Godzilla is coming to the Music Box Garden

The anticipated release of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer inspired the screenings of four lesser-seen Godzilla classics.

By JOEY SHAPIRO

Close your eyes. Picture Godzilla. He’s probably breathing fire, definitely rubbery, maybe toppling a Tokyo skyscraper like a Jenga tower. But what if I were to tell you there’s more to this monster than Ping-Pong ball eyes and clunky latex-suited melee? This July, as Oppenheimer fever is rapidly spreading across the moviegoing public, the Music Box Theatre and Chicago film critic and programmer Katie Rife are showing several different sides of Godzilla with four screenings of his later, lesser-seen classics, playing at sundown in the Music Box Garden every night from July 24-27. In his original 1954 incarnation, Godzilla was a direct response to the bombing of Hiroshima, a towering physical manifestation of nature’s revenge on humanity for having the gall to create world-destroying weapons. (Looking at you, J. Robert Oppenheimer.) Sometime shortly after he squared up against King Kong in 1962, Godzilla shed some of that metaphorical subtext to adopt a more cartoonish persona that snowballed with each successive movie, and by the late 60s this grim personification of nuclear holocaust had become the unlikely star of what were essentially (delightful!) children’s movies in which he played beach volleyball with a giant crab and suplexed his fellow monsters, Hulk Hogan-style.

I grew up watching these sillier kaiju movies—kaiju being the name of this genre of Japanese monster movies, as well as the name for the city-flattening monsters featured in them—until the VHS cassettes wore out, and they hold a special place in my heart. But this monster contains multitudes, and as he entered his 30s, a milestone at which most men decide to get into post-rock and recenter their identity around either a baseball team or a dive bar near their apartment, Godzilla returned to his roots as dark, brooding, and, for the first time in decades, scary. The next 15 years of films, known collectively as the Heisei era of the franchise, as it more or less aligns chronologically with Japan’s Heisei imperial period, would strip away the tonguein-cheek approach that defined many of the sequels in favor of heightened melodrama and surprising brutality.

Rife explains, “What I like about this era is the way it approaches the material, which can be a little exaggerated and silly . . . with total seriousness. I find that really charming.”

The first two screenings of the series, Godzilla vs. Biollante on Monday, July 24, and Godzilla vs. Destoroyah on Tuesday the 25th, are the undeniable peaks of this era, and any viewers who are only familiar with Godzilla’s earlier work are likely to be shocked by how much of a physical transformation he and the franchise as a whole have taken on. These monsters sweat and bleed, and when our favorite lizard opens his mouth, you can literally see the strands of drool glisten.

Biollante, the antagonist of the first film, is as genuinely frightening as the franchise ever got: like Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors filtered through John Carpenter’s The Thing, it’s a many-toothed marvel of science genetically engineered from a rose, Godzilla’s DNA, and the spirit of the lead scientist’s recently deceased daughter. (Just go with it, it’s Godzilla logic.) The confrontations with Biollante are a bloodbath compared to the 60s and 70s fight scenes, with green goop flying in all directions and, at one point, Godzilla literally being given stigmata by Biollante’s tendrils, which all end in tiny mouths with tiny razor-sharp teeth. Godzilla vs. Destoroyah dials it back on the body horror, but instead goes all-in on the sense of Greek tragedy that underlies most of the Heisei movies. If you can only make it to one of these screenings but still want your Godzilla worldview to be rocked, this is the one to see. It’s my personal favorite, and the only one in which it’s entirely reasonable to get a little emo. A frail, terminally ill Godzilla needs his son Godzilla Junior to fight his battles for him as a disgusting bat/mantis creature attacks Tokyo. How could your eyes not well up? Godzilla’s heart is on the verge of bursting, and, assuming you’re not made of steel, yours will be too. It’s a sweeping, apocalyptic finale of the Heisei era and is framed as the end of the series as a whole, although obviously that idea only lasted a couple years before the king of monsters was back on his feet.

