A Kaiju Story in Nature Magazine?

Call this one a career goal! I've got a brand new story for you about giant monsters published by Nature.

The Nature Futures program, which runs Science Fiction stories in the otherwise Non-Fiction Science publication, does amazing work. This is my second story with them, and I'm tremendously proud of it. It is both a kaiju story and a rare piece of Hard SciFi from me. I researched radiation technology and animal behavior extensively for how someone might try to treat these things if they existed.

The result is "Tucking In the Nuclear Egg," a story about how to care for kaiju eggs that otherwise will irradiate your continent. You can read it for free by clicking here.

The reception has been wonderfully warm so far. Please let me know what you think!

The Halloween List: Shin Godzilla is a Return to the Soul of Kaiju Film

It’s a two-second shot that defines the movie. The camera points up a cramped street as wreckage overflows into it, literal tons of boats and cottages rolling up the pavement like waves in a hellish river. A single young man runs from the camera and the tide of destruction so fast that his limbs are losing coordination. We don’t see him escape this street, and we never see him again. We can only hope he made it out of here. Shin Godzilla is an angry movie, angry that government has failed to save us, and insistent that it do better.

Shin Godzilla is the most political entry in the series since the original in 1954, which was an allegory for the horrors of the atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Eventually kaiju film became more about giant monsters and robots fighting each other, and while fun, Shin Godzilla is from an older school. Godzilla has always been a hybrid of metaphors, and this movie shares influences from the 3/11 earthquake, Fukushima reactor incident, and recent tsunamis. It’s unnerving from its haunting score, to the camera so frequently switching to the point of view of his victims seconds before they die, to the pure nightmare fuel of Godzilla’s new appearance.

Six Great Movies Still Coming Out in 2016

September is half-over and Christmas decorations are starting to crop up in department stores. 2016 is a dying beast, and some people are already writing their Best Of lists. But there are books (yo, Wall of Storms), games (yo, Mafia 3), and even movies yet to be released that we’re craving. I just knocked off Don’t Breathe, which I have many, many thoughts on.

But that can wait. Let’s talk about cool movies that are coming out alarmingly soon.

1.     The Mermaid

You might not have heard that The Mermaid is the most popular film in the history of China. Releasing earlier this year, it has already doubled Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s lifetime box office, and is heralded as revolutionizing Chinese Fantasy films.

The Mermaid is a remix of Chinese folklore through the unique lens of director Stephen Chow (Kung Fu Hustle, Shaolin Soccer). Trailers promise a comedy about a lovable loser being harassed by a mermaid, or a tragic love story of that same duo being pulled from each other by a cavalcade of figures from Chinese folklore. Despite the CG battles, I’m hoping for more of a comedy, because no director has Chow’s knack for oddballs.

You probably haven’t heard of it, though, because it was licensed by Sony Pictures. The company released it on just 35 theaters across the entire United States. Fortunately, it’s received an On Demand release.

Nuke ‘Em: Pacific Rim's Problem with Kaiju Heritage

There’s a lot I love about Pacific Rim, but its ending has bothered me since opening weekend. Spoilers, naturally, if you haven’t seen it. In the last year, I haven’t heard a single person mention the oddity of a film rooted in Kaiju lore that resolves its problems by nuking the enemy army.

To start: Pacific Rim owes its existence to Godzilla. It has copious allusions to the 1954 film, and that franchise popularized the Kaiju battles that Pacific Rim is built around. Godzilla was punching giant robots a full decade before Guillermo Del Toro started making movies. It’s easy to envision the Jaeger program building Mechagodzilla in the eventual crossover – and Del Toro publicly said he wanted a crossover even before Pacific Rim screened. The appropriation is deliberate and largely affectionate.

In the fun and camp of giant battles, it’s easy to forget that the 1954 Godzilla is rooted in the trauma of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In that film, the beast is both an allegory for nuclear war, and is literally woken up by the usage of nuclear weapons. These themes ebb and flow in the ensuing franchise, but the beloved character was emblematic of a real national terror.

Pacific Rim solves its conflict by dropping a nuclear bomb into the rift. The characters are explicit that the Jaeger’s core is a nuclear reactor – that’s why it works when others can't, and it goes off like a nuclear bomb, not like a reactor in meltdown. The war isn’t resolved when the two Jaegers defeat the final Kaiju. It isn’t solved by Pentecost’s sacrifice. Humanity is only safe once we’ve A-bombed the bad guys.

I reveled in most of the movie. Kikuchi, Perlman, Day and Elba are delights, the soundtrack is pitch-perfect, and the overall film is greatly executed. Is the movie dumb? Yes, but it’s great at its dumbness. Even the bombing, with GLaDOS counting down and the heroes racing to safety, is exciting.

