REVIEW: Godzilla

Courtesy of Warner Bros.

Filmmaker Gareth Edwards, who landed on Hollywood’s radar thanks to 2010’s indie sci-fi thriller Monsters, earned a similar project for his big-budget debut. He’s tasked with restoring the reputation of Godzilla, arguably the world’s most famous monster, after Roland Emmerich’s disastrous version. If you’ve seen that turkey, you know what a seemingly impossible task that is, but Edwards mostly pulls it off.

This new, vastly improved Godzilla is a slow burn, one that’s much closer to the tone and character development of old-school monster movies than modern short-attention-span blockbusters like Pacific Rim and the Transformers flicks. While the titular creature’s reveal is glorious – viewers in my screening broke into thunderous applause – it doesn’t happen until halfway through the flick.

The first hour is devoted to setting up the story’s human elements. Admittedly, in a movie named after a giant lizard, people get the short end of the stick. Edwards casts solid actors in the primary roles, but Max Borenstein’s screenplay (from a story by Dave Callaham) makes it abundantly clear that they only exist to spout exposition and act as the audience’s eyes during the spectacular creature battles.

Godzilla begins in 1999, when a team of scientists unearth the skeleton of a giant creature in the Philippines. There’s also a giant trail of destruction that leads from the excavation site to the ocean. A bit later, a sudden, violent quake triggers a nuclear meltdown at a power plant in Japan, where an engineer (Bryan Cranston) is forced to watch his wife (Juliette Binoche) die behind a giant blast door that seals in the escaping radiation.

Fast-forward 15 years, the engineer is still obsessed with finding the truth about what happened that day. He gets arrested while poking around the still-quarantined area, explaining to his son (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) that whatever happened back then is about to happen again. Everyone thinks he’s a lunatic until the area is attacked by a giant creature that resembles a mixture of moth and praying mantis.

Named “MUTO” (massive unidentified terrestrial organisms) by the military, the monster quickly reveals that it is communicating with another member of its species in order to mate. There’s almost no weapon in the armory that can take down such massive targets, but one scientist (Ken Watanabe) has another idea.

Back in the 1950s, another massive creature was discovered, but it has remained mostly dormant. However, he believes that if these MUTOs threaten Earth’s stability, this other creature will awaken and act as a counterbalance. In other words, the scientist tells the military, “let them fight.”

That basically means there’s a bunch of unessential build-up to what everybody’s paying to see: an absolutely jaw-dropping grudge match between Godzilla and the MUTOs that levels San Francisco. I could see younger viewers, raised on the disaster porn stylings of Michael Bay and the aforementioned Emmerich, flat-out hating this movie. Edwards is meticulous in establishing the one-dimensional characters and setting up the real world stakes of three skyscraper-sized monsters fighting it out in the middle of a city. In the meantime, viewers get an occasional glimpse of a foot, a tail or an eye to keep them invested. As a result of Edwards’ old-school teases, when viewers finally see Godzilla, as well as the epic beat down he delivers to the MUTOs, it’s a wonderful feeling.

For me, the technique was a fun bit of delayed gratification. Audiences have become spoiled by the magic of cinema, so we get bored by spectacles that would’ve been miraculous a couple of decades ago. (Drew McWeeny, one of my favorite critics, wrote an excellent piece about this concept on hitfix.com a couple of weeks ago.) Godzilla is a throwback to a simpler, sometimes more compelling, style of filmmaking.

The actors do what they can, and I appreciate Edwards casting performers capable of bringing gravitas to a ridiculous premise, but the characters have no effect whatsoever on the narrative’s outcome. The movie ends the exact same way regardless of whether these people are involved.

Cranston (who has a much smaller role than the trailers suggest) brings his A-game as always, especially in the opening scenes. Binoche’s role is a cameo, albeit a poignant one. Taylor-Johnson basically scowls for two hours and Elizabeth Olsen’s talent is completely wasted in a stereotypical worried wife role.

But, again, nobody’s going to see Godzilla because they’re interested in the human characters. They literally don’t matter. And the movie ends on such a cool note that the sequel could bring in a whole new slate of actors anyway.

Godzilla is rated PG-13 for intense sequences of destruction, mayhem and creature violence.

Grade: B