Godzilla Review: A Monstrous Waste of Time

Godzilla tried so hard to revive the monster movie genre while erasing our memories of the 1998 film of the same name. Unfortunately, this version is just Independence Day with a few monsters replacing the aliens…

By Damon Martin — Editor/Lead Writer

The golden age of monster movies was a special time for science fiction and horror fans alike. From Godzilla to Mothra and even to some extent King Kong, the bigger than life nature of these beasts cascading higher than the clouds, hell bent on destruction, were the man-made alien invasion stories that permeated so many fun movies from the 1950’s forward.

Then came the re-invention of the monster movie with CGI and big special effects and the days of cheesy graphics and over the top reactions were gone. They were replaced with attempts at real terror, huge explosions and tumbling buildings meant to actually look like buildings and not a model built on a table somewhere as a guy in a Godzilla costume trounced some cardboard cutouts. The 1998 film ‘Godzilla’ attempted to revive the genre and instead nearly killed the monster movie craze all together.

So as Hollywood does every decade or so when an idea doesn’t work, they hand it over to a new director and new writer to start over from scratch while pretending that the previous movie never existed. What we are left with is the 2014 film ‘Godzilla’ that opens in theaters this week directed by big budget newcomer Gareth Edwards starring Bryan Cranston, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen and Ken Watanabe.

THE PLOT

The film starts out jumping through a few different years starting in 1954 where we get our first glimpses of Godzilla, although this is just an opening credits scene and you don’t really know what’s going on with the great beast at this point. Things pick up years later in the Philippines where a scientist (Watanabe) is brought in to explore an underground cavern that was discovered by diggers, and what they found inside couldn’t be explained by anyone on Earth. There appeared to be a cocoon where a couple of ginormous eggs once nested, but the only problem is one of them is missing and has now burrowed its way out to sea.

From there we pick up in 1999 where Bryan Cranston’s character Joe is introduced. He’s working at a nuclear plant where things have become decidedly unstable lately, and on the day he’s called a meeting to talk about his latest findings a series of seismic shifts have begun to rock the plant and cause everything to go haywire. In the midst of things, Joe’s wife is caught in a reactor and dies, leaving Joe and his young son to escape Japan after the plant melts down.

Fast forward 15 years later and that’s where our story really picks up with Joe’s son Ford growing up to be a military man specializing in disabling bombs, married to his wife Elle (Olsen) and their five year old son. Joe is still living in Japan and he’s turned into a cooky, conspiracy theorist, determined to prove that the government was hiding something amidst the meltdown and he wants to know why his wife had to die.

From there all hell breaks loose when our mystery egg hatches and a MUTO (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism) is revealed. So right away we have two monsters because Godzilla hasn’t even shown up yet! Don’t worry too much because before too long a third monster appears, and we’re getting ready for a royal rumble between the trio as a pair of them are trying to procreate and spawn off a bunch of mini-MUTO’s while our scaly hero is out to restore balance to the world by appearing and fighting them for no real reason other than they are both in the same place at the same time.

REVIEW

In so many ways, Godzilla was really just Independence Day disguised as a monster movie, which is rather ironic considering the 1998 version of the film was actually written by the same guy who wrote Independence Day (Roland Emmerich). All the boxes are ticked for a huge budget disaster film and when you throw in a bunch of bigger than life monsters as the movie’s version of aliens or a natural disaster, it all ends the same.

Godzilla starts out with a lot of promise (outside of the constant jumping around in years) as Bryan Cranston’s acting saves so much of this film with his expected brilliance through the first 20 minutes or so. He goes from alarmed scientist to nuclear truther in a snap, but even he can’t save the rest of the cast from falling over itself time and time again.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson takes the lead after Cranston’s all-too-brief stint in the movie and he had a good run in ‘Kick Ass’ and for all it’s faults, I thought he was solid in ‘Savages’ as well, but here when he’s caught somewhere between Will Smith and Bill Pullman, he just can’t get the job done. His job with the military of course becomes a major plot point in the battle with the monsters, but to get there he has to leave his family behind and Johnson spends the next two hours more or less trying to get back to them while still attempting to save the world. Sound familiar? It should.

Elizabeth Olsen does a good enough job playing ‘woman in peril’ with those big doe eyes of hers, but she has so little material to work with in this script, you’d almost forget she’s there.

The real stinker of this movie unfortunately is Ken Watanabe — who I’ve really enjoyed in other films such as Inception — but here his constant look of shock and amazement gets old after about two scenes. He literally has the same look on his face throughout the entire movie — eyes fixed on a focal point, mouth slightly gaped open, and a stare that’s either meant to be a gaze or he was just really high at the time. I’m not sure which.

Now you’re probably saying ‘this is a monster movie, who cares about the actors’ but we have to pay attention to them considering how little we actually see Godzilla or the MUTO’s. Truth be told this is more of a MUTO movie than it is a Godzilla movie. The giant lizard creature appears in far less scenes, and you only see him at his true girth for seconds at a time. The whole point of the monster movie is to show off what monstrosities these creatures are supposed to be, but as the movie pushes forward scene after scene, we catch a leg, or a foot, but rarely do we see them full scale barreling over random passers by or just wiping out a city. The movie ends up showing more aftermath than actual destruction.

By the end of the two hour movie, I was just glad it was over. The plot was so predictable, there was nothing surprising whatsoever outside of the one twist involving Godzilla that kind of defeated the whole point of this being a movie about Godzilla. The effects were great and the sound editing involving the creatures was a nice touch, but that’s about as complimentary as I can get for this film. I’m not giving up on Johnson yet because I think he has real star potential, but he needs to get away from these types of movies for a while and be a side player like he’ll get the chance to portray in ‘The Avengers: Age of Ultron’ where he can rely on far stronger actors like Robert Downey Jr. to do most of the heavy lifting while he gets his big boy britches on. Olsen also has the ability to be a leading lady, but there’s really no judgment on her, good or bad, because there’s just not enough of her in this movie to tell the difference. (Johnson and Olsen will both star in ‘The Avengers 2’ as brother and sister this time).

When it’s all said and done, Godzilla is a classic movie monster that will live on forever as a movie you can pick up at the store or probably catch on Netflix and enjoy the awesomely bad effects and the over the top reactions from everyone involved. It appears, however, if you’ve been waiting on a modern version to revive the film for this new age, this Godzilla still isn’t getting the job done.