Guest Blog: Godzilla Review *Spoilers*

***** SPOILER ALERT *****

This review will be discussing plot points which may be considered spoilers. Consider yourselves warned.

When I think of the embodiment of raw, awesome, power, Godzilla is the first thing that comes to mind. Pulverizing humanity’s great cities, brushing aside the world’s militaries, and slugging it out with other big honking monsters, Godzilla did it all. Seeing these movies as a young boy I loved the giant radioactive dinosaur dragon. Admittedly, in the sixty years since his debut in 1954, Godzilla’s movies have ranged between wildly entertaining, to reflective and poignant, to just plain laughably and ridiculous. It is just hard to not like Godzilla, and truth be told, it is really hard to mess up a Godzilla movie, (although it has happened). When I first learned that a new Hollywood Godzilla film was coming out in 2014, I was cautiously optimistic.

The film’s opening credits start with a montage eerily similar to the one seen in Roland Emmerich’s offensive 1998 Godzilla. However the key difference is that instead of nuclear tests on Bikini Atoll creating Godzilla, they were meant to try to kill him. The action starts in 1999 in the Philippines where Dr. Ichiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) (the name is borrowed from a character in the 1954 film) and his assistant Sally Hawkins (Vivienne Graham) investigate a giant sinkhole at a mining site. The miners have unearthed giant monster bones along with two eggs—one dormant and one hatched with its occupant having burrowed out to daylight. A quick jump to Japan introduces Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) and his wife, Sandra, (Juliette Binoche) who are working at a Japanese nuclear power plant. While they are on site, what appears to be an earthquake destroys much of the plant, killing Sandra.

Jumping forward fifteen years later, Joe’s son, Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is returning home from overseas to his wife Elle (Elizabeth Olsen) and son. He learns that his father was arrested for entering the quarantine zone of their old home in Japan.  Joe believes that something biological hit the plant fifteen years previously that is being covered up, and is hell bent on proving it. He convinces his son to join him in another attempt into the quarantine zone and—surprise, surprise—Joe is right. The monster from the Philippines has taken up residence in the reactors in cocoon form and is being studied by Dr. Serizawa. It suddenly hatches and wreaks havoc on the site and then flies away. Now it is up to the military, led by Admiral William Stenz (David Strathairn), to destroy it. The problem is compounded since the dormant egg, which has been hidden away in Yucca Mountain, was not dormant and has hatched. To top it all off, Godzilla has taken notice of all the commotion and has left his home deep under the sea to undertake a giant monster hunt, with human kind stuck right in the middle.

If it sounds as though Godzilla is kind of plopped in to his own movie, he was. The whole film is centered on trying to kill the other two monsters, called MUTOs. Godzilla just appears in Hawaii to take on the flying MUTO. Anyone with no knowledge of the franchise and not knowing the title would just be sitting there thinking “Where the hell did this thing come from?” It’s only after the failure of the military to take down the MUTOs that Godzilla’s role in the movie becomes clear. He is the only thing that can kill them. This didn’t really bother me as a plot device, but as a long time fan but I did walk out of the theater wishing I had seen more Godzilla.

The movie does explain that Godzilla has been known to us since ‘54, but doesn’t show how that happened or what it was like. This is not an origin story for Godzilla. We get a brief description of his evolution. Godzilla science as always been a little wonky:  so Godzilla is part of a species that lived when the Earth was young and more radioactive, and they feed on that radioactivity, but as the Earth cooled and got less radioactive they went deeper under the ocean  to feed on the radioactivity from the core?…..I’ll roll with that! The key thing to remember is that it’s a Godzilla movie, so I suggest that fans don’t watch it all Neil-de-Grasse-Tyson-like, looking for stuff to point out as wrong.

