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(052214) It’s not hard to see the enduring appeal of the Godzilla myth, even
divorced from the context of traumatized post-World War II Japan. The arrogance
of human attempts to best the gods with technology is an eternally relevant
theme (Icarus, Prometheus, Faust, Frankenstein, Flubber), and there’s no gain
saying the basic fun to be had in watching a bumpy-skinned reptile as big as a
skyscraper reduce an entire city to rubble beneath his gargantuan stomping feet.
Plus, by now Godzilla, with his radioactive fire-breath, stumpy waving forelegs,
and aversion to intact skylines, is an archetypal, almost lovable figure—a
quality highly valued by film studios in search of market-ready tent pole
entertainments. Edwards’ Godzilla is likely to do a decent job holding up its
end of Warner Bros.’ 2014 tent: It’s a smooth, sleek, technologically
awe-inspiring 3-D blockbuster with a top-shelf cast (speaking
middle-to-lower-shelf dialogue most of the time, to be sure, but they do it with
style).
For a shining moment in the first reel, it seems like Bryan Cranston’s
appealingly schlubby Joe Brody, a scientist stationed at a nuclear plant in
Janjira, Japan, with his family, will be our hero. But after a scientifically
unexplainable disaster at the plant kills Brody’s wife (Juliette Binoche, who
packs a lot into her doomed 10 minutes onscreen), we flash forward 15 years and
the focus switches to the Brody’s now-grown son, Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a
specialist in bomb defusing for the Army. Joe, now a reclusive conspiracy
theorist obsessed with revisiting the meltdown that took his wife’s life, breaks
the law by visiting the quarantined zone to retrieve evidence from his own
former house. When Ford comes to Japan to bail Joe out of jail, he finds himself
getting embroiled in his father’s crackpot theories about what happened that
long-ago day in Janjira. Joe’s paranoid rants turn out to be accurate scientific
predictions, and the semi-estranged father and son join forces to figure out how
to stop the creatures—giant prehistoric monsters that feed on radiation—before
they destroy Honolulu (whoops, too late) and San Francisco, where Ford’s wife
(Elizabeth Olsen) and son (Carson Bolde) are on the run from the impending
monster beat down.
You’ll notice I’m alluding to monsters in the plural here—not multiple Godzillae,
but (spoiler alert, since the marketing has shown some admirable restraint) one
Godzilla plus the MUTOs (“Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms”), a pair
of colossal praying mantis-like horrors that have emerged from crevices in the
Earth’s crust to complete their mating ritual. There’s a lot of warm-up MUTO
action before we finally get a good look at the title monster, about an hour in:
Scary insect hook-hands ripping out bridge cables, glowing egg sacs with tiny
MUTO larvae wriggling inside, mysterious pods dripping with slimy goo. A pair of
monster experts (Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins, both massively overqualified)
pop up as needed to make with the scientific gobbledygook about electromagnetic
pulses and restoring the balance of nature.
Director Gareth Edwards (a visual effects artist who made his directorial debut
with the well-regarded 2010 indie Monsters) can compose a nice shot, edit an
action sequence with something like causal logic, and even pull off the
occasional mildly winking joke—all of which makes Godzilla’s two-hour running
time bump along more agreeably than it might have. The climactic
monster-v.-monster showdown in the San Francisco Bay—which the imponderably
enormous Godzilla wades through like a kiddie pool— is full of thrilling,
vaguely Spielbergian shots in which ordinary bystanders, including a school bus
full of awestruck children, contemplate the monsters’ sheer scale. It’s too bad
that the human protagonists of this are the least interesting: Taylor-Johnson’s
stoic soldier hero and his distraught wife and son. We care that these three
find each other on the basic level that we’re happy for reunited families in
AT&T commercials, but the script hasn’t given us much more to work with than
“good-looking people who miss each other.” The scientists, meanwhile, are even
more under drawn. At one point a dead-serious Hawkins respectfully addresses
Watanabe as “sensei,” which made me long for a digression on the scientists’
back-story.
But complaining about such things is akin to going to the Indy 500 and
complaining that the cars are too loud and are going over the speed limit. You
go to watch a giant radioactive lizard whale on stuff, and on that score,
Godzilla does its work. With the possible exception of the Transamerica
building, every iconic San Francisco monument is at some point stomped, chomped,
or otherwise casually destroyed. (I kept hoping for some Internet-economy humor,
like a shot of one of the creatures crashing through Twitter’s SF headquarters
clutching a Google bus in each claw.) Though this King of the Monsters is
animated digitally, his sometimes-comical lumbering gait gestures at the
unwieldy solidity of the original “Suitmation” costume. At the end, his beef
with the MUTOs settled, this gentler, less historically fraught, endearingly
senescent Godzilla makes his way back into the ocean’s depths, the balance of
nature restored once more—for now.
Where Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin failed spectacularly in 1998, Gareth
Edwards has succeeded. Although the 2014 edition of Godzilla isn't the be-all
and end-all of monster movies, it's a respectable big-budget effort. Most
importantly for legions of fans across the globe, it's a Godzilla movie,
honoring not only the look and feel of the Big Green Lizard's most famous
outings but paying homage to his entire history. Many of the wrongs committed by
Emmerich and Devlin are corrected here. To the extent that summer movies are all
about mayhem and destruction, Godzilla delivers everything expected of it, and
perhaps a little more. At the very least, it argues that Hollywood can deliver a
Godzilla movie without completely screwing up. The movie has its weaknesses (the
build-up is too long and some of the subplots could have been truncated) but it
works. This may not exactly be the Godzilla I grew up with but it's a more than
acceptable upgrade.
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