movies, without quite being as good as any of them, or Godzillas of the past. Inasmuch as moviegoers will see the great effort taken to be faithful to its predecessors, by bringing more than just Godzilla to the picture, by bringing in a significant number of character actors that will be familiar to audiences, and by trying to create more spectacular visuals than came before, the latest Godzilla movie, opening today, doesn’t match either the monster mayhem or the humor of its 20th century predecessors.
Stuffed with every over-used creature and action trope, some used repeatedly, Godzilla: King of the Monsterssuffers from taking itself too seriously. Its single attempt at levity is Get Out’sBradley Whitford as a wise-cracking scientist who seems to be channeling Brent Spiner in the Independence Day movies. But beyond that, this is a family drama, more talk and human family in-fighting than Godzilla screen-time, between Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown as Madison and her separated parents played by Kyle Chandler (Super 8) and Vera Farmiga (The Commuter) (in that way it suffers the flaws of the 2014 Godzilla). For some credibility we get Oscar-nominated actor Ken Watanabe (Isle of Dogs, The Last Samurai, Batman Begins) to remind us of the creature’s 65 years as a Japanese kaijū icon. Other than that, the production skipped Japanese actors for this installment. The best character and performance comes from Charles Dance(Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Bleak House, Gosford Park), who plays a terrorist. His character is the lone voice who speaks sense in a film that only makes sense if you also believe ocean drillers are the best choice to pilot a space shuttle to save the world from an oncoming asteroid. Armageddon, War of the Worlds, Cloverfield, The Day After Tomorrow, Pacific Rim and every other disaster movie is rolled up into a single package here. Direction and decisions are all over the place. Even in a crazy, kooky, over-the-top monster movie, audiences deserve a plot with a foundation with a smidge of reality, especially if the talking heads scenes get equal time with the clashing creatures. So if you decide to see Godzilla: King of the Monsters in the theater, you’ll need to throw all logic and reason aside and try to enjoy the ride.
Although this wasn’t clear in the trailers, Godzilla: King of the Monsters is more than another franchise installment, it’s a direct sequel to Gareth Edwards’ 2014 Godzilla movie. Five years later the world is learning how to live as 17 titans (monsters like Godzilla) surface across the globe. Watanabe joins other returning cast members, including Oscar-nominated actress Sally Hawkins (The Shape of Water, Blue Jasmine, Layer Cake), Oscar-nominated actor David Strathairn(Sneakers, The Firm, Eight Men Out, Memphis Belle), as they attempt to cause the titans to join forces in support of Godzilla instead of his three-headed dragon competition Ghidorah. The best of the encounters finds the flying Rodan taking on a convoy of jet fighters, in a sweeping, well-choreographed scene that you’d expect from a Godzilla movie, although this scene and the rest of the monster scenes are mostly fuzzy and don’t make the most of high-definition camera capabilities or CGI.
Much of the best science fiction doesn’t leave us with memorable or lovable characters so much as incredible, imaginative ideas, and prescient or prophetic visions. When you look to science fiction’s past, examples can be found throughout the works of H.G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, and Ray Bradbury. Great concepts abound, like Wells’ time travel, Mary Shelley stretching the bounds–and horrors–of medical science, Dick always wrestling with the perils and annoyances of technology, and Michael Crichton finding ways to use science to change the future. Robert J. Sawyer is a current science fiction author building on the ideas of the past, and like all of the above writers who researched the real science behind their characters, he delves deep into his subjects. In his novel Quantum Night, now available in paperback, he has with surgical precision stitched together a tale of modern truths and horrors, bundled in a story pressing the bounds of psychology and quantum theory to explain why the world may seem to be falling apart, and offering one way to try to repair it.
In a very educational way, Quantum Night is also a refresher in Psychology 101. Sawyer, one of only three science fiction writers ever to have won the trifecta of writing awards (the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Campbell), references every major theory and experiment from college days along with enough background in quantum theory to support a compelling thriller. By book’s end you may find yourself staring at strangers and questioning their level of consciousness, conscience, and psychopathy. You may be sitting next to a psychopathic individual right now, or someone with a mind that may be even more gut-wrenching to discover. Written in 2015 and taking place in the not-so-distant future, Russian President Vladimir Putin readies to fire nuclear weapons on the United States. A future U.S. President gets Roe v. Wade overturned, has gotten his country to turn on immigrants and then invades Canada, led by its first Muslim prime minister (here Sawyer predicts the future of the current real-life Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi), purportedly so the U.S. can secure Canada’s cities when the country no longer is able to control the flow of terrorists.
The story follows a professor of psychology who also serves as an expert witness to defend criminals who have proven to be psychopathic on both established and modern psychopathy tests. In the latest case he is reminded of his own past on cross-examination–a past he refuses to believe. As he re-traces his memories he learns his volunteering for psychology experiments in college resulted in six months of erased memories. And it gets worse–his mind was altered. Readers encounter a pair of scientists in the past, trying to hone in on those elements of the mind that shape how we think. The protagonist encounters a lover from his college days who is also in the field, and their relationship and her relationship with her daughter and her brother (now 20 years in a coma), could dictate the fate of everyone’s future with a high-tech tuning fork “sonic screwdriver”-inspired device and one of the 40 giant, real-world synchrotrons.