But even in IMAX, it was also troubling. We clearly hit a military installation, with no idea of how many civilians live on site. It’s like the lovably dumb movie suddenly committed another Hiroshima.

It’s one thing to not make the anti-nuclear message your core point, and it’s another to explicitly go against it. Was it intentional? I like to think not. No press I’ve read around the film suggests an enthusiasm for nuclear holocaust. And mistakes happen in art because when you’re juggling a dozen things in your mind, a thirteenth can always hit the floor. What hit the floor here is an incredibly sensitive item, from the genesis of kaiju films and one of the worst evils human beings have ever committed.

And the bombing isn’t indispensible to the plot. The rift could have been blown up rather than the people on the other side. In Newton Geiszler’s mind melds with Kaiju, a solution to closing all rifts could have been revealed. The Category 5 Kaiju could have been the lord and mother of them all, and its defeat the guarantee that no more could be created, or that the remainder would have no motive to continue attacking. Rewriting a few scenes, you could craft several different endings that wouldn’t require nuking the enemy.

It's still a surprisingly haunting moment.

Re-watching the 1954 Godzilla on Friday night brought this all to mind again. If it wasn’t the first, Kaiju film began there, and that film begins with a makeshift hospital laden with bodies, dead parents, irradiated children, and a narrator dazedly waking up in the wreckage. This is the fallout of a radioactive dinosaur, an impossibility that harkened to another impossibility – a mushroom of smoke changing the world.

That’s what any alien survivors of the end of Pacific Rim will wake up to. It feels spiritually wrong.

Godzilla Review: Spoiler-free, except for one

Let me spoil one moment of Godzilla to let you know what the movie is actually like.

About an hour in, Godzilla finally gets out of the water and roars for the camera. He faces down a winged kaiju at an airport, what's suggested to be an ancient predator of his kind. The military is down; the humans are helpless. Flames swell and it's clear only Godzilla can stop this.

The movie immediately cuts to the hero's living room, where his son watches a news channel showing Godzilla and the winged kaiju throwing each other around for a few seconds. The kid yells, "Mommy, Mommy, dinosaurs!"

The guy sitting behind me snorted. I laughed. The rest of the room was awkwardly quiet, especially as the movie then depicted the monsters going separate ways. We missed the fight, we missed what made them split up, and we immediately go back to humans talking.

I don't feel this is much of a spoiler because it's a trick the movie pulls at least five more times. It's as though they didn't have the budget to make a giant monster movie and so went to every length to avoid it, giving you glimpses of struggle from the corner of the screen, or multiple times, shrunken visions on TV sets. During its climactic battle, the movie cannot wait to cut away from the giants in favor of Navy men trying to get into the city, steal a nuclear warhead, and then escape the city.

Godzilla gets tackled? Cut to the humans.

Godzilla slams a kaiju through a skyscraper? Cut to the humans.

I was rooting for them to die so that we could stop checking in on them.

And we cut to the wrong humans. Prominently featured in trailers and commercials, Bryan Cranston and Ken Watanabe are shouldered out of the way for Aaron Taylor-Johnson, an ordnance expert and Cranston's character's son. He is not just a cipher, but an uncharismatic one who constantly requires excuses to keep around. He's at one set-piece because of his dad, then another on his way to the airport, and so-on. While the humans tend to suck in Godzilla movies, it's not often you get two great actors who are already in it and then shunted.

So the movie becomes more frustrating than anything. Its new kaiju are interesting, and up to something crazy, and pose different threats to Godzilla. One is winged and nimble, where the other is more of a hulk. There's an excitement to seeing a throwdown, and so the movie did the build-up well enough, if it took far too long to get there. It's no Jurassic Park in its build, but it's adequate. The problem becomes that it's nowhere near Jurassic Park's league when it finally lets us see the creatures. The T-Rex is supposed to show up and dominate the scene, not be interspersed with talking head sequences with mission command, reporters and nurses, all of whom exist to tell you the thing you're not seeing is scary and important. That's when the movie starts getting goofy.

For a movie that was billed as intense, it wobbles between drab and cheesy. At one point Watanabe gives a nuke-happy admiral his father's watch – it stopped the day he died in Hiroshima. Get it? But shortly thereafter, Godzilla saves a school bus. I'm still not sure if he did it on purpose; it was goofy enough that I laughed. The movie is occasionally dumb, but not campy like the Godzilla franchise you expect.

We get multiple shots of casualties lying around like human set design, and also multiple sight-gags. This movie absolutely loves people being unaware something enormous is right next to them, including the hero's wife not hearing an airplane crashing until it explodes behind her, and a specialist team checking a waste dump and missing that a 500-foot monster was eating there. It never reconciles its tone, right to the end, when it flashes a headline that literally dropped my jaw.

