Godzilla, Green Lantern, and You

Yesterday, I went to the Seattle International Film Festival to see one of the most powerful and important films of the current year, a sweeping epic of war and mankind's place in the universe I'm sure you've all heard of. Namely, Godzilla: Final Wars. This film is crazed, almost a movie told in shorthand constructed out of the entire body of previous works Toho has created before it... this is a movie so full of references and cameos that someone like myself, someone only partially initiated, can catch at best a third of them. It's also filled with references to films like The Matrix, X-Men and even Star Wars and does the scenes referencing those films with its tongue jammed firmly into its cheek. There's even a scene where a major character in the film who hasn't been seen in some time appears duing the large confrontation with the evil Xiliens and says 'I managed to escape somehow!' and the subject is never approached again. It's a goofy movie, with the monster fighting sequences synchronized to the human drama in a way both disquieting and interesting.

The real reason I bring it up, however, is that all the way back from the film I was musing on something that was bothering me. There was something about the film that kept nagging at me, some connection to comic books made more pressing in my mind by the trip to the comic book store I made just before seeing it. Something, but what something? Finally it hit me: this was a movie made as if every Toho film before it, even the ones that went out of their way to say that they were starting the franchise over and none of those other movies counted anymore, existed in a single seamless flow from one to the next and any dissonance between, say, Godzilla 1985 and the character of Minya was simply unimportant. This movie had a Godzilla who attacked human cities indiscriminately, as has been the wont in the most recent series, and yet also had a chubby Pillsbury Doughboy-looking monster trying to drive a truck, breakdancing mutants, and a villain so transparently and delightedly evil that he actually cackled and giggled in several scenes.

This is how continuity should work. The works of the past should neither be revered so highly that we can't see the goofiness of them (one remember the Shark, a Green Lantern foe who actually possessed an invisible yellow force field, a trick which makes one reel into contemplations of existential and quantum physical natures of yellow) nor disdained and abused merely because of those self-same goofy bits. Has anyone ever written a story like the one where Gorilla Grodd decides to take over the world by making himself give off an energy field that makes people like him? There's a concept, man. (Grodd also displays an odd publicity sense when he names his drive to power the Grodd Appreciation Society, and even deliberately shortens it to the G.A.S. several times. But who knows what's funny to a telepathic ape?) It occurs to me that we're too interested in explaining away all the ridiculous bits in comics at the moment with books like Identity Crisis (a reasonably tightly plotted anti-mystery, one could make the case for, but one in which a period of time in comics is simultaneously demolished and lionized... why do either, when you could instead make use of it?) or the recent Countdown to Infinite Crisis wherein a character died, as far as I can tell, merely for having been too-strongly identified with a period that people want to distance themselves from.

Part of the reason I bring this up is that I finally picked up the last issues of Green Lantern: Rebirth and the first issue of Green Lantern while waiting to see the movie. And to a degree, Johns is managing the trick of at least keeping as much of the sometimes ridiculous, sometimes colorful, sometimes astonishing Green Lantern mythology as intact as possible. While I still loathe the explanation of Jordan's murderous rampage (oh, he didn't really want to do it, an alien entity that both thrives on and is itself made of fear inhabited his brain and drove him crazy after the destruction of Coast City) I don't know that there was any way they could have explained it that I would have been happy with. What they manage to do in the series is to lift my suspension of disbelief just enough that I'm willing to say, as that minor character did in the Godzilla film, that he miraculously escaped somehow and move on with the story. Part of that is because of what Johns didn't do in the story, which is that he didn't feel the need to drive anyone insane or make them become total failures just to justify Hal Jordan's return. Kyle, John, Kilowog, even Guy Gardner are given time to shine and to show why they deserve to wear the ring, and Kyle's tenure as the only Green Lantern isn't swept under the rug or spit on, but accepted and brought into the greater story of the Corps. It's this ability to simultaneously touch upon many aspects of the history of the character and its mythology, displaying an awareness that, yes, Sinestro is a more compelling and more dangerous foe than a big evil yellow fear monster (and having Sinestro first contact the Parallax entity while trapped in the Great Battery is a nice touch) that makes the series ultimately work well enough for me. While I hope that Johns slows down a touch and writes a few less books, I'm not disturbed by his being the hand on Green Lantern for now: he was a lot gentler to the various characters embedded in the character's history than other writers have been.

By the way, my own personal favorite creators in the history of GL are Broome and Kane. Johns and Pacheco have a long, long way to go to catch up to them, but at least so far I'm not writhing in agony at the prospect.

Posted by Matt Rossi at May 29, 2005 1:49 PM