“The arrogance of man is thinking nature is in our control… and not the other way around.” Dr.Serizawa says, at one point. Since 1954, when Godzilla first made his big screen debut, that has been central theme of almost all of the thirty plus movies featuring the King of Monsters.  Director Gareth Edwards made sure this was not lost in his 2014 version of Godzilla, even going so far as having Dr. Serizawa spell it out for us. This theme is the big one and Edwards nails it. Godzilla, throughout the film, is totally unconcerned with the presence of man around him. He brushes aside with impunity any attempt to stop or even slow him down. Destroyers and Aircraft Carriers that cruise alongside him in the ocean don’t even warrant his attention. He has one goal and one goal only: kill the MUTOs. The humans around him are just in his way and collateral damage. Mankind, for all its advancements and technology, is helpless in the face of these monsters. The movie is careful to avoid some of the heavy handed social, political, and environmental messages that also appear in many other Godzilla films

Edwards and Max Borenstein (screenplay) seem to use the tone and take elements from the 1954 and 1984 Godzilla films as the base line for this movie. They focus just enough on the human characters to give the film a realistic and compelling feel. The audience also gets a good sense for the human toll these monsters take. I think Edwards very effectively uses elements from real life—natural disasters that many of us are familiar with. A Japanese nuclear power plant is destroyed and the surrounding are uninhabitable (officially); people are swept away by the waters as Godzilla comes ashore, and buried in heaps of rumble. The people charged with protecting these citizens can’t seem to do anything about it. “I’m sacrificing lives by the minute,” Admiral Stenz  points out. Overall the screenplay did a good job of respecting the source material while at the same time adding a strong, serious attitude.

The cast is great. The real danger and often Achilles heel of movie like this is the melodramatic or schlocky performances of the actors. It was a smart movie to make the effect to get actors who could credibly take on these roles. Everyone is spot on. Brain Cranston pretty much carries the movie until Godzilla shows up.  They played it straight and were a big part in making sure this movie wasn’t campy.

In adding monsters for Godzilla to fight the filmmakers used a classic Godzilla plot: really, really bad monsters are breaking all the human’s cities and Godzilla is the only thing that can stop them. Unlike in the Shōwa era of films, in which Godzilla was often portrayed as actively helping humans, 2014’s Godzilla is more animal like, hunting the MUTOs as an “Alpha predator”. The fights themselves are designed and choreographed very well. Viewers get a good sense of the power these monsters have, you can almost feel the blows at times. The final battle in San Francisco is appropriately epic.

Godzilla’s design has changed many times of the years. In fact, I’m not sure if any two Godzillas were ever the same from movie to movie. I was really looking forward to seeing what this one would look like. Happily this new Godzilla really embodies the traits I mentioned above. In many older movies, Godzilla’s fighting abilities came off as hokey, here the CDI worked very well and allowed Godzilla to use his tail and bite attacks in the fights very convincingly. His radioactive heat breath/beam/fire got a redesign too.  I was cool with this.  In the first film it was more like a mist, then it looked like hot foam, and later became more of a beam. In this film it looks much more like traditional dragon’s fire, but is still blue, and his back spines still light up before he lets fly—a must for the fans. His eyes seemed a little small, but one big change I noticed was the addition of gills! Most important though, sound design did the roar justice.

My one big gripe with the film is that Godzilla and the MUTOs didn’t battle each other enough.  In many of the Godzilla movies there are usually one or two brief but fun fights to whet the audience’s appetite before the giant fight at the end. At least twice in this movie it looked like the creatures were about to fight, then suddenly the scene breaks. It is obvious that the movie makers wanted to show more of the human characters to make the film more compelling. However, even with this great cast there is only so much you can do with them. At the end of the day, fans just want to see big, frigging monsters kick the crap out of each other.

Also, one thing that is in many Godzilla movies that was missing here is the big scene where the military gets wrecked by Godzilla or the other monsters. Although there was a running battle throughout the movie between the military and the MUTOs, I preferred those battles in which tanks and planes are all lined up to fight Godzilla and he just spanks them. The ’84 film had the best one of those ever. The ’84 film had the best one of these scenes ever. The best we got in 2014 was a War of the Worlds(2005) type shot where the broken remains of Army hardware are floating down a river.

Overall, the 2014 Godzilla does this long time Godzilla fan proud, and is a worthy entry in to the series. Godzilla is a fun and satisfying ride that fans will be pleased with and any newcomer should dig.

4 out of 5 Death Stars

–by Joseph De Paul