Godzilla (2014)

Dir: Gareth Edwards
Rel: May 16th 2014

After Roland Emmerich’s disastrous 1998 Godzilla, there was, quite understandably, much concern over whether another American reboot/remake was a good idea on any level. Gareth Edwards, director of the slow but thoughtful Monsters (2010), seemed like a promising choice to helm this new attempt, and the tone of the film certainly seemed to come across well in the trailers. It would be impossible to know for sure until the full product was unspooled before us on the big screen.

Now that day has finally come, and I have to say…well, that was certainly a Godzilla movie, with all the good and bad that implies. Reactions from those unfamiliar with the franchise (and, indeed, the genre) have focused on the lack of screen time for Godzilla, but he’s up there about as long as he is in most of his films. What did they want, monster dialogue scenes? (That has actually been done three times in the series, believe it or not. Once with thought balloons.) Putting those behemoths onscreen costs money, whether you’re rendering out super detailed CG or building and stomping on miniature replicas of Tokyo. There’s a formula to the kaiju picture that Edwards follows surprisingly closely, although whether he should have done so is a matter of debate.

In classic kaiju fashion, the start of it all involves a cave in, mysterious remains, nuclear radiation spikes, and a very concerned scientist (Ken Watanabe) who clearly knows more than he’s letting on. We ease into the story by following Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston), an American engineer at a nuclear power plant in Japan, who believes the seismic activity near the plant is abnormal and justifies a shutdown. Before his colleagues can even get around to calling him a crazy American, something attacks the plant, resulting in the death of Joe’s wife in the tunnels beneath the plant, and a massive swath of the nearby area being declared a quarantine zone.

We then jump 15 years ahead, shifting perspective to that of Joe’s now grown up son, Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his wife Elle (Elizabeth Olsen), happily living in San Francisco. Ford is a bomb expert in the military, while Joe has descended into conspiracy loon territory back in Japan, believing that the incident that robbed him of his wife was not what the authorities say it was. He’s right, of course, and the secret in the quarantine zone turns out to be a gestating giant monster called a M.U.T.O. (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism, one of the more amusingly dumb acronyms in recent film). Ken Watanabe takes a break from looking concerned and awestruck at something off camera to explain that the M.U.T.O.s are ancient creatures who feed on radiation, but that something else will arrive soon to stop them. Something he calls Godzilla. And he’s right!

As with most of the classic Godzilla films, you soldier on through scenes of dialogue between characters you not only don’t care about, but generally can’t even name. Tons of military operations occur, none of them remotely effective and many of them directly endangering civilians, despite the fact that small arms fire is clearly not going to damage the M.U.T.O.s, and firing shells from destroyers at Godzilla while civilian evacuees are on the other side of him (not to mention a major American landmark) is absolutely insane. It’s explained earlier that all the nuclear tests of the ‘50s were not tests at all, but attempts to kill Godzilla the last time he emerged. If the nukes at Bikini Atoll didn’t scratch this thing, I think you can put your M4s down, boys.

Edwards has a knack for the Spielbergian “awestruck reveal” shot but doesn’t quite know when to knock it off. At a certain point in the film, we’ve seen all the monsters and been shown just about every kind of moment of discovery available given the story at play. Edwards continues to taunt us with bits of movement just off camera or things the characters can’t see but we can, such as a monster concealed as a shadow or up against a hill. Those visual suggestions turn out to be exactly what they’re suggested to be, and at some point you just have to stop treating this stuff like a horror movie and move on to the spectacle of it all. This does happen, but the film’s pacing would have benefited greatly from it happening about 30 minutes sooner.

Once the monsters are finally operating in full effect, though, the movie fires on all cylinders. Godzilla looks and sounds great, and, perhaps more importantly, like Godzilla. The M.U.T.O.s are not the most compelling foes Godzilla has ever fought, but they do the job well enough, and even have a couple of surprisingly expressive scenes. Much of the action is shot from a human-level perspective, emphasizing the truly colossal scale of these creatures (at 355 feet in height, this is the largest Godzilla has ever been in a film), but Edwards knows to occasionally pull out wide to show the monsters ripping up the eastern half of San Francisco. These are the long shots of the old Godzilla films, but with millions more dollars to play with.

This, of course, is part of the unspoken deal one makes with a kaiju film: I’ll put up with your insipid storytelling if you deliver the monster goods in the last act. There’s no question that Godzilla delivers on its end of that bargain. If giant monsters fighting one another is what you came to see, it’s hard to regret sitting through the forgettable dialogue and story once Godzilla and the M.U.T.O.s get going.

While he remains admirably true to the Godzilla formula, Edwards doesn’t figure out how to put all the pieces together to make a compelling whole. Still, the Godzilla canon is full of directors who fell far shorter of the mark than he did. For all the film’s faults, it’s an honest to God Godzilla movie, from visuals to structure to theme, and for that I thank him. The monster action here is probably the best ever put to film in terms of visual quality and believability. Taken as a whole, it’s somewhere in the middle ranks of the Godzilla films overall, outmatched by the Toho outings that weren’t afraid to have some fun with their inherently ridiculous premise. Here’s hoping the sequel isn’t afraid to bring in an all-new cast and go a little crazy. I need some aliens from Planet X unleashing King Ghidorah on Hong Kong or Los Angeles, and don’t think I didn’t catch that Mothra reference, either. Go nuts.

Rating: 3 out of 5