I could complain about its ill-fitted soundtrack and the number of Asians it enjoys killing, but why bother? After more than twenty films, and one failed American film to study, it managed to be the Godzilla movie that didn't know it was supposed to be about Godzilla. The great hope is that we get that rumored Pacific Rim/Godzilla crossover, and thus get this beast into Guillermo Del Toro's hands. Somebody else, please take a shot.

Waiting for God(zilla)

We're days away from the worldwide release of Godzilla. If you've read this blog for long then you know I cherish giant monsters. They're splendid metaphors for natural disasters and even more splendid excuses for giant fight scenes. I've been watching kaiju movies since elementary school and even today, at least once a year, will watch Cinemassacre's entire series retrospective on Godzilla. It's probably my favorite thing on Youtube for how unabashedly the narrator, who seemingly hates everything else, loves that series.

How do you hide this guy for an hour of film?

The hype cycle started early for this adaptation, and so we're getting different attempts for media attention now. Director Gareth Edwards explained to early journalist audiences that Godzilla wouldn't show up too much to build anticipation. He likened it to the T-Rex in Jurassic Park, who isn't on screen for that long.  

This worried me for a few reasons. Firstly, there are over twenty Godzilla movies. Even if you've missed all the shots of this Godzilla, we all pretty much know what he looks like. You can't surprise us the way Steven Spielberg did with Stan Winston's revolutionary puppets and CGI. 

And furthermore, as a teen I didn't run out of the cinema babbling about how cool it was that the movie hid the T-Rex for the first hour. The impression was that once the creature showed up, the movie had amazing payoffs for using it. You want your director to pitch how cool his ideas are for Godzilla when he throws off the cloak of shadow, not an emphasis on the cloak. As my friend Randall Nichols put it, Jurassic Park wasn't called "T-Rex." It was a feature of that movie, sure, but it wasn't what was promised on every poster, so they had more leeway. The second and third Jurassic Parks couldn't afford to be as coy.

Somehow, even with the questionable press and negative reviews showing up, I've calmed. Early reviews are trickling in, with critics going back and forth on there being too much of the humans (nooo), the humans being too uninteresting (a Godzilla fan has to swallow that), and the movie being too preoccupied with its titans (that's the God-damned point).

I've had the healthy realization that I don't need this movie to be great. Sure, I want it to be – I'm going to pay to see it. But I've watched the trailers so often that the collected runtime is greater than that of the average movie, and I've enjoyed them outside of a pure hype cycle. I've actually gotten a movie's worth of enjoyment already, which is a strange thing to realize, and if I were more Marxist, this consumerist positive-drip would scare me. Now in my thirties, I'm just grateful for entertainment where I can find it. This takes some of the edge off of fears of another American Godzilla screw-up.

Maybe they'll still enrage me by having the non-Watanabe, non-Cranston humans talk too much.

That lithe classic Godzilla.

By the way: for a laugh, read about Japanese fans fat-shaming our new thicker Godzilla.

By the way 2*: negative reviews and bad reviews are not the same thing.

Time Magazine has an example of a negative review here, taking a pick-axe to the film with some thought. 

Forbes has a bad review I won't bother linking; it has little to say and spends several paragraphs repeating itself. It even has some choice errors, like when some buggy algorithm links a stock quote to an actor's name: 

 

Which is what you get when you ask stock merchants for reviews of giant monster movies. The conflation of "negative" and "bad" reviews has occurred more as authors become more public about their consumption of reviews. It can be excruciating to read an angry review of your work, and I've been lucky that the few anthologies I've been in have had enthusiastic responses. That'll be fixed, though, when I start publishing these novels I'm working on. If I'm lucky enough to catch on, somebody will hate everything I like. That's the life of an author who makes it.

I'm already a little adjusted to having someone hate everything I like. I mean, I'm a Gigan fan.

 *or, By The Way Raids Again

Bathroom Monologue: Rescuing Pacific Rim

Dear Stacker Pentecost,

I notice that you are devoting your life to fighting the giant enemies of civilization. As a mechanical being that has not only spent its entire existence in this service, but was actually built for it, I am deeply sympathetic to your cause and wish your organization the best of luck.

I actually wish you more than luck for, as someone built to help in this struggle, it's often been an issue that I was not built larger. Like my creators, you seem to have constructed robot armors at approximately the same height and mass as the monsters you face. Unlike my creators, though, you seem to have at least four times the resources, given that you have four machines, where there is only one of me. I know, also, that you have several outdated machines of similar dimensions, and all of these are also similar to the titanic crabs, pterodactyls and whatever the glowing squidy thing was.

Have you ever considered taking all the material for several machines and making one that was much bigger than the giant monsters you face? Given that your plan of attack is always fisticuffs (my favorite professional approach, as well), punching the things to death would be considerably easier if they were much smaller than you. Many have been the days on which I wished I hadn't been built to the specifications, down to the meter, of the monster I had to pursue. If only I was as much bigger than him as he was than my creators, then the fight would have been over very quickly, perhaps leaving you time to get that nice Asian lady some psychotherapy.

