Jurassic World Rebirth

Find in Jurassic World Rebirth two competing plot lines. The first is premised on the kind of pitch-think that sees a real movie star, like Scarlett Johansson, hired to take up an enormous amount of one sheet real estate and play a mercenary hunting for blood samples on an island packed with tooth and claw. The second, and less obviously showy strand, concerns itself with an injured and extremely divorced father attempting to keep his tween and teen daughters, as well as a layabout boyfriend (and eventually a tag-along pet who's the spitting image of Cera from Don Bluth's The Land Before Time), alive after they are shipwrecked in the exact same neighbourhood. So while the more experienced players can set up rope harnesses to descend into Pterosaur lairs or blast hand-held shock guns at thrashing sea creatures, the civilians that are along for the ride, the Delgado family, are able to have separate (and far more entertaining) sequences built around a terrifying jungle expedition. 

Set an enough amount of time following Jurassic World Dominion that the new normal proposed by that fossilized stinker - that mankind must learn to co-exist alongside prehistoric beasts of every stripe - has been jettisoned in favour of an equatorial containment that has dinosaurs only able to thrive on the tropical islands where they were genetically engineered in the first place. Rebirth then, despite the more expansive language used in its title, is far more interested in following up concepts and ideas present in the Park-era, Michael Crichton-adapting instalments. Directed by Gareth Edwards with a returning David Koepp on screenwriting duties, Rebirth underlines this conceptual shift with an ailing Apatosaur being scraped up off the tarmac in New York while tardy commuters grumble. Unlike the more striking, camouflaged examples that appear later in Rebirth, this dinosaur has the flat, grey texture of a lower resolution ancestor and the drooping clumsiness of Winsor McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur. It is, as it dies, marked as both technologically primitive and archaeologically outmoded. 

Although not the totality of a piece that still clings to the misguided notion that audiences demand fresh, mutated creatures and expert contrivance to get themselves engaged (see also: Alien: Romulus) Rebirth is best when the audience are allowed to luxuriate in the company of dinosaurs who are behaving more like curious animals in search of their next meal. A first act sortie involving a massive and highly prized Mosasaurus apportions space to a pack of streaked Spinosaurs who swim in her wake, gobbling up leftovers. Despite Jurassic Park III's big bad being relegated to a scavenger picking up after the real apex predator, this more crocodilian take on Joe Johnston's featured theropod allows Edwards' film to not only correct now discredited takes on antiquated beasts but also to indulge himself in Spielbergian conceits that reach beyond that director's Jurassic predecessors. Briefly, we're in Jaws territory with hurried chatter about astronomical taxonomy and wincing inserts of human blood lapping at uncharted shorelines. Even better still is a creeping interlude in which the sodden Delgado family attempt to retrieve a raft from underneath a slumbering (but not sated) Tyrannosaur, a sequence dreamt up by Crichton for his 1990 hardback but left out of the original Jurassic Park feature. 

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

In its early passages Rogue One: A Star Wars Story manages to present something as dispassionate and mechanical as a holiday season blockbuster in personal, perhaps even obsessive terms. It's fitting that Rogue One explicitly stands outside the numbered installments, the story is smaller, the telling more obviously coming from a place of deep affection rather than brand maintenance. Shots and digital effects are framed to capture the obscure, visual affectations of analogue home video; the story revolves around the kind of people that had action figures you had to collect coupons for.

Gareth Edwards begins with broken 'scope homesteads then switches street level, weaving in and out of exciting background players while rebel spies actually act like they're under extreme stress. Edwards' approach is reminiscent of the one Genndy Tartakovsky took with Star Wars: Clone Wars, a fan's work that accounts for their own disparate influences, using them to compliment and mutate George Lucas' core product. So while Tartakovsky amped up the Akira Kurosawa influences and smuggled in some Sergio Leone and John Milius for flavour, Edwards shoots a desperate information exchange like one of Sorcerer's early interludes then gives an alliance extremist a character tic on loan from Blue Velvet's Frank Booth.

