Movie Muser

Oh dear God, here we go again. Sharknado became a bit of an odd sensation last year, not because anyone thought it was going to be a good film, but purely because of the title. Indeed as director Anthony C. Ferrante openly admits in the Featurette on the Sharknado 2 Blu-ray, the first film was only made after the Syfy Channel liked a joke about a sharknado in one of Ferrante’s earlier movies and decided they wanted to create an entire movie based around that word being the title.

After the success of the first one – it was admittedly success mired in utter derision, but it was success nevertheless – a sequel was inevitable. And to be honest it’s rather like the first one – unable to decide how much of a comedy it is and what sort it should be, as well as constantly flirting on the line between trying to ensure the audience has a good time and having so little respect for them that there are moments that feel like the cinematic equivalent of someone giving you the finger.

The film has absolutely no interest in doing anything exact presenting exactly the same film again but moving it from Los Angeles to New York and hoping that a few extra pennies on the special effects will get it through.

Los Angeles Sharknado survivors Fin (Ian Ziering) and April (Tara Reid) are headed to NYC but they haven’t even landed before a new shark storm in upon them. After almost miraculously getting to the Fin must find his sister and her family and then once more try and stop a trio of sharknados that, if they converge, could wipe out the city completely.

It’s immensely dumb and it knows it, but it never seems entirely sure how far it should stick its tongue in its cheek. Indeed it blows its load early on this score with a fun spoof on the famed Twilight Zone episode ‘Nightmare At 20,000 Feet’ and having Airplane’s Robert Hays as the flight’s captain. It never quite manages to be that clever and witty again, and what ensues is a mix of fun moments and stupidity, most of which doesn’t come across as whimsical silliness but more like unutterable dumbness.

Most of the time, rather than offering anything new or different – I didn’t know it was possible to fit this many shots of flying sharks biting people’s heads off into one movie (which isn’t as cool as it sounds) – it merely tries to shove as many cameos in as possible. In fact it doesn’t really have a cast, just a series of ‘faces’ you may recognise, many of whom seem to have come on board on the promise they can be eaten by a fish as soon as possible.

Having so much of the film’s potential fun riding on the cameos is more of a problem for international than US audience, as while us non-Yanks will probably know who Wil Wheaton and Kelly Osbourne, many of the film’s others faces will mean little to most non-Americans. For example, Matt Lauer and Al Roker are massive names in America, and those who know who they are will undoubtedly smile at their serious attempts to report on the Sharknado story, but for everyone else their presence will seem a bit random.

I know it’s almost too easy to rip on something like Sharknado, but just because something is based on a silly idea it shouldn’t get a free pass on everything else. In its favour it’s better than the first one and there are a few moments where it really comes alive – normally when it realises that it’s daft premise should allow its imagination to run riot, rather than just doing the same thing over and over again. Most of the time though it’s happy to just fill the time with dumbness that fills out the requisite running time and throws in a shark death and a cameo every few minutes in order to get us to the end.

Overall Verdict: There are certainly a lot worse cheap, b-movie monster movies made every year, and Sharknado 2 certainly has its moments, but it’s still difficult not to wish and expect it to be more fun than it is.

Special Features:
Making Of Featurette
Cameos Featurette
Audio Commentaries
Trailer
Deleted Scenes

Reviewer: Tim Isaac

After the disaster that was Roland Emmerich’s dreadful 1998 take on Godzilla you might have thought Hollywood would never touch the property again. However the massive monster has returned in a movie that sticks closer to the original Japanese Toho ideas than Emmerich’s efforts, and yet is still very much a modern blockbuster.

While working at a Japanese Nuclear Reactor in the late 1990s, Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) lost his wife (Juliette Binoche) during a meltdown. However he’s never believed it was caused by an earthquake and has become obsessed with the idea that something is being hidden in the supposed disaster area. After recruiting his estranged son, Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), they venture into the hot zone and discover that not only is there no radiation, but that an organisation called Monarch is hiding a pupating monster.

When the creature, dubbed a MUTO, emerges, it’s clear that it could cause devastation and perhaps end human civilisation. As Ford tries to get back to his family in San Francisco, he is witness to just how dangerous the MUTO is, and when another one emerges he becomes part of a plan to use a nuclear weapon to stop them. However the only thing that might be able to restore the balance is another ancient creature that re-emerged on the Earth’s surface after mankind started playing with radiation in the 1950s – the 300ft tall apex predator Godzilla.

This new take on the classic franchise has plenty of good ideas and bringing in director Gareth Edwards was an incredibly smart idea, as his background in special effects ensures he knows how to create some truly impressive set-pieces. He’s particularly good at showing scale, something that’s often lost in big disaster epics and modern monster movies. It works particularly well here where humanity and all its efforts are shown as essentially ants running around pretending they still have control of something that is far greater both physically and metaphorically than they are.

It’s an entertaining movie and does a good job of creating tension, particularly with its old monster movie trick of ensuring that for a long time we only see glimpses of Godzilla himself, which again concentrates on showing his immense size compared to the tiny humans.

However it’s far from perfect. First off it creates a great central character in Bryan Cranston’s obsessive and damaged Joe, but after the first half hour it decides to shift the focus to the far less interesting Ford. Despite Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s best efforts, Ford is a pretty bland character and the script doesn’t exactly do a great job of hiding the fact that the only thing it’s really interested in about him is finding coincidences to get him to every key moment involving the monsters (indeed in this respect it’s not that different from a Roland Emmerich movie). Indeed it’s peculiar that the idea of 300ft tall monsters attacking cities seems more sensible than the plot machinations employed to ensure Ford is always around whenever they do anything memorable.

There’s an odd sense of Gareth Edwards trying to work against certain elements of the script and he actually does a very good job of creating something much bigger, more ominous and interesting than the sometimes connect-the-dots storyline suggests. And there’s no doubt that the film wouldn’t have gotten the reception it did at the cinema without the exceptionally good final battle in San Francisco, which manages to bring together all the best elements of a classic monster movie with modern special effects and some great moments.

To be honest though, no matter how much of a good time I had watching the film, it was difficult not to feel that it was all it a bit of a good overture and that I’m actually more interested in watching Godzilla 2 than rewatching the first one. Godzilla is a film that holds out a lot of promise for a franchise, even if it’s a bit of a mixed bag itself.

The Blu-ray also includes some pretty good extras, including a few very interesting ‘making of…’ featurettes. The best things though are ‘Monarch: Declassified’, which are films supposedly taken from top secret files showing the history of mankind’s interactions with Godzilla, our attempts to destroy him and also how we came across the monster that ends up in the Japanese reactor. Again like the movie, it makes you wonder what other creatures may be out there in a sequel.

Overall Verdict: Godzilla is a peculiar mixture of almost shamelessly generic Hollywood pap and surprisingly good ideas and set-pieces. Overall it works, but that’s more thanks to top drawer efforts from the cast and crew to paper over its more ridiculous tendencies, and remembering exactly what is best about the title character.

Special Features:
‘MONARCH: Declassified – Operation: Lucky Dragon’ Featurette
‘MONARCH: Declassified – MONARCH: The M.U.T.O. File’ Featurette
‘MONARCH: Declassified – The Godzilla Revelation’ Featurette
‘Godzilla: Force of Nature’ Featurette
‘A Whole New Level Of Destruction’ Featurette
‘Into The Void: The H.A.L.O. Jump’ Featurette
‘Ancient Enemy: The M.U.T.O.s’ Featurette

Reviewer: Tim Isaac