If we’re being technical, that happened in 1998 when he made his Hollywood debut in Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla , but I generously choose to strike that movie from the record—it was so universally reviled that the franchise’s Japanese studio, Toho, retroactively claimed that Godzilla doesn’t appear in it, but it instead features a separate entity called Zilla because Emmerich had, in the words of producer Shōgo Tomiyama, “taken the God out of him.” The following year, however, marked his real return, now entering the flashier and more CGI-heavy millennium era. If 60s Godzilla felt like Saturday morning cartoons, these millennium films feel like vivid, overstu ed anime. They can be pretty hit-or-miss, but Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All Out Attack , screening on Wednesday, July 26—if they can fit it on the marquee—is one movie in which the pieces fell perfectly into place. Directed by Shûsuke Kaneko, who headed up the Heisei films of rival kaiju franchise Gamera, GMKG: GMAOA feels like a post-Y2K update on the what-if-big-monsters-knew-WWE-moves premise of some of Godzilla’s earlier hits. There’s no understating how close the fights in this film are to professional wrestling; at one point a helicopter news crew is filming as Godzilla stomps on armadillo/bat kaiju Baragon and narrating it with color commentary like, “And Godzilla puts the boot in again!” This is also notably one of the great showcases for Godzilla’s ethereal sometimes-rival Mothra, who Rife lists as a favorite of hers. “I love Mothra’s femme energy,” she says. “She’s a benevolent goddess who sheds scales o of her wings, and they create a protective mirror that deflects Godzilla’s atomic breath, so she fights with glitter. Plus she has two fairy friends!”

No amount of monster elbow-drops can prepare you for the final film playing in this series, Godzilla: Final Wars, screening Thursday, July 26. There’s a scene in a Halloween episode of The Simpsons in which Homer is sent to Hell, strapped into a chair, and tortured by being force-fed “all the donuts in the world.” He finishes them and asks for more. There’s no better metaphor for Final Wars, a movie expressly designed to give you exactly what you want and more of it than you asked for: a frenetically edited two hours featuring just about every single monster who has ever appeared in this franchise, plus many who haven’t. Yes, that includes Zilla, who fights Godzilla mano a mano in front of the Sydney Opera House while a Sum 41 song blares on the soundtrack.

It’s a hyperactive barrage of kaiju royal rumbles paced like Mad Max: Fury Road, set to an unrelenting techno beat, and populated by MMA fighters-turned-actors and sinister aliens in leather trench coats and sunglasses. There’s no better kind of high-energy incoherence (did I mention the martial arts motorcycle chase?) and certainly no more perfect way to reintroduce Chicago film fans to a giant mutant iguana whose story Christopher Nolan wasn’t brave enough to tell. v

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NOW PLAYING R Asteroid City

Asteroid City, the latest from Wes Anderson, is a true achievement from one of America’s most unique cinematic voices. Set in 1955, the early days of the space age, a group of students, parents, military officials, and various passersby gather in a small desert town for an astronomical science competition. The emotional center of the film is Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman), a war photographer and father of one of the competitors who mourns the recent loss of his wife, and Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), a movie star in town for the competition with her own brainiac daughter. When an extraterrestrial visitor makes an appearance, forcing the town to go under military lockdown, Augie and Midge develop a melancholic chemistry built on navigating the world while maintaining joy in the face of inevitable moments of sorrow.

Asteroid City contains the brilliant ensemble of actors and creative collaborators and the tight stylistic formalism we’ve come to expect from Anderson. A comedy laced with tragedy, tonally, highlights Anderson’s mastery of wry comedic pacing tempered by poignant tragic elements. Structurally, it folds in on itself. It’s a film about a television program about the making of a play, which coils itself so tightly in its own world that it nearly collapses under its own weight of self-referentiality before pulling back into some deeply poignant reflections on tragic endings, exciting new beginnings, and how our identities are shaped for and by those around us.

Critics of Anderson fault his filmmaking as overly stylistically focused at the expense of narrative or thematic content, but Asteroid City brilliantly threads the needle of utilizing the best of Anderson’s aesthetic to convey an emotionally compelling narrative, one which welcomes us to open ourselves up, even if for just a moment, to sharing the pain and joy that make us human. —ADAM MULLINS-KHATIB PG-13, 104 min. Wide release in theaters

RElemental

Disney’s latest venture Elemental will make your heart melt, even if it’s not Pixar’s best. In Element City, all citizens are divided based on the four classical elements they personify: water, fire, earth, and air. Ember Lumen and her family are “Firish”; her parents once immigrated to Element City, facing discrimination but eventually opening their own convenience store called the Fireplace. Ember grows up dreaming of taking over the store, but her father challenges her to overcome her “fiery temper” first. However, when she meets and falls in love with water element Wade Ripple, she’s forced to question everything she thinks she knows about their world.

This is a movie where Pixar’s animation truly shines. Each character across the elements inhabits their nature in a unique, anthropomorphic way. Seeing how they move through this world is truly a delight, from Wade accidentally absorbing into a sponge as a child to Ember melting broken glass with her own body heat. Wade and Ember’s romance develops slowly and unexpectedly, even though you know this is a love story. The best part is that it’s not just a love story; it’s a story about family, duty, and dreams.

