Godzilla Review

Too much humans, not enough Godzilla.

This whole “fill the screen time with lame humans instead of expensive CGI” is something of an ongoing issue with movies involving really cool giant whatever.  Maybe it’s just me.  I bitched about this in Transfomers.  I bitched about this in Pacific Rim.  I even kind of bitched about this in the Avengers.  To me it is the curse of Hollywood these days that a film titled “The Super Awesome Nostalgic Icon We All Want to See” will feature about 10 minutes of SANIWAWTS and 140 minutes of some early 20’s douchebag all true nerds learned to hate when he was getting laid in high school and we were playing Car Wars until four in the morning running around doing crap no one cares about.

To be fair to my own opinion any amount of screen time 0< dedicated to Shia LeBeouf is a waste of time, film, and brain cells.  Michael Bay I want about 50 minutes of my life wasted on him in the last Transformers movie refunded please.

So it is with this film.  The moments with Godzilla or one of the other monsters on the screen were like playing with a kindle of the cutest kittens ever but as soon as the camera switched to a non Godzilla scene the kittens morphed and merged into a 15 year old smelly bloodhound laying on the porch too lazy to do more than breath and fart.  SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT BIG SPOILER ALERT DON’T SAY I DIDN’T WARN YOU I had real hope for this film giving me someone to engage with outside of Godzilla when they cast the great Bryan Cranston (and featured him extensively in every single trailer) but his character dies after like 25 minutes, leaving us with hunk-of-the-month Aaron Taylor-Johnson to carry the entire rest of the film on his woefully inadequate acting shoulders (that’s not really fair.  He has done some decent work but this film did not give him any kind of depth to sink his teeth into).

So about halfway through the film you realize you care more about Godzilla and the other monsters than any actual human on the screen.  This has the net effect of making you resent any time spent watching humans without a giant monster turning them into toe jam.  That being said the scenes with monsters were freaking amazing.  The one thing this movie did better than any I have seen in a long time is it really made you feel what it would be like to be a human running around while Godzilla stomps through your local Pick N’ Save.  More than ever I felt what it must be like to be so insignificant that the monsters don’t even notice you.  Normally to feel that insignificant and disregarded I have to go out trying to meet women.  Truly effective.

Plus the action was amazing, although they did a lot of it at night and obscured by smoke, clouds, or random debris.  I got frustrated a couple times when they were lining up for a major battle only to show it for 10 seconds before cutting to video footage on a newscast.  They did however push the PG-13 to a level I found acceptable.  There was no shortage of destruction, death, and mayhem.  I mean, we aren’t going to a Godzilla film to see him destroy an abandoned tenement block and then sort the wreckage into the worlds largest compost pile.  When I think of Godzilla I want to see skyscrapers crumbling on top of thousands of screaming humans.  Godzilla is serious business.  Of course since 9-11 it is super bad PC karma to show anything destructive happen to New York the go to city for mass destruction is San Francisco.  I naturally felt an even closer connection to the action when I saw Godzilla stomp on a bar in Chinatown where I have seen a friend of mine puke on the sidewalk.

Some more spoilers incoming so if that is a problem maybe skip the story recap.  Five paragraphs.  SPOILER ALERT It starts with two Japanese(ish) scientists of some kind (actually if any of you can figure out what they were will you let me know?  Were they paleontologists?  Biologists?  Geologists?  Seems like they were whatever the plot needed at the moment.  Ken Watanabe-Inception, the Last Samurai, Batman Begins and Sally Hawkins-Layer Cake, Blue Jasmine, All is Bright) being called in to look at a giant sink hole.  They climb inside and discover the massive bones of some gigantic monster.  Skip a few miles away to a Japanese nuclear reactor and engineer Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston-Breaking Bad, Argo, Drive) living with his wife Sandra (Juliette Binoche-Dan in Real Life, The English Patient, An Open Heart) and son Ford (CJ Adams-the Odd Life of Timothy Green, Dan in Real Life, Against the Wild).  There is some kind of seismic activity that seems to be traveling towards their reactor.  Joe sends Sandra into the reactor to do something and she gets cooked when the whole thing melts down.

Skip ahead 15 years and Ford (now Aaron Taylor-Johnson-Kick Ass, Savages, Kick Ass 2) is now a navy lieutenant in charge of bomb disposal and Joe a weird conspiracy nut, convinced that the reactor meltdown that killed his wife had some kind of other cause than just an earthquake.  Ford rotates home to be with his wife Elle (Elizabeth Olsen-Silent House, Oldboy, In Secret) and son in San Francisco only to find out his father has been arrested again by the Japanese for trying to sneak into the radioactive quarantine zone.  He has to fly to Tokyo to bail Joe out.

Once there he gets sucked into Joes conspiracy world with little effort and together they sneak into their old home to recover some old floppy disks of data.  Joe is convinced whatever happened before will happen again.  They get arrested and taken to a secret compound where something in the ground is being studied.

Honestly you don’t really need to know a whole lot more.  The thing in the ground is a gigantic monster called a M.U.T.O. (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism) that jumps up and wrecks most everything, including Joe.  At that exact moment all the character development and story that had been written into the first 40 minutes of the film more or less flies out the window.  The Muto also flies off into the night and wrecks Tokyo.  Meanwhile another monster is being tracked and turns out to be Godzilla, somehow tracking the MUTO (?) and rapidly identified by the Japanese scientist as an Alpha predator.  They fight and the MUTO flies off towards the US West Coast, followed by Godzilla.  It’s mate surfaces in Nevada and wrecks Las Vegas (I found that very amusing.  I spend way to much time in Vegas for work to have anything other than contempt for the Strip).

During all this Ford is getting involved mainly by hitching a ride on different military transports without any orders.  All the monsters seem to be headed towards San Francisco.  The military comes up with a plan to lure them together and nuke them all in one fell swoop (I guess they were short on nukes?  Seems the prudent thing to do would have been drop three separate nukes on each of the monsters while they were in the in the middle of the ocean or desert but I guess I’m not Sun Tzu).  Because the MUTO puts out an EMP pulse they have to put in a mechanical countdown clock on the nuke.  The MUTO steals the nuke (oh, yeah, they eat radiation.  No violation of the laws of conservation of mass to see here folks.  Move along) to feed it’s clutch of eggs.  Ford has to parachute into the heart of San Francisco to disarm the nuke now.  Godzilla shows up, kicks ass, and leaves San Francisco a physical wasteland to match the cultