Those zombies were scrubbed of personality just as efficiently as they’d been robbed of any potentially unsettling thematic point.Įven the filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro-an almost solitary hero of the modern monster movie, not to mention a specialist to rival Ray Harryhausen in designing creatures with pathos and texture-recently stumbled with Pacific Rim, a versus film that featured murkily lit inter-dimensional warlords composed of interchangeably vague tentacles and horns and scales. This adaptation of Max Brooks’s unsettling global horror novel scrapped most of the source material’s haunting subtext so as to emphasize marauding armies of the undead that were so clearly the product of generically composed ones and zeroes that they resembled, oddly, the grain you might find on the images of problematically restored older films. This neutered computer tent-pole syndrome is most obvious in the contemporary zombie film, which reached its demoralizing zenith in last year’s World War Z. American movie monsters bear little metaphorical connection to the theme and intent of the rest of the film to which they belong-and this is the cornerstone of a great monster.
Rather, they’re reduced to set (or set-piece) window dressing.įor example: With the exception of The Lord of the Rings’ Gollum, a creature of real tragic stature, do you recall the specifics of any of the various monsters to appear in any of these series, other than perhaps the Transformers, which have been around for ages as toys? The werewolves of the Twilight sequels and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, for instance, were mostly memorable for the harmlessly pixelated poses they struck compared to the savage lycanthropes of past classics such as An American Werewolf in London or The Howling. Monsters used to predominantly figure into, logically, horror films, but today, they’re everywhere-both in “monster movies” and in non-monster movies, and they aren’t even usually the primary focuses of these films. The need for such reassurance is a symptom of the problem with contemporary American movie monsters. (And, sure enough, some early reviews confirm it: As the Associated Press's Jessica Herndon writes, "When we finally see Godzilla-just shy of an hour into the film-the anticipation has built to such a degree that we expect to be awe-struck. The new film’s trailers implicitly promise to restore Godzilla as a terrifying being of majesty, rather than as just another animated creepy-crawly. No, the new monster is just that: an operatic monster with the wonderfully, irrationally hunched human gait and the recognizable stegosaurus spikes jutting out of its back. Though controversially tubbier than its cinematic Japanese grandpa, this Godzilla is still unmistakably Godzilla the filmmakers haven’t attempted to render it “realistic” in the forgettable mold of the decidedly T-Rex-esque beastie that charged through Roland Emmerich’s misbegotten 1998 film.
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