When Gareth Edwards' Monsters came out in 2010, I reasoned that many of its sometimes severe deficiencies were the result of a noble attempt on the part of its director to stretch a tiny budget further than it could reasonably be stretched. If there's one thing to be gleaned from Edwards' new film Godzilla, heralding the long-awaited return of cinema's most iconic movie monster, it's that Edwards actually suffers from some severely misaligned priorities. For even with a projected budget of $160 million behind him, he has once again turned out a film that is, in spite of a great deal of care and insight behind the camera, an absolute fucking slog in places where it really shouldn't be. It's a good deal more galling this time around, however. It doesn't just feel like a waste of that hyperinflated budget, but something trickier and all the more frustrating: there is a fantastic Godzilla film that could have been assembled from essentially nothing more than footage that already exists within the film, and to be instead saddled with the fitfully spectacular and frequently tedious film that we got instead is an outright tragedy.
Picking up the mantle from Japanese studio Toho after their iconic mascot was put to pasture ten years ago in the wake of increasingly lackluster box office returns, Godzilla serves as a reboot to the now 60-year-old franchise begun in 1954, and the first time an American production company has taken the reins since Roland Emmerich's spectacularly misbegotten 1998 misfire. The new film opens in Janjira, Japan, with nuclear plant supervisor Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) losing his wife Sandra (Juliette Binoche, wasted) in a plant meltdown caused by freak seismic activity. Things jump forward 15 years to the present day and we're introduced to Brody's now-adult son Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), returning from a stint in a US Navy bomb disposal squad before being unwillingly summoned to Japan to bail out his father, who has remained obsessed with uncovering the true cause of the meltdown, convinced that there was a cover-up. Joe is right, of course, and his snooping brings both he and his son to the attention of a shadowy team of scientists lead by Ishiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) and Vivienne Graham (Sally Hawkins, also wasted). The Janjira plant has become the nesting grounds of a great big Something, dubbed MUTO (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism), and the Brodys have arrived just in time to see it hatch.
It's at this point that Brody the younger more or less takes over as the lone protagonist of the film and things turn into a race against time by the Navy to put a stop to a pair of MUTOs who are cutting a swathe across the United States - first Hawaii, then Nevada, and finally San Francisco. There is another Something hunting the MUTOs, though, and the film respects its audience's intelligence enough not to play coy with its identity. Yes indeed, a hulking prehistoric lizard dubbed Godzilla by Serizawa's team has been woken by all the seismic activity, and it is pissed. Ford also has a wife and son (Elizabeth Olsen and Carson Bolde respectively) in San Francisco, and that fact that I could summarise so much of the plot without mentioning them once is a keener demonstration of what they add to the film than anything else I could say. More worrying still is how little of that plot actually revolves around the presence of Godzilla himself. It was a ballsy move of the filmmakers to assume enough existing familiarity with Godzilla that precious screentime need not be wasted in establishing his importance, but it tips too far over the line into taking Godzilla for granted entirely, assuming that we will understand his importance and care about his fate simply because he is who he is.
I will say this much: for probably the first third of its running time, Godzilla is damn near faultless. The fifteen-year timeskip feels dreadfully unnecessary and certainly contributes to a lot of the bloat later on in the film, but everything else is spot-on. Even the opening credits are thrilling; a rapid assault of historical footage and snatches of on-screen text that are hastily whisked away while the most driving and ingenious orchestration in Alexandre Desplat's otherwise forgettable score pounds away demands we sit up and pay attention and leaves us with just enough information that we're hungry for more. The following scenes detailing the tragedy at the plant and glimpses of Serizawa's research are nearly as good and set in motion a whirlwind of information and imagery that churns along at a breakneck pace and brings the film's giant monsters into the fold with hardly a wasted breath. Things get a little rockier when Godzilla's backstory is detailed, a moment of horribly strained writing that hits all the wrong notes and manages in one fell swoop to completely depoliticize one of the most political movie monsters in history, serving up mythology in place of allegory and leaving Watanabe helpless to salvage the moment with all the gravitas he can bring to bear.
The fumbling of such a pivotal moment is almost forgotten when MUTO hits Honolulu, though, in a scene that would have been inconceivable in the days when the monsters were men in rubber suits stomping around miniature sets. It's a scene that marries a human point of view with an immaculate sense of scale that could only have been achieved through the use of CGI, and it strikes a balance of awe and horror that could not be more perfectly suited to the material. It culminates in the first full shot of Godzilla, a slow upwards pan that shows off the new design, a perfect marriage of his traditional appearance with the increased detail and more animalistic features allowed by CGI. Godzilla gives of an earth-shaking roar, ready to fight, and... Cue a useless cutaway to Ford's wife and child that serves no purpose, narrative or emotional, and only serves to play keep-away with the scenes of monsters fighting that should be the movie's raison d'etre. It's at this point that Godzilla grinds to a halt and never fully recovers.
Ford Brody, you see, is just a godawful protagonist, and everything in Godzilla from there on out is focused on he and his family to the exclusion of nearly everything else, up to and including the giant monsters that everybody is presumably there to see. The Godzilla franchise is not known for its history of compelling human protagonists, of course, but then it has also been historically characterised by running times that come in south of 100 minutes (frequently south of 80!), at least 30 of which are given over to nothing but giant monsters beating the holy hell out of each other, something which is emphatically not true of Godzilla 2014. I don't entirely understand why the character of Ford and the fifteen-year timeskip were even necessary at all. Joe Brody is no-one's idea of a memorable or engaging character but Cranston draws on the guilt and obsession that motivate him and brings a livewire energy to the role that is miles more watchable than Taylor-Johnson's bland and inflectionless performance. It's made worse still by the aforementioned marriage of human POV and large-scale monster action, which means that we're given no respite from Ford's presence even when, after nearly an hour of wheel-spinning, the monsters start duking it out in earnest. What worked so well early in the film falls victim to diminishing returns swiftly, and it becomes clear that Edwards has no interest in trying anything else at all.
The tragic thing, though, is that when we do get an all-too-fleeting glimpse at the spectacle on offer, it's absolutely top-notch. Every moment that Godzilla and the MUTOs spend engaged in combat, the film could not be improved upon. Edwards has a great eye, and the choreography, lighting and use of colour in the action scenes leaves them stuffed with indelible imagery. If only it weren't doled out thirty seconds at a time, intercut with endless minutes of Taylor-Johnson's blank face! It's not even satisfying to think of in terms of quality over quantity: the exact same amount of monster action, if presented uninterrupted and in a film that was a good thirty minutes shorter, would be enormously satisfying. As it is the endless interruptions and lethargic pacing actually serve to dilute the strength of the spectacle, rendering what should be some of the franchise's all-time highs into far less than the sum of their parts.
History is littered with quite a few less-than-successful Godzilla reboots, so it's hardly surprising that this one, too, would be littered with problems - I haven't even addressed the way the film refuses to grapple with the US's role in creating Godzilla in the original, or why exactly a monster whose whole reason for existing was as a cautionary tale about nuclear warfare would appear in a movie with such a blasé attitude towards nuclear weaponry. Godzilla himself at least is in fine form; the new design strikes a perfect balance between paying homage to Godzillas past and bringing him into the modern blockbuster age (the MUTOs, unfortunately, feel like yet another rehash of the Cloverfield monster). It took some clumsy writing, positioning him as neither hero nor antagonist but simply a force of nature - a role arrived at much more organically in previous takes on the character - but Godzilla is now also in a prime position to reappear better than ever in future movies. Hopefully next time, he won't feel so much like the sidekick in his own starring vehicle.
6/10
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