GODZILLA

GRADE: A
Starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, David Strathairn, Elizabeth Olsen. Ken Watanabe and Bryan Cranston
Directed by Gareth Edwards
Reviewed by Paul Gibbs


As much as a year before its release, people were trying to convince me that the 1998 Roland Emmerich version of Godzilla was going to be a classic that made everyone forget those puny little dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. I was quite skeptical about the movie, and it turns out I was right. It ended up being a lackluster dud chock full of spoofy jokes that weren't funny, and is now mostly forgotten. This was one of the biggest reasons I couldn't muster up any excitement for the 2014 version, even when people tried to convince me how good it was going to be. This time, I was happy not to be right.

Gareth Edward's Godzilla begins with Dr. Joe Brody ( Bryan Cranston, a nuclear physicist conducting radioactivity research at a power plant in Japan, along with his scientist wife (Juliette Binoche) when tragedy strikes his family. 15 years later, Brody is estranged from his son Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a military man working in explosive ordinance disposal. Ford is summoned to to Japan, where his crackpot father is pursuing wild theories about what happened before. It's not long before the Brodys of course discover that the theory are not only not so crazy, but also involve three giant monsters, one of which is the legendary lizard of the title. From here the story shifts to a larger scale to include various Admirals,scientists, and people fleeing the wrath of the creatures.

The story gets off to a somewhat slow start, and it's very disappointing to see the immensely talented Cranston once more woefully underused (has any movie other than Argo really made a decent use of him?). Among the humans, only Ken Watanbe (playing Dr.Ishiro Serizawa, a Japanese scientist) makes much of an impression. But amazingly, it doesn't really matter. The stars are Godzilla himself and director Gareth Edwards, who looks to be a major presence in the future. The skill with which Edwards films and stages the action/suspense sequences recall much of the best genre work of Steven Spielberg, and yet at the same time demonstrates a creative vision of his own. This is a director who has studied and learned technique and knows how to use it in ways that put nearly all of his blockbuster contemporaries to shame. Edwards expertly blends teasing the monster (like Spielberg did in Jaws), with wowing us with the spectacle of the beast (like Spielberg did in Jurassic Park), and helps to give the big guy a presence which almost makes the blandness of some of the human characters an asset because they don't distract from the King of Monsters. The soul of the movie is the creature, and there's a lot more to him than smashing stuff. Edwards also wisely keeps the other two monster dark and lacking in facial detail to make them genuinely scary, and not all sympathetic (even to a guy like me who always wants to root for the creature). He also deftly utilizes point of view to make us feel inside the action without resorting to an excess of shakicam (yes, the 3D helps, and it's a no brainer that a giant monster is best in IMAX). The effects team of course deserves a lot of credit. They and Edwards use the effects in a way which reminded me how exciting and fun effects used to be. While the film may be lacking a bit in humor, that's understandable as they try to distance themselves from the campiness of Emmerich's version, and there is one moment that earns much more laughter than any of the groan inducing mugging of that film did.

It may be a bit thin on the side of story and character, but sheer technical skill of effects and direction, and sheer monster movie thrills, scares, cheers and fun, Godzilla is a blast. It's a movie that knows exactly what it wants to be and does it to near perfection.  It is rated PG-13 for violence.