Cultural Insensitivity without Matthew Broderick

I'll begin by saying that I am a huge fan of the Japanese Godzilla movies. Their delightful kitch-ness encapsulate so beautiful the often mocked sub-genre that is the Japanese Giant Monster Movie. Without these films, we would never have had the likes of Power Rangers, and seven decades of movie-goers would have missed out on the delightfully camp misadventures of everyone's favourite city-crushing radioactive dinosaur.

As such, when the first trailers for the new Hollywood version (let's forget for a moment 1998's travesty, after all, as Xander Harris so finely put it, "Matthew Broderick did not kill Godzilla. He killed a big, dumb lizard that was NOT the real Godzilla"), and indeed the trailers looked ruddy awesome, I was understandably excited. 

Fast forward to this evening, when with pick and mix in hand, I sat on the edge of my seat looking forward to two hours of deligful monstery fun. 

Now, admittedly, at least one hour of monstery madness was delivered, though had I walked out of the cinema when I was so very close to doing so, I would have missed out on the actual fun that is to be had in this picture. The first half of Gareth Edwards' canonical entry to the Godzilla mythology is so utterly insensitive that it manages to not only recreate an earthquake at a nuclear power plant in North West Japan, but also has giant beasties feeding from the destroyed core, before same beasties cause tsunamis along the Hawaiian coastline, all a mere three years after the Fukushima tragedy. Without dwelling too much upon my own experiences of the earthquake of March 2011, I'll simply say that I have never been so upset and offended by a film; the flippant-ness with which such a sensitive and devastating event is parodied is quite frankly disgusting and I am amazed that Ken Watanabe, star of the film and previously a big donor in the aftermath clear-up operation, did not think to point out the way in which history has been lampooned.

Indeed so close to the bone is the imagery that Manami, sat next to me, burst into tears halfway through the film; a great Japanese tragedy has been made a mockery using, sadly, a great Japanese cinematic icon. 

That said, the film is saved somewhat by some fantastic special effects, and the characterisation of the eponymous antihero is a spot-on homage to the original films. The main actors add very little; Watanabe makes a few occasional grunts, Elizabeth Olsen looks scared and cries a lot, and Bryan Cranston gives one of the hammiest performances of his career.

I'm very intrigued to see how Japanese critics react when Godzilla is released over there in two weeks' time; there has already been outrage at the original poster campaign, and I fear that a further backlash is to come. But at least Matthew Broderick isn't in it this time round...