Godzilla
starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ken Watanabe, Bryan Cranston, and Elizabeth Olsen
written by Max Borenstein & Dave Callaham and directed by Gareth Edwards
Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of destruction, mayhem and creature violence.
90%
American engineer Joe Brody (Cranston) has spent years searching for answers about the true cause of a nuclear plant disaster in Japan that devastated his family. His obsession has kept him at arm’s length from his son Ford (Taylor-Johnson), a Navy bomb disposal expert. Meanwhile, Japanese scientist Dr. Ishiro Serizawa (Watanabe) investigates an alarming sequence of events following a mysterious cave-in in the Philippines. The three are thrown together in a desperate bid to forestall disaster after a shocking, unprecedented cataclysm occurs.
Take heed Michael Bay, Roland Emmerich, and yes, even you, Guillermo del Toro. This is how you construct and produce jaw-dropping spectacle without sacrificing narrative or visual coherence. This is how you tell a massive, blockbusting story on a monstrous scale while preserving meaningful human drama. In fact, there are a lot of directors (Peter Jackson, Jon Favreau, Gore Verbinski, et al.) who could use a reminder that hiring a computer animator to make something that looks “awesome” does not automatically make their movie “awesome,” or interesting to watch, or even good.
I honestly can’t remember the last time I saw a movie with this much large-scale destruction that didn’t have me checking my watch halfway through yet another interminable sequence of superheroes, monsters, or giant machines throwing each other into skyscrapers. Edwards never lets these scenes overstay their welcome, always pulling back after giving us just a tantalizing taste of the kind of action other directors throw at the screen in buckets.
He lets our imaginations do a lot of the work, producing a superior product while likely saving a fortune in production costs and time. Which isn’t to say that Godzilla doesn’t deliver. The climax is an incredible payoff, made all the more amazing and enjoyable without the wall-to-wall-action fatigue that lesser movies have created by this point. At the same time, it manages the difficult feat of creating real tension and peril around its characters, whose survival never seems like a foregone conclusion.
Certainly the best thing about it, and the highest praise I can give it, is that this movie delivered everything I didn’t even know I wanted out of a Godzilla movie. I’m going to confess right now that the only Godzilla I’ve ever seen is the execrable 1998 Emmerich version, which I am given to understand true fans regard with such contempt that it isn’t even considered a Godzilla movie at all. I never really got the appeal of watching a guy in a big rubber suit stomp around knock over cheap city sets, or fighting other guys in big rubber suits. Until now. Sitting there in the darkened theater, drinking in the massive awesomeness of Godzilla, something clicked, and I suddenly understood the whole “King of the Monsters” thing.
I could go on gushing like this for awhile, but that’s really all I want to say about this movie in a review. Because yet another impressive feat it pulled off was advertising a Godzilla movie that left me completely unprepared for the story that unfolded in this movie. I still can’t quite believe that the advertising campaign didn’t even hint at some of this movie’s fantastic surprises. So I’ve tried to respect that with a plot summary that is as vague as the movie’s trailer, and a discussion that is even more spoiler-free than I’m used to providing.
The movie’s weak point, unsurprisingly, is character development. During the first act, Taylor-Johnson’s character, Ford, emerges as the primary point-of-view/audience surrogate. Not the protagonist or antagonist, of course. That would be Godzilla himself. However, his performance, in fact his whole demeanor, is startlingly wooden and emotionless. This worked pretty well for me, making him something of a blank screen on which I projected my own emotions about his family and his circumstances. But I’m doing all of the dramatic heavy-lifting as the spectator, and he’s not doing much of anything.
Part of the problem, though, is in the writing. Ford doesn’t experience any growth as a character, and he doesn’t have an arc to speak of. My sense of these films is that this is all kind of built in at the genre level, but it’s the most significant criticism I had apart from a couple of the usual head-scratcher plot holes that don’t necessarily register until you think about the movie later. There are, by my count, 3 Oscar nominees, an Oscar winner, and a 4-time Emmy winner in this cast. But none of them are getting any nominations for this movie. And that’s okay. Godzilla delivered exactly what I came to see without treating me like a popcorn-swilling moron. I’d say that puts it at least two steps ahead of the average summer blockbuster.
Moviegoings 