Rogue One toys with a real sense of danger in these moments. The Rebel Alliance and the Galactic Empire are both shown to require a certain amount of savviness to navigate, neither ruling with absolute consensus. They're messy. There are factions within factions, each trying to make their voice heard, to seize credit and take control. George Lucas' disappointing prequel trilogy gave us something similar, a sense of how dangerous it was for an individual to exist within the various machines that ruled the galaxy. Unfortunately, Lucas' precariousness tended to track towards petulance and tantrums, Rogue One's filmmakers aim for motor.

This uncertainty is best expressed by Ben Mendelsohn's Orson Krennic, an ambitious middle-manager trying to stake a claim and thus be noticed by his monstrous overlords. Krennic pursues gain in anxious, selfish terms. He wants to stand out in a system built on uniformity. He wears white and a cape rather than the typical grey tunic; his entourage are cast in black and called Death Troopers. He is a human personality trying to bend totalitarianism to his own ends, building bigger and bigger mega-weapons to score himself nicer apartments on Coruscant. Krennic is a new kind of character for the saga, an opportunist jealously guarding his achievements, aware that CG seniority will gobble them up given the slightest provocation.

Before long though Rogue One has to start tidying itself away. Characters must shed their doubts before they can be summed up in the series standard, three-front battle. It's an understandable development, given the franchise and release date, but the way it is communicated feels synthetic. This tonal shift is more of a lurch, transforming the piece from a war film that just happens to be set in the Star Wars universe into an organised, contextualised, shot at the latest, bleeding edge action noise. For a long stretch Rogue One is dramatically distinctive, fulfilling the promise of  'A Star Wars Story' sub-brand as the place for individual voices to exist within a wider product slate. Then the third-act happens and the plotting reverts to type, using shell-shocked loners to nakedly state the film's emotional objectives at each other.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story - TOYETIC

Star Wars generated an incredible amount of merchandise, so much so that deep into the 1980s you couldn't rummage around any kind of outdoor market without coming across a stall hawking action figures of the less exciting members of Jabba the Hutt's enormous entourage. You know the ones, your Gamorrean Guards, a Weequay or, if you were very lucky indeed, Lando Calrissian in his Tamtel Skreej disguise. Based on this trailer, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story feels like a film springing from that kind of starting point. Gareth Edwards (and whoever ended up helming the reshoots) armed with a toybox selection of the also-ran characters, all jetting off on their own adventure.

Godzilla (2014)

Godzilla has survived many genre upheavals. Beginning as a nuclear extinction parable, the films have raced excitedly through mutations dictated by public taste. Science fiction evolved into spy thriller, then an after-school special and onto childish superheroics. Godzilla has never been one particular thing. Like 007 the series is about building whatever story you like around one indefatigable idea - he walks the Earth. Godzilla 2014 matches the character with a modern set of concerns. How can we slot the King of Monsters into a pro-forces blockbuster?

Following an unusually localised earthquake in Japan, the Janjira nuclear power plant collapses in on itself killing (amongst others) supervisor Joe Brody's wife. We catapult ahead 15 years to find Brody and his son breaking into the exclusion zone to track radiation signatures in derelict buildings. It's a shame more time isn't spent in this milieu - the unhinged Joe as our point-of-view and Tokyo as the cyclical backdrop; ruin as a habitat rather than an interchangeable arena. Post-fall Edo is born in a reality bending shuffle. News footage of the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown by way of a 1970s disaster movie, framed, much like a key reveal in Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack, from a classroom. A decade and a half after the accident a secret research facility sits in the heart of destruction. Teams of scientists pore over an egg concealing calamity, director Gareth Edwards giving us a taste of Akira scenes shot live action.

Despite the best efforts of on-site expert Dr Serizawa and his giant electricity gun, the egg hatches and the newborn riots, trashing Joe Brody's investigation. Attention then settles on his disengaged, thick-necked son for the remainder of the runtime. Brody Jnr. is an army bomb disposal expert with a smiley family back in San Francisco. Military leads are nothing new to the Godzilla series, the Millennium cycle had a procession of officer class women desperate for a settler with the Kaiju King. Ford Brody isn't quite so involved though, instead he's an everyman with a dramatically sympathetic job that allows us to track the carnage. Ford is decent but unremarkable, a poor substitute for a spluttering Bryan Cranston. From the second act onwards the entire film is placed on Aaron Taylor-Johnson's shoulders, of course it wobbles.

