Last night, when confronted with a choice between killing time watching the new Godzilla and wading through several kilometers of heavy traffic, I chose the former. Truth be told, I'm not really sure that was the better decision.
The opening credits feature some archival footage of nuclear testing from the 1950s, glimpses of a mysterious creature and the repeated appearance of the name "Monarch" before the film segues to 1999, when Dr. Ichiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) and his associate Viviene Graham (Sally Hawkins), fly to a remote location in the Philippines, where miners have unearthed what appears to be the bones of a giant creature several feet underground. Startlingly, they also discover what appear to be eggs of enormous creatures, one of which has hatched, with its occupant having cut a swath of destruction out to the sea.
Not long after, in Japan, American engineer Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) who lives in Japan with his wife Sandra (Juliette Binoche) and their son Ford (CJ Adams) and works at a nuclear power plant, is concerned regarding seismic activity happening right under the plant, but he cannot get his superiors to listen to his theories as to what is happening, until it is too late and a catastrophic meltdown occurs, with particularly terrible consequences for Brody.
Years later, Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), now grown up with a wife (Elizabeth Olsen) and a son (Carson Bolde) of his own, lives in San Francisco and works in the U.S. Navy as an Explosive Ordnance Disposal technician. For all the time that has passed, however, Joe Brody has never let go of his obsession with finding out what really happened at the nuclear power plant. He gets arrested attempting to enter what has become a quarantined zone, where his old house, and the data disks it contains, are, and Ford has to bail him out of jail. Eventually he prevails on Ford to return to the quarantined zone, where the two of them discover something even more terrifying than Joe could have imagined in his all of his paranoid speculation. Soon a race is on to protect humanity from a threat they have never known before.
I'll be direct; I did not like this movie.
I walked in hoping for a giant creature movie in the vein of Guillermo del Toro's Pacific Rim and Peter Jackson's King Kong, both of which I thoroughly enjoyed, and instead I got a disaster movie with a grand total of, by my estimation, about six or seven minutes of actual screen-time for the title character. To say I felt cheated would be an understatement of monstrous proportions.
There are things I liked about this movie, to be fair; I loved Bryan Cranston's performance. The only real poignancy in the film came from his story, in particular his relationship with his family. Also, while his histrionics may have seemed over the top at some points, of all the actors assembled, and there were quite a few notable ones, he brought the most conviction to his role; it was from his performance that one got the sense of urgency, that there was something terrible about to happen to all of mankind. That he was written out of the script as early as he was really robbed the film of some genuine emotional heft.
Instead of Cranston's Joe, a truly tragic figure seeking redemption through the truth, the focus and intended emotional center of the film is his son Ford, played in adulthood by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who basically looked to me like he was sleepwalking through the whole damned movie. Olsen, as his wife Elle, is good at looking scared and running away, and little else. Between the two of them, these two actors don't come anywhere near what Cranston could have brought to the film had they kept him in longer, and yet it is on them that the filmmakers spend most of the film's running time. I get that the idea was to give the story a human core, and to get audiences to care about the people caught in the mayhem of Godzilla's titanic battles, but that only works when the leads are engaging, and neither of the two leads really is.
Also, Watanabe's Serizawa comes across as downright silly; there's something laughable about his belief that Godzilla (or "Gojira" as he correctly calls him) is some kind of benevolent force of nature. He's supposed to be a scientist, after all, and yet there's no evidence to support his theory of Godzilla's inclinations. His view seems more like a matter of religious faith than of actual scientific principle, a notion bolstered by the fact that Graham refers to the giant lizard as "a god."
It's not a total loss; the depiction of Godzilla is utterly magnificent, and allayed my fears that for all the filmmakers' efforts, he would still look like a guy in a rubber suit. No, the sight and sound of this creature are downright awesome, and I know that description may come across as trite, but I can truly not think of a more apt description. I missed seeing this in IMAX but I imagine that must be a special experience. Given, however, that he's barely ever on the screen in a two-hour movie, though, I wouldn't recommend spending the arm and a leg required to watch in IMAX theaters. Still, I applaud the folks at WETA Digital for rising up to the difficult task of visually updating such an iconic character, as well as the folks responsible for designing his distinctive roar. The creatures he faces off against, the Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms or MUTOS, are similarly imposing, though not nearly as impressive to behold. The time Godzilla and his foes are filling the screen was quite a lot of fun to watch, which made the dearth of his screen time all the more infuriating.
One small touch I appreciated was a fairly novel use for the 3-D format which played around with the audience's point-of-view. Sometimes the mayhem is viewed through Ford Brody's goggles as he skydives, and other times through a car windshield, and other times still through an office window.
For me, the movie fails on two crucial points; it fails in terms of human drama due to actors who, for the most part, turn in utterly tepid, unconvincing performances, and as a monster movie considering that the title character is on the screen for less than ten percent of the total running time. Compared to Pacific Rim and especially King Kong, which were generous both with the development of their human characters and their creature exposure, this movie just fell woefully flat for me.
5/10
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