Though Element City is visually stunning, the world-building could use some expanding. There are some inconsistencies that made me question the rules: Ember’s family are immigrants, but are all Fire people? And some of the movie’s themes are a little on-the-nose, though it’s a children’s film, a er all, inspired by director

Peter Sohn’s experiences growing up as the child of Korean immigrants in 1970s NYC. Pixar has been known as one of the heaviest hitters at the House of Mouse, though recent projects have been a hit or a miss. Turning Red and Luca? Hits. Onward and Lightyear? Misses. Elemental is definitely a hit with a gut-punch ending that will leave you misty-eyed. —NOËLLE D. LILLEY PG, 109 min. Wide release in theaters

RIndiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the fi h and final installment in the series that launched in 1981 with Raiders of the Lost Ark, picks up 12 years a er the end of its immediate predecessor, 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. That film ended with archaeologist-adventurer Henry “Indiana” Jones (Harrison Ford) happily reunited with his estranged lover Marion (played by Ford’s Raiders costar Karen Allen). But in Dial of Destiny, set in 1969—the summer of America’s moon landing—world-weary 70-year-old Indy is once again alone, he and Marion having separated following their son’s death in Vietnam. A chance at emotional resurrection is presented by Indy’s goddaughter, antiquities dealer Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), who invites Indy on a search for a legendary astronomical calculator, the Dial of Archimedes, that may be able to facilitate time travel. Their allies on this globe-trotting quest include Helena’s street-kid sidekick Teddy Kumar (Ethann Isidore) and Indy’s Egyptian comrade Sallah (Welsh actor John Rhys-Davies, reprising the role he played in Raiders of the Lost Ark). Along the way, the treasure seekers tangle with CIA agents (Shaunette Renée Wilson), Moroccan mobsters, and a slew of Nazis under the command of Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), a German rocket scientist now working in NASA’s Apollo space-flight program.

Directed by James Mangold (The Wolverine, Logan, Ford v Ferrari), Dial of Destiny is action-packed and breathlessly paced, to be sure. Indy’s AI-enhanced exploits here include a reckless car chase through the cramped and crowded streets of Tangier, a galloping horse ride on the tracks of the New York City subway system, a dive for ancient Roman shipwrecks in the Aegean Sea (where the ophidiophobic Jones must face a swarm of snakelike eels), and a plane flight into a time warp. There’s also plenty of gunplay, and I lost count of the bodies early on. Ford, a decade older than the character he’s playing, brings a rugged, grizzled gravitas to his iconic role, adding credibility to even the most far-fetched fantasy elements and seasoned grit to the screenplay’s sharp (and sometimes not-so-sharp) wisecracks. —ALBERT WILLIAMS PG-13, 154 min. Wide release in theaters

Revoir Paris

Revoir Paris’s first scene is painfully ordinary. But not without intention. Mia, a Parisian translator played by Virginie Efira, drinks her coffee and prepares for another day. Disruptions to her routine bother us, like when Vincent, her doctor boyfriend played by Grégoire Colin, abruptly leaves dinner to return to the hospital. In the downpour, she heads home on her motorcycle and stops for a drink at a bistro. She sits alone, people-watching, and gradually, the scene develops an unsettling pressure, as if the crowded restaurant becomes more and more visible. The tension suddenly bursts when gunmen open fire in the dining room during a horrifying sequence that recalls the 2015 Bataclan massacre.

Instead of fixating on the cultural a ermath, Alice Winocour’s film narrows in on Mia. Revoir Paris presents a fractured viewpoint of a survivor, avoiding general claims about the all-too-familiar threat of gun violence. The brutal attack circumvents sensationalism, offering a more intimate look into Mia’s psyche. But her memory is obscured, le as remnants three months a er the assault. She struggles to connect with her partner and friends as she performs her routines with a disquieting detachment. So, she seeks comfort from other survivors, returning to the bistro to confront her splintered memory.

Revoir Paris offers a poignant vignette to post-Bataclan Parisian trauma, but the most affecting moments feel diminished by the bulk of the film. Mia’s story suffers from overripe plot devices that feel unconvincingly overt, especially since Efira’s performance excels in its subtlety. Her interactions with other characters o en flatline, resulting in a fruitless pathos that might engage us but leaves us ultimately unaffected. That said, Winocour’s film successfully reframes grief, implicating the world that won’t allow Mia to mourn. Unfortunately, despite a touching finale, Revoir Paris struggles to pull off its muted story. —MAXWELL RABB 105 min. Gene Siskel Film Center v