Best,

Mechagodzilla

Liebster Award, Take Two (Thanks Katherine!)

You can tell the Liebster Award has made its circuit of our community as it's come back to me. I first handed it out on December 23rd after Mark Beyer bestowed it upon me. Katherine Hajer was kind enough to give me a second dipping.

Now I've already handed it out and given the random facts, but Katherine has given me eleven new questions to field. I had a lot of fun with these, and I hope you will too.

1. Chocolate or vanilla?
   Chocolate to excess. At any given time at least ten pounds of me is chocolate, even if I haven’t eaten it recently. It owns real estate on my ass.
   
   
2. Tea or coffee?
   Tea, especially black tea or raspberry tea with raw honey. It’s become a key instrument in freeing me for soda. I’ve never liked coffee.
   
   
3. What colour is Thursday (and why)?
   Caucasian. G.K. Chesterton didn’t write much fiction about people of color.
   
   
4. What's the first thing you remember?
   The Big Bang. It’s a false memory, but you can’t pre-date it.
   
   
5. If a stranger were to open your fridge door and look in right now, what would be the first thing they noticed?
   Me shrieking in terror at an intruder. Then the bat swinging down.
   
   
6. What made you decide to start writing a blog? 
   I was already writing Bathroom Monologues for years beforehand. An agent recommended every author have a blog, and I figured, I wasn’t really doing anything else with all these bits of prose. What was their purpose if not to share them?
   
   
7. If your home got featured in a house & home sort of magazine, how would you describe your decorating style?
   Lysol.
   
   
8. What was the last book you read that you recommended to other people, and why?
   I’ve tweeted about Tom Holt’s Blonde Bombshell multiple times, posted a review to Goodreads and on Facebook. Before I’d even finished it, I bought it for someone’s birthday present. If it actually got remaindered, I’ll be depressed. It is madcap absurd, about a bomb destined to blow up earth that gets a conscience and a libido, a genius tech engineer who’s paranoid unicorns are following her, and all because we’re the scum of the universe who had the audacity to invent the addictive nuisance of music. Every page is sharply written. You can read my full review of it here.
   
   
9. What's your idea of the perfect Sunday?
   Wake up early but rested, probably around 8:30, when not much is going on and there’s ample light. It’s one of my rare off days from exercise and physical therapy, and the one day per week I get to eat red meat. Tacos and pasta simmer while I exercise a bit, and read some incredible author. If football doesn’t come on soon, then curling had better. One or two friends stop by, but not for too long, because I’m usually a cognitive hermit. Either from then or from my relations on the internet, brave new things are discovered, like GIFs of rampaging Godzilla toys, some obscure Japanese wrestling match, or an author that someone threatens my life if I don’t try. I do try it and my whole week will be better for reading them. And all the while, I accidentally write an incredible amount without having noticed I was working.
   
   
10. Socks or barefoot?
    
11. What's next?
    The perfect Sunday.

Bathroom Monologue: The Godzilla Moment at Niagara Falls

Earlier this year I visited Niagara Falls for the first time. My phone was busted and ate the photos I took, but I kept a monologue from my visit to the base of the falls. I'm still not sure why I like exposing these thoughts. It'd probably be better if I didn't.

This is what I came for. From above it looked like any waterfall, just bigger, more gallons-of-water per square-national-treasure. Up there it seemed the factual mass existed, but not the spiritual.

Below, the grandeur sets in. It sets in so deep that I realize “grandeur” is Shakespearian for “bigness.” From below, Niagara Falls possesses considerable bigness.

Peering up through its perpetual mist, at how its spill dwarfs all neighboring staircases and hills, and yet all remains in motion. A fall from its lip possessed mortality. This, I thought, was how those peasants must have felt when Godzilla first loomed over the mountain. Yes, the spirit of kaiju filled my heart at Niagara.

Perhaps my experience was even better than Godzilla’s witnesses.

After all, I was real.

I also wasn’t eaten.

Bathroom Monologue: My Zombie Apocalypse Team (see if you can spot the theme)

It’s 120 meters tall, mechanical so it can’t get infected, carries every Weapon of Mass Destruction known to man, has a flight mode, underwater mode, and always comes back in the last act of the movie no matter what went wrong. It's the Brains of the outfit because its brain is yet another laser gun, and since it has its own repair bay, it's set for Medics. A toy of Mechagodzilla can even suffice as our team Mascot.

Instructions? Point my “team” at the zombie apocalypse and leave town for a weekend.

Alright, I might have been kidding about the Mascot. If we're going to sell mechanized weapons at the end of the world, then he can tag along.