Godzilla 2014 is then constructed to tease. The title creature is glimpsed in snatches - an arm here, an undercarriage there. As with his excellent Monsters, Gareth Edwards wants to present a world in which mankind are struggling against warring / mating Gods. The reason this doesn't quite work, for me at any rate, is that Edwards is so good at arranging the combatants that you just want to see them fight. An extended sequence in Hawaii in which Godzilla comes to shore, causing a tsunami naturally, registers as a beautiful example of pace because we know one of the enemy MUTO monsters is rampaging on the same island. We are shown not only where the two beasts are but how close they're getting to each other. Geography is becoming a lost art in action films, so to see a director in complete command of beat-to-beat moments junking his climax for a Spielbergian gag is incredibly disappointing.

For all intents and purposes we have a sequence that plays like the greatest Wrestlemania hype promo disappearing into background noise. Godzilla was thundering through Honolulu, flanked by waves of people and debris. The male MUTO was in the process of eating a sky-train, presumably because it resembles the ICBMs it's discovered a taste for. We were criss-crossing constantly, soldiers firing wildly, unable to even gain Godzilla's attention. Ford Brody grappling with gravity, desperately trying to keep himself and a child from being consumed by the hungry antagonist. Explosions at the airport! Rows and rows of aircraft crumble and ignite around the moving MUTO, then water hits a cowering baggage handler, signalling the King of Monsters' arrival. It was an expert moment - endless possibilities signaled by a tiny detail. Godzilla is the wave, and he is close. His lumpy Apatosaurus foot smashes into view, framed by an airport lounge. Battle is joined. Cut to a child watching TV.

Again and again Edwards and editor Bob Ducsay build these confrontations, then deny release. Possibly this stings even more because a massive amount of trailer real estate was created out of the film's scant Godzilla glimpses. Surely the function of an advert should be to give an elliptical impression of the whole? Hints of spectacle rather than the spectacle itself? I haven't seen a film so committed to blowing its grandstand moments through advertising since Transformers. When the creatures do finally fall on each other, the resulting action is only briefly noted. We aren't experiencing these confrontations through the expertly realised monsters, we're avoiding it in the company of Kick-Ass. Sustained fisticuffs are absent, there's never really a point were you get to simmer in the weight and space of three titans clashing. Instead, for better or for worse, we're left with the vague impression of an earthbound God moving through clouds of rubble.

MUTO

A couple of weeks from release and it's still hard to get a handle on what kind of Godzilla film Gareth Edwards has made. Western trailers have barely mentioned any enemy beasts and kept the sense of threat focused on the titular kaiju. Those ads have had a elliptical, apocalyptic quality that suggests a 60th anniversary reinterpretation of Ishiro Honda's 1954 original.

This Chinese trailer takes a completely different tact, revelling in confrontations with a concrete coloured monster that either mutates into various forms, or has a string of similar looking pals. Couple that with a few gasps of dialogue that seem to organise Godzilla into a celestial protector role and you have something closer to the Heisei cycle meets Yoshimitsu Banno's Godzilla vs Hedorah. Perhaps Pacific Rim is to blame for the mixed messages? Guillermo del Toro's mech-pilot punch up tanked in America but found an audience in China, raking in enough money to make a sequel a real possibility.

HIS SHADOW STILL LOOMS

Godzilla is like Batman or James Bond. He's a character that's been around so long he can be talked about in a million different ways. A central idea invincible enough to survive any number of reboots or recalibrations. One cycle ends, another one begins. Shoring up just in time for the 60th anniversary, Gareth Edwards' take looks to be a human-centric nuclear disaster film, very much in the vein of Ishiro Honda's 1954 original and Koji Hashimoto's pearl anniversary remake / sequel. Standing in bold defiance of Roland Emmerich's puny also-ran, this Godzilla accounts for, and has some nifty ideas about, the monster's Atoll origin and American culpability.