After watching director Gareth Edwards
'Godzilla' I immediately called my older brother, a Kaiju geek
if ever there was one… okay… a geek about everything if ever
there was one… and ask him quite simply… 'Pacific Rim' or
'Godzilla'. He hemmed and hawed, mentioning that
watching robots hit a monster on the head with an oil tanker
is hard to beat, but eventually he settled on Godzilla by a
nose. For me however… Godzilla by a long shot. It
laps Pacific Rim and I really liked Pacific Rim.
Somewhere in Japan, in the year of 1999, nuclear reactor
scientist Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) knows something is going
wrong with his reactors and he needs to find out what it
is. It's monsters Joe, but later on that. It is
Joe's birthday, and just so you know, Joe is about to have the
worst birthday that anybody could ever imagine.
Regardless, Joe sends his beloved wife Sandra (Juliette
Binoche) to check out the reactor down low while his team
monitors the goings on up top, but tragically an earthquake or
a typhoon or a tsunami or something wipes out the reactor and
Joe and his little boy Ford are sad. Still monsters
though. They just don't know.
Fast forward to the present day where Joe is a total whackjob,
knowing full well that an earthquake didn't wipe out that
reactor, and he will do anything to get to the truth.
Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is all grown up and defuses bombs
for the navy for a living, when he's not loving his own little
boy and his wife Elle (Elizabeth Olson) or bailing his dad out
of some Japanese prison for violating the space around the
contaminated area of the failed plant in his efforts to expose
the truth. Say like today, when Ford had to bail Joe
out, but oddly enough Joe was right. It wasn't an
earthquake. It was totally monsters, like we said, that
collapsed that power plant so many years ago and The Man knew
all about it. Trouble is this monster, which they have
named MUTO, which stands for something I can't remember, is
out and about and causing a ruckus.
The worst news is that this Muto has awakened
another ancient creature which people in the know have named
Godzilla, because Godzilla hates these things. In fact
Godzilla is about to wreck a whole bunch of stuff just to get
to this creature. And his girlfriend. That's
right, there are two of them and it looks like they want to
spawn, which would be bad. And wreck stuff, which is
currently bad. Unless Godzilla can stop them. With
the help of this dude we insist on following around.
What we are going to try to do here in the next couple of
paragraphs is attempt to counter a few of the criticisms that
we have heard floating about in regards to this film, and
probably agree with a couple as well. For instance, the
statement that Godzilla is a guest star in his own
movie. While the film doesn't have a lot of Godzilla in
it, at least in the beginning, I prefer this 'Superman I'
approach … setting the atmosphere and building a backstory for
our hero… as opposed to the 'Pacific Rim' approach of just
throwing us into the middle of the mayhem. I appreciated
the development of the world that Godzilla was about to enter,
and the setup for Godzilla itself. If we were to use the
original Godzilla as an example, this is more in line with
that film. In my opinion this made for a purer, more
organic viewing experience.
Then there is the argument that movie is too grim. Can't
really argue… the movie is dark, both figuratively and
literally… thousands upon thousands of people die, people get
stomped on, buildings collapse with property destruction
probably edging into the trillions and in this sense this film
is very 'Man of Steel' like considering all of the death of
destruction. Difference being that these are giant
monsters that don't know any better. This is what should
happen when giant monsters walk through the middle of town and
fight to the death. And when giant monsters that eat
radioactivity do finally show up and randomly kill hundreds of
thousands, chances are we aren't going to be cracking too many
jokes to keep things light. The original Godzilla wasn't
all that funny either and 'Gamera: Revenge of Iris', argued as
the greatest Kaiju movie ever, with which this film shares
some similarities, was about as down as it gets.
Then we hear that the human characters are weak.
Maybe. Bryan Cranston's character, for the time he was
in this movie, gave this film its critical launching point,
Ken Watanabe's Dr. Sherizawa provided us with exposition
without actually becoming 'exposition guy' and Aaron
Taylor-Johnson gave us a focal point. I like monster
destruction as much as the next guy, but there has to be a
human element and I felt the human element in this one was
handled well, but in all honestly, how really important are
human characters in a Godzilla movie? Who do you
actually remember from a Godzilla movie, outside of those
little chicks that sang to Mothra?
Some things, however, I can't argue with. The fact that
almost all the monster battles were fought in a dark, smoky
haze. Shine a light on something Mr. Edwards.
Also, this director likes to tease. Godzilla and the
first monster were just about to do their thing, for the first
time no less… and the screen turns black to follow Aaron
Taylor-Johnson around some more. That was a little
frustrating. Other little issues… if one is waiting for
a critical call from the one you love, thinking he might be
dead, take your cell phone off vibrate. Or better yet,
man making call, call the house phone. It always
rings. Oh, and this wife might want to check her
messages on her cell phone. And what was up with the
road blocks on the bridge, knowing full well that 500 foot
monsters were on the way to wreck everything? Thank
goodness for that magical bus driver who had the good sense to
ignore the road blocks, and the people waving at him to stop,
despite the fact this bridge was currently being decimated by
giant monsters and rockets grenades and was seconds away from
total collapse. Those people are dumb and more people
are dead.
There's more praise and more stupidity we could talk about,
but with Godzilla 2014 I can safely say that director Gareth
Edwards got it mostly right. It is a visual wonder… from
the parts I could see clearly… it tells a good story, is paced
just about perfect and almost removes the taste of Godzilla
1998 from our mouths. Almost. Not quite.
