Godzila - Film Review

Can film makers ever be satisfied by blowing up dozens of major cities and their respective landmarks?

2013 was a year dominated by the trashing of several major cities by Superman, kaiju, interstellar aliens from a variety of locations, a biblical catastrophe interrupting James Franco's party, a mix of pub crawls and blank surrogates, Iron Man, Thor and more.

2014 has continued with yet more destruction, albeit not as much as last year, and now it seems like the big-daddy of destroying cities is making his reappearance.

Godzilla's last film appearance came in a flat 1998 remix that was more memorable for its soundtrack - including a Rage Against the Machine song that slagged off Godzilla - than its poorly realised monsters and dull characters.

While the Japanese have put out a Godzilla film in 2004 in the meantime, this is the latest attempt of Hollywood to bring this monster to life.

Fittingly for the 60th anniversary of film's most high-profile city-eating radioactive lizard, it appears recent events have served as an uncomfortable sheen for the film.

To an extent, all disaster movies since 9/11 have felt uncomfortable by virtue of association with what was a real-life horror story, and the same goes for the military incompetence that usually rings true in these pieces. But equally unsettling is an almost mirror-image of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, with added tsunami damage, 24-hour news channel saturation and the post-Hurricane Katrina relief effort thrown in.

This combination kicks off after an impressive opening strand with the look and feel of vintage '50's film to show that in 1954, the US Army's nuclear testing was a cover to kill the lizard.

We jump to 1999, where weird pod things are found in an abandoned mine in the Philippines, while an emergency occurs at a nuclear power station outside of Tokyo.

Some 15 years on, and the power plant's former chief engineer Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) is now living in a standard conspiracy theorist flat in Tokyo, after his wife Sandra (Juliette Binoche) had died in the initial implosion, while his son Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is now living in San Francisco with his wife Elle (Elizabeth Olsen) and on a break from duties with the US Army.

Ford flies out to Tokyo to bail his crazy dad out after he was caught illegally trespassing in the area around the abandoned nuclear power plant. But sure enough, he tags along with, where the duo surprisingly discovers the air in the abandoned city near the power plant is free of radiation.

This eventually leads to the first sighting of a MUTO - Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism - namely an enormous winged creature, which can launch its own EMP attack on a whim and is equally as adept at destroying things as the film's big lizardy draw.

One weird feeling is that this initial creature and the second MUTO that hatches later on and destroys Las Vegas for its own grand arrival are the real stars, and not the more famous giant lizard. Instead, the lizard's presence feels more like its too entice people through the doors, and it receives much more of a throwaway entrance to proceedings, as well as the fact he almost seems to exist to kick the crap out of the other monsters as much as the cities.

That's not to say the MUTOs or Godzilla himself are problematic, as they are all impressively realised. They feel more authentic looking than the beasts in Pacific Rim and certainly seem to have more going for them than simply colonising the human world.

Not that this depicted human world, like that in Pacific Rim, would be missing characters of note, given more seems to have been put into characterising the monsters than the humans we have to follow around.

After dispensing with Cranston in the first half an hour despite his performance being the best of those during his time on screen, the film is primarily carried by a flat standard soldier type performance from Taylor-Johnson and by Ken Watanabe, who plays the standard scientist with all the answers and helpfully surrounded by a flock of stereotypical army and science people unwilling to question his ideas.

There isn't even someone chewing the scenery to such a magnificent extent as Idris Elba did in Pacific Rim, with most of it going down the Nolan Batman route of a super-serious thing - not something particularly easy to muster when you have a 300ft tall monster levelling cities as part of his battle against two snuggling monsters that live on a diet of nuclear weapons and atomic waste.

It even reaches the unusual step where the army is not only tolerating but accompanying Godzilla, following him from a battle in Honolulu with one of the MUTOs all the way to San Francisco, where the MUTOs are planning on mating and Godzilla is hopeful of smashing them to pieces.

San Francisco is also the site of the majority of this movie's "what famous landmarks can we trash?" portion, barring all-to-brief levellings of Honolulu - replete with an uncomfortable tsunami sequence - and Vegas, which is largely shown through army TV monitors. Predictably, the Golden Gate Bridge is the first thing that is dispensed with, although played very well through the eyes of a school bus trying to evacuate the city.

After that, its fair game, and skyscraper after skyscraper is duly sent tumbling to the floor. There's also time for an astonishingly realised army jump into the city to recover a nuke about to detonate, and this final sequence does feel like its making up for time lost to the saggy middle.

But with so many real world problems as inspiration - several 9/11-style attacks, Fukushima, military incompetence, the stadiums full of the missing people after Hurricane Katrina, various tsunamis - it starts to reflect a depressingly exaggerated news cycle, which is not helped by the presence of TV stations throughout depicting constant doom.

At the very least, its grit certainly helps it top the pathetic 1998 version, which was bogged down by bad acting, writing, monsters and its bafflingly stupid baby Zillas plot at the end. But it is not a legendary piece, given it wants us to focus on under-written humans as much as it does the monsters, and it gets bogged down in an uncomfortably real canvas of cataclysmic reality.

That's not to say there is nothing to admire here, but it needed a lot more work. Still, as this is the first in a proposed trilogy, those who enjoy watching the endless destruction of cities by enormous lizard monsters will get a further chance to engage in this filmic pursuit no time soon.

3/5