Even Matthew Broderick couldn’t get rid of Godzilla. The monster that made popular the creature feature is back. Director Gareth Edwards has fun building Godzilla to a rousing climax of beast on beast action. Godzilla tramples everything in its path, including compelling characters.
After a prologue, the movie takes us to 1999 where Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) is a nuclear engineer working in Japan. He and his wife (Juliette Binoche) encounter seismic complications that result in the quarantine of their facility. Flash forward to present day, where Joe’s son Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a Navy bomb technician, is coping with the fallout of that incident with his wife (Elizabeth Olsen) and son (Carson Bolde) in San Francisco. Wouldn’t you know it, on the day that Joe calls Ford to bail him out of jail in Japan, that is the day that giant beasts awaken (including the titular lizard), placing Ford and his family directly in the crosshairs of this ancient war.
Director Gareth Edwards clearly has a love for Godzilla and wants to do him right by movie standards. Edwards chooses to showcases Godzilla’s grandeur by using humans as his scale. Much has been written about Edwards’s human eye view direction of these great monsters, and rightfully so. By using Aaron Taylor-Johnson as a measuring stick, the first time a monster appears on-screen it dwarfs Johnson intimidatingly. Wisely, Edwards expands the view as more monsters including Godzilla enter the fight, but even then, he’ll show a view from a building window or from a skydiver (some of this is for 3D purposes, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt). The slow-build to the final monster mash is worth the final 30 minutes: that fight has some amazing demolishing and concludes in one of the more unexpected and satisfying ways possible.
Unfortunately, Godzilla contains humans too. The movie opens with a bang emotionally, and goes nowhere after that, especially during the Godzilla-less first hour. Bryan Cranston and Juliette Binoche get the best work here, though Cranston goes a little too crazy by the end. Aaron Taylor-Johnson is the blank slate: he is a purely plot actor here, being noble and good to his family. We believe in him, but wouldn’t follow him into battle. Elizabeth Olsen’s eyes do a great job looking scared. Ken Watanabe is the ace in the hole as a corporate leader: he has a habit of making clichéd dialogue work in a scene. David Strathairn and Sally Hawkins do nothing but earn a paycheck. The screenplay gets credit for getting rid of characters when they are no longer useful, but wastes that credit by thinly drawing everyone.
Godzilla boils down to a simple question (like Pacific Rim last year): do you want to see huge monsters fight each other? Godzilla proudly flaunts its monster across the screen, bragging about how impossible it is to stop. Blue fire-breathing lizards is just fun to say, and Godzilla doesn’t take its star for granted.