REVIEW: Godzilla

It’s been a decade since the last Godzilla film and 16 years since the last US attempt to tackle the franchise (one we’d all rather forget). This rift represents the longest stretch of time everyone’s favorite Kaiju has gone without a film since he first appeared in 1954 and for good reason. I am a huge fan of the Godzilla series (and Kaiju films in general) going right back to my childhood and I am more than happy to recognize that the Godzilla cannon still only has one direct hit to its name, followed by a few partial hits, numerous misfires and one squib load. Particularly in recent years, the Godzilla films have tried again and again to educe the potent power of the original and they have never succeeded, of the 6 Godzilla films made since 1999, 4 of them acted as direct sequels to the original, trying to capture the same lightning in a new bottle. Now we have this new one, helmed by Gareth Edwards and replete with talented actors. Does it stand up to the original? No, not even close. Is it a worthy addition to the Godzilla pantheon? Yes, and the best jump-start the franchise has had in 30 years.

Directed by the man behind Monsters, the film opens with the destruction of a nuclear power-plant in coastal Japan, something having stirred from its slumber beneath the ground in a Filipino mine and made a beeline straight for the nearest source of abundant radioactive energy. Joe and Sandra Brody (Bryan Cranston and Juliette Binoche) are among the employees caught in the calamity and are torn from one another in the film’s most tragic scene. The clock then winds ahead to present day as Joe has become a paranoid, embittered conspiracy theorist, desperately trying to unearth the truth about what happened that day, while his son (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) tries to put the past behind him. As it turns out Brody was onto something big, the site of the disaster has become a holding pen for an enormous chrysalis, which pulsates as it continues to dine on nuclear energy. Unfortunately just as Brody and son arrive, it opens. Enter the MUTO, the new addition to the Kaiju rogue’s gallery, it’s a wonderfully sinister looking thing, in equal parts avian, insect and reptile and once airborne it sets off on a destructive hunt for more radiation to feed on, only to run headfirst into a grouchy Godzilla who arrives to find out who’s making all the racket.

From then on the film becomes something of a chase movie as Godzilla follows his prey further across the globe and the humans desperately scuttle around the beasts trying figure out a way to remedy the situation. Unfortunately this where the film runs into the problem that plagues most monster movies, the human characters simply aren’t particularly interesting. However good the cast is, they can only work within the limitations of a somewhat flimsy screenplay. Ken Wantanabe is an appropriately grim exposition fairy, but an exposition fairy nonetheless and I cannot for the life of me figure out why Sally Hawkins is even in the film, she seems to serve the exact same purpose with none of the glimmer of atomic remorse that just about elevates Wantanabe’s character. Elizabeth Olsen and Aaron Taylor-Johnson both manage to put a human face on the chaos but I did find myself wishing they had more depth. The monster element of the film on the other hand is handled beautifully, to the point at which the passive nature of the people feels like it’s by design, the humans are just betting on a seismic roulette wheel, the monsters have the final say in how it all turns out. This is a big point in the film’s favor, however one-dimensional many of the human characters are, their actions have little to no real bearing on the bigger picture, they’re just there so that we can observe the destruction from the familiar angle, they help us understand what it might be like.

That idea feeds into the way Godzilla has been characterized this time around, he’s been good and evil in previous outings but he’s effectively neutral in this one, as far as the humans are concerned he has no strong feelings one way or the other, he’s there to get rid of MUTO, the humans just happen to be there. This is a very resonant idea, the original Godzilla embodied the rage and remorse of a nation that had been scarred by the advent of the A-bomb, the 80s/90s incarnation was a bitter and resentful shade of a panic stricken planet on the brink of Armageddon, but this Godzilla? He’s above all that, our cares are of little importance to him. In a time when it feels like the universe is shrinking and the Earth is on the cusp of shaking us all loose like fleas, that angle works perfectly. Almost every other giant monster movie ever made has been framed around and haunted by one question: how do you stop it? This time around we’ve been given a far more apt solution: you don’t, you get the hell out of the way. Almost everything of any narrative consequence anyone does in this film just makes things worse and even during the mind-blowing climax in San Francisco, the soldiers scurrying between buildings while Godzilla and MUTO grapple hundreds of feet above feel like ants crawling between chair legs during a pub fight (my brother has insisted that I mention that he came up with that analogy). The military do have a go at Godzilla themselves at one stage (it’s kind of traditional) but as usual it’s akin to spraying RAID on a Bengal tiger, it’s woefully ineffectual and probably just makes things worse.

Perhaps the strongest point of the film though is just the way it looks, the cinematography is staggering, largely built around aerial shots, it feels like taking a helicopter tour of the Rapture and the CGI is spectacular. Godzilla looks better than he has since the early 90s, he moves with real weight and certain tiredness, like he’s becoming jaded with all this rigmarole. The actual fighting has had perhaps the most significant update, far beyond a group of stuntmen in rubber suits shoving each other through miniatures that somebody probably worked really hard on, they fight like animals would, biting, grasping and thrashing while any human construct that might be in the way crumbles like dried-out carrot cake. It’s immensely satisfying, especially considering how coy the film is with its monster action until the final, gigantic payoff. The sound design is also superb, distracting from the rather inconsistent score, Godzilla’s roar has been tweaked enough to gel with the rest of the film but it’s still the same basic sound, a happy medium.

No monster film will ever match the original Godzilla; it’s the exception that proves the rule, an allegorical product of a time and place, an outcry of regret at something that should have never happened. The best sequels made no attempt to replicate that unique catalyst, they just picked Godzilla up and placed him into an interesting, exciting, engaging context. This film does just that, regarding Godzilla as an integral part of a natural balance far beyond anything humans can influence, it’s clichéd and silly, but there’s potency in the broad strokes, perhaps enough to fuel a whole new era of Godzilla films, even the welcome return of other iconic Kaiju. For now though, I’ll settle for just the big guy, Godzilla’s found his voice again and it’s about damn time.

7.5/10