Seeing as the film industry has to come up with a whole new batch of big, destruction-heavy disaster movies every summer, in order to keep spectacle-seeking audiences rich in bright colors and loud noises, it often becomes necessary for them to engage in a bit of content churn. That’s probably why they pull legendary Japanese movie monster Godzilla out of mothballs for another go-around in theaters every once in a while. Godzilla is cool. He’s huge, he’s green, he can breathe nuclear fire, and he makes for a great excuse for a bunch of guns to fire and a bunch of buildings to blow up. Why not go back to that well for another round of large-scale mayhem every decade or so, once special effects technology has had time to take another leap forward?
This time around the big green guy is being brought to us by a fairly new feature director named Gareth Edwards, who impressed with the creature effects he was able to produce for his relatively small budget 2010 film, Monsters. The story this new Godzilla tells is kind of a soft reboot, where a small reference is made to the fact that there was a Godzilla attack in the 50s (a clear nod to the original Godzilla movie, Gojira, from 1954), but where the particulars of the existence of gigantic, radioactive monsters has been kept from the general public in the years since. The secrecy doesn’t last long into this film, however, because horrific creatures have started popping up in the Pacific again, Godzilla is on the move, government forces are planning a nuclear attack strategy, and a destructive battle of epic proportions is imminent. Though Godzilla is the real star here, a human element is necessary for storytelling purposes, so we see the events of the film mostly through the eyes of a straight-laced solider played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, and sometimes from the perspective of his eccentric scientist father (Bryan Cranston), who’s been suspicious that the government has been covering up something big for decades, and who’s dedicated his life to investigating what that secret is.
And there’s where the problems with the film begin. The character Cranston is playing, who’s driven, obsessive, and who has experienced great loss thanks to whatever the world’s governments are hiding from the public, is an interesting one. Cranston really swings for the fences with his performance, wringing every last bit of drama he can out of his character, and if he was anybody other than Bryan Cranston it probably would have come off as looking cheesy, but he is Bryan Cranston, so it works. You get invested in this guy, you care about his journey, but before you can really get off to the races with him, the perspective of the film completely shifts, and suddenly his milquetoast son reveals himself to be the real main character, leaving Cranston to disappear completely.
Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s soldier who’s caught in the middle of chaos and trying to get back to his family is so dull. Dish water dull. He’s the most generic generic-hero-guy I’ve seen in a movie in a long time, and other than the moments where Godzilla is smashing things, or the stock blockbuster movie scientist (Ken Watanabe) and military leader (David Strathairn) characters are having their stock argument over whether or not to use nukes, he gets almost all of the focus. This is a problem, because he has no distinguishing characteristics other than “good” or “brave” whatsoever, so focusing most of the buildup to the big finale on him makes for a supremely boring movie.
His family doesn’t help engage you in the story either. They exist as meat to be put in peril and nothing else. Edwards cast an actress as good as Elizabeth Olsen to play Taylor-Johnson’s wife, and then he wastes her in a role that gives her nothing to do other than look alternately worried or terrified as things happen around her that are out of her control. She’s a nurse and she doesn’t even get a subplot where she gets to care for the wounded or anything. That’s the biggest problem with this film. The performances are okay, and once Godzilla finally starts doing his force of nature schtick at the end, there are a couple moments of fun, but the movie is just so completely devoid of any sort of character or personality or originality that it’s hard to care about any of it. There might not be a single line of dialogue that isn’t exposition meant to explain the nature of the beast or the doomed plan to take him down. There isn’t a single human character who you’d want to see show up in a sequel.
Dialogue and character aren’t the only problem with the script either. Also, the way the story develops isn’t so hot. There are just so many coincidences of location and timing that have to happen to keep Cranston and Taylor-Johnson’s characters at the center of all the global monster mayhem that’s happening that it eventually gets frustrating. If the movie were a bit more fun, or had a bit more personality, then these are the sorts of problems that would be easy to ignore, but unfortunately that isn’t the case here. The buildup to the action doesn’t really work either. Edwards has good intentions, trying to save the best eye candy for the end so that the film doesn’t run out of steam early, but when you’re dealing with creatures that exist on this sort of scale, delaying gratification isn’t really possible. This isn’t a slasher film where you can keep the killer hidden in the shadows, so what you end up getting is the complete and total destruction of Honolulu and Las Vegas happening frustratingly off camera and getting largely glossed over so that the focus can be put on the complete and total destruction of San Francisco, which happens at the end of the film. At best that’s being too coy, and at worst it’s glossing over death and human misery to the point of disrespect.
Ultimately, this new Godzilla isn’t a movie that really worked for me. It sticks too closely to the blockbuster formula, it cuts the legs out from under its only interesting character, and there’s just nothing in it that’s going to be all that memorable to anyone other than huge Godzilla fans once we get a few years into the future. Formulas are formulas because they generally work for people though, and the scenes where gigantic monster action is happening in the middle of San Francisco are pretty thrilling to look at—at least in the moment—so that’s probably enough to bump this one up from being a failure to being a mixed bag of mediocrity that you should still check out if the admittedly excellent advertising has put a bug up your butt to do so. Just temper your expectations before you go in.
