Review of Godzilla (2014)

Anyone who has seen his 2010 feature debut “Monsters” knows that Gareth Edwards can direct a film. With that effort, he proved that he had a good eye for little details, a willingness to dwell on the small moments which draw the viewer in, and a capability for handling big, emotional scenes (the closing moments hit me like a sledgehammer). The film remains one of my favourites of that year, and is crucial on one tiny aspect; it forewent actually having many monsters in it, is basically a romantic drama, and treated the fact that there was an alien invasion as if it was part of the scenery. It was a fresh, confident, low-budget effort with a lingering natural style.

And now, four years later, we have his studio “remake”, or “re-imagining”, or “re-interpretation” of Godzilla, that famed Japanese lizard-dragon-dinosaur thing. Originally a nuclear-allegory, we’ve seen Godzilla morph into an icon (“Godzilla VS King Kong”) and the centre of an action movie (Roland Emmerich’s 1998 “Godzilla”). Here… I can’t say for sure what it is. It’s the main attraction used to sell a huge, dumb, problematic, overlong, overcooked, boring, joyless romp, I guess.

In fact, the title Godzilla is a bit of a lie. The titles “Heavy-Handed Exposition”, or “Extraneous Characters and Plot Details”, or “Giant Winged ‘Muto’ Monsters Given More Attention Than Godzilla” would have been much more of a fit. But you can’t really sell those with Happy Meals, can you?

No, what we have here is a film made in the Christopher Nolan model (think lumbering and dark), right down to the very last moments, which are basically a foggy rehash of The Dark Knight Rises. We have two prologues, set in 1999; the first, shows us Ken Watanabe’s awfully under-used Dr Ichiro Serizawa discovering a sight where one of the first signs of monster were displayed, and the second introducing us to Bryan Cranston’s work obsessed family man Joe Brody, working in a nuclear power-plant, worrying about some readings on a seismic graph. We know he’s work obsessed because he forgets his own birthday, despite being told by his wife (Juliette Binoche), literally right in front of him.

But, that’s okay, because maybe the film will go on to develop his character in a way where we learn how scatterbrained he is. Or, maybe not. After a huge accident means he has to let his wife die, in one of the films’ first and many attempts at delivering emotional impact, we then move forward fifteen years to the present day, with his son Ford (Aaron Taylor Johnson) all grown up and living in a big city with his wife and child. He’s a military man and a bomb defuser; upon returning home from duty, he gets a phone call saying his father was caught trespassing on the nuclear power-plant. Back to Japan we go.

And so on, and so on, for a good forty minutes before we get to the feature attraction, a ‘Muto’, (aka a clone of the monster from 2008’s “Cloverfield”). It promptly flies away. Then we get a good half hour more of exposition. Then there’s a big fight between Godzilla (who appears from the sea) and a Muto. Then more exposition. Then, finally, a whole city has to be evacuated to make way for the big fight between the Muto, another Muto (which is declared female despite anyone getting a look at its genitals), and Godzilla.

A word about the Muto’s (Muto? Muti?) and Godzilla. They “eat” nuclear radiation. The film handily introduces a nuclear bomb, which the final act of the film revolves around Ford’s attempts to defuse. I am not sure quite what the nutritional value of nuclear radiation is, but something here doesn’t add up. I’m willing to buy that the nuclear-radiation created the monsters in the first place, but does that mean that nuclear-radiation is the only thing that the monsters can eat? What about humans, or other monsters? Just because you and I were created by sperm and eggs... You get the idea.

Perhaps I’m being too nitpicky, But, devoid of allegory or metaphor, emotional clout, or pacing, the film tires quickly. It is an exercise in extraneous details. Several characters could be removed very easily, the dialogue could be snappier, the film could try and have some life. There’s an abundance of mist, fog and smoke in the film, which does little but obscure the details of Godzilla itself. The whole film is very dark; I saw it in 2D, and found myself uncertain where to look at times. Anyone seeing it in 3D, with light loss, is going to have a hard time.

Here’s the thing. If this film had been a character based film with a monster backdrop, it would have worked, as Monsters did. If the film had been a mindless romp, it also probably would have worked, within that remit, and been a good bit of fun. But the film is both, and neither, and gives the distinct impression of a work of auteur near-greatness torn apart by studio heads. It flounders.

(A quick note on Godzilla itself; I grew fond of it (he? She?). It shows determination, it isn’t strictly bad, and it doesn’t want to mindlessly destroy things. It is given more dimension and weight than any of the human characters, we feel a certain strange sympathy for it, and the CGI used to create its’ scarcely seen facial features is probably the film’s crowning achievement. In the inevitable sequel, I recommend basing the film around it more. Like the title kinda, y’know, implied).