There might not be too many movies this summer that I will be more excited to see than I was when I watched Godzilla, and probably with good reason. I can’t recall a movie in recent memory that had a more pitch perfect marketing campaign than Godzilla, whose trailers and images highlighted amazing visuals and a “realistic” setting. The movie, for all intents and purposes, delivers on much of that promise, giving you stunning visuals and a movie you’ll be hard pressed not to enjoy. However, even with the many highs, there are just as many WTF moments that will leave you unable to can and shaking your head.
Godzilla is a movie best served by not knowing too many plot details but I’ll give you the basics. After a nuclear plant explosion leaves the Brody family devastated, they find themselves drawn back into the monist conspiracy when the site has become active again and all hell begins to break loose and the military scrambles to figure out just how to deal with the looming threat, all the while Ford Brody (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) tries to make his way back to his family.
Godzilla is a movie that you have to be willing to suspend your disbelief in off jump and if you don’t do that you’ll never recover. For the most part the movie had me. The script was solid enough to keep the movie going and never letting up once it got on its roll. There were several times I had to resist the urge to shout YAAAAAAAAASSSSSS at something that happened because the movie was so entertaining. On the acting side, the performances range from the good to the hammy. At the intersection of these are the triumvirate of Bryan Cranston, Aaron Taylor Johnson and Elizabeth Olsen. Each actor seems to know exactly what the film needs in any given moment, using every ounce of their acting weight to pull it off. It could have been so easy for these actors to get lost in the shuffle, but instead they keep the attention rightfully on themselves.
This movie however, belongs to the duo of Seamus McGarvey and Alexandre Desplat, the cinematographer and composer respectively, whose master of their art allowed this movie to leap off the screen. I don’t know how Seamus has found himself in the blockbuster vein but his compositions and interesting camera work really made this movie feel like a cut above the rest. Desplat is one of the best composers working today and from the second his opening title started to play I knew he’d have some amazingness in store for me. The score is soooooooo good and it just carries you through the movie.
Now, I want to talk a bit more about the film but it would include spoilers so you can see them after the picture.
Grade: **1/2/**** (C+)
Spoiler Section
I guess the place to start this spoiler section is that Godzilla is not the main monster here destroying everything. Instead the villains of the piece are two Kaiju monsters that feed off of radiation and are looking to make earth a home for their children. On the one hand, I loved the switcheroo and it was so much fun watching the monsters battle each other (idk if anything will top how Godzilla ended both of his foes. On the other hand, I had to hold my eyes to keep them from rolling every time the scientists talked about what they were doing or the monsters popped on the screen. So these monsters have just been hiding out in places where there is a tn of radiation and none one saw them? Especially the 2nd one which they stored in Yucca Mountain and ended up being 300 feet bigger than the one that could fly? And the fact that the 2nd one was looking for a place to lay eggs chile…I couldn’t deal.
Also, the creature design for these two animals was TERRIBLE. Like worse than the generic Cloverfield and Super 8 monsters. How did this happen when Godzilla and the rest of the visual effects looked so good? It kept taking me out of the movie which is a shame cause I was 100% on board with giant monsters destroying San Francisco but when they looked like video games character rather than monsters in a big budget film, I cannot take it seriously.
Speaking of seriously, this movie, in its efforts to be a more serious movie, fails at times to let the freak flag fly. They hint at it, mainly with Cranston’s out of this world scenery chewing, but there are so many times this movie plays things laughably straight. Like I cackled when they did a slow zoom into Wantanabe saying Gojira. There were countless other moments that the movie just got so bogged down with (the bus driver on the bridge!) that it was hard to stay in the film.
And finally, perhaps more egregiously, the movie presents us with a hero who doesn’t have to make any decisions and is miraculously in the right place at the right time, every time. Now I LOVED Aaron Taylor-Johnson in this movie but that character and the narrative machinations to get him to the end were a bit foolish. Like it was totally fine that he knew how to disarm bombs (he’s in the army) but how does the climax involve him being there to disarm the bomb that they end up just sending out on a boat…pero like…whet? The movie seemed to have so many special rules for him and his survival that at the end I wondered if I was grateful for the family reuniting because of the cliche or because the movie earned. it.
Also, why the hell did Godzilla wait so damn long to unleash that molten fire????
Couldn’t agree more.