Godzilla is King of the Blockbusters

Directed by Gareth Edwards.

Written by Max Borenstein.

Starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen, Ken Watanabe, Sally Hawkins, David Stathairn, Juliette Binoche and Bryan Cranston.

PG-13, 116 minutes.

The new Godzilla film is, fittingly, obsessed with the concept of size. From the opening frame (not counting the main title sequence), the audience is instantly positioned as minuscule, whether it be through a lush, tropical landscape or, most cleverly, at the feet of a small child walking through the disaster area of toy soldiers and tanks in his bedroom, foreshadowing the destruction to come. It is a film dedicated to being, first and foremost, an experience measured in scale above all else.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson stars as Ford Brody, a bomb-stopping specialist whose domestic bliss with his wife, played by Elizabeth Olsen, and young son is cut short when his father (Bryan Cranston) is arrested in Japan for trying to dig up the truth regarding a traumatic family incident fifteen years prior. Ford becomes entangled in a globetrotting disaster in the form of gigantic parasitic creatures dubbed MUTO’s (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms) who feed off radiation and plan to breed amidst the destruction of humanity unless they’re stopped. Hope arrives in the unexpected form of another giant monster when the titular lizard resurfaces from the depths of the ocean to restore balance to the world.

Godzilla is directed by Gareth Edwards, whose directorial debut, Monsters, showcased a deft hand at maintaining suspense with the power of suggestion (the film was made for half a million dollars) and ended with a wonderful dovetail into awe-inspiring terrain. Few actual monsters were shown in the film.  Godzilla follows in this trend, but has enough in the bank for a few scenes of mass destruction leading up to a big finale.

It’s been a few months since the film’s release. The main complaints have more or less to do with its pacing. It’s about forty minutes into a two-hour movie before you see a monster of any kind, and it’s not even Godzilla. It’s another twenty minutes before you see Godzilla in the flesh, and after that most of the monster fighting that goes on is mainly relegated to point of view shots from scared human observers or television broadcasts.

This is a rather ingenuous way of building up suspense until the final half-hour, where the destruction is really amped up to eleven and San Francisco is practically leveled. The filmmakers wisely chose to not overplay their hand early on and risk losing the audience’s interest once the big finale came around. It’s because of the general restraint in sidelining the title character for so long that the big finale works because it builds up suspense, a reminder of films like Alien and Jaws, where we get to know our main characters and watch them struggle to react against unstoppable forces seemingly out of their control.

The score by Alexandre Desplat is fantastic as well. It’s rousing in all the right ways, vaguely reassembling the score of the original Gojira infused with the jangling tension found in something like Psycho. The music works so well that it’s worth listening to independent of the film itself once you’ve seen it.

Despite my gushing, Godzilla isn’t a perfect film by any means. Some disappointment comes from the handling of the human characters (Bryan Cranston, Sally Hawkins and Juliette Binoche deserve more, dammit!). There are some silly, cliche-filled moments and gaps of logic, sure, and the film doesn’t quite pull off the intimate human character building moments as well as Edwards’ Monsters did, but that does little to hamper the awe-inspiring wonder and terror of being a small, helpless creature in the face of destructive forces of nature.

Godzilla was a movie I wasn’t really looking forward to going into this summer, but now that the dust has settled, it is the most accomplished of all the big-budget offerings of summer 2014. It’s a rare find these days, a hyped-up, big-time summer movie that makes me excited enough to watch it again removed from the big screen.

If you enjoyed N. Demmy’s piece, you can find his latest work right HERE and his earlier articles and reviews over HERE.

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