Godzilla has certainly been stomping his way through the competition taking in an impressive $200 million on its opening weekend and has even earned himself a sequel. But one of the biggest points on contention with the movie has been, what some have called, a lack of Godzilla in his own movie.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, script writer Max Borenstein addressed this issue…
“It’s a balance between suspense and reveals. People are going to react differently to it. There are people who will appreciate a slow build, and there are people who are going to want Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots from the very beginning. It’s a matter of taste and a matter of choice.”
Borenstein continues, “It’s done less these days because CGI has allowed us to show whatever we want when we want. There was something great about the suspense that was built up when you didn’t see Jaws in the full until the end of the film. By doing so, that movie becomes incredibly suspenseful, and perhaps it’s the reason Jaws 2 becomes a lot less interesting, because you see him right from the very beginning.”
He also discusses the difficulties in writing a Godzilla script, “Godzilla is unique in cinema history. His relationship to human beings is not an anthropomorphic one, unlike the other great monsters of cinema, like King Kong or Frankenstein. Jaws is at the same scale as human beings, so you can have a mano-a-mano battle. Godzilla is so much larger in scale that unless you want to manufacture something that feels tonally inconsistent with what we wanted to go for – such as some human being with a telepathic link to him – then you have to treat Godzilla more as a force of nature than an actual character. At the same time, he’s a force with some kind of intelligence. It’s just not one we can relate to or understand. Therefore, creating a human interest and a human plot within the context of a Godzilla movie becomes a unique challenge.”
You can read the rest of the interview here where he also discusses the birth of MUTO and writing Godzilla as a character.
Described as an epic rebirth to Toho’s iconic monster, Godzilla is out now with a cast that includes Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Kick-Ass), Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad), Elizabeth Olsen (Avengers: Age of Ultron), Ken Watanabe (Inception), David Strathairn (The Bourne Legacy), Juliette Binoche (The English Patient) and Sally Hawkins (Blue Jasmine). Read our reviews here and here and listen to our podcast review here.
Originally published May 20, 2014. Updated November 29, 2022.
