Tonight, I watched Godzilla 2000 on the local Spanish TV station.  Despite my last name, I don’t speak Spanish.  Turns out you’re not born knowing it, and I never really got the chance to learn.

It didn’t matter.  Godzilla speaks the universal language of butt-kicking, city-stomping action.  I’d seen the movie before, of course.  Several times.  Even if I hadn’t though it would’ve been easy to follow.

That’s something I love about Godzilla flicks.  They don’t need complicated plots to be exciting.  They just need Monster A to fight Monster B until one of them is defeated.  The why is largely unimportant.

This isn’t just true of kaiju films though.  This is true of many stories, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.  I’ll admit that every time I hear someone complain about an action film’s “lack of story” I get a little cheesed off.  It’s an action movie.  Too much story just gets in the way.

Too often a complicated plot is mistaken for a sophisticated plot, but I’ve always believed a story should only have as much plot as is necessary to keep it going.  If an alien spacecraft comes to Earth and decides it needs to absorb Godzilla’s life force to take over the world, I’m cool with that.  I don’t need a complicated explanation why this is true.  I can just play along.  As long as I get to watch Godzilla blast the alien to cosmic dust along the way.

Sometimes, we overthink.  Probably because we’ve been convinced that if you’re not overthinking, you’re underthinking.  But there is a middle ground, I feel.  Something can be thrilling and fun with a very simple story without automatically being stupid.

And then there’s movies like Up and Kung Fu Panda that are incredibly intelligent and superbly crafted.  The characters and their motivations in this films are absolutely essential to the story.  There are subtleties here that pay off in fantastic ways.

Godzilla isn’t subtle.  Nor should he be.  He’s a giant, radioactive lizard who destroys all opponents that get in his way.  That’s what I love about the big lug.  You can call him stupid if you want.  Godzilla cares not for your insults.  He’s too busy saving and / or destroying Tokyo.  Because that’s what he does.

And damned if he isn’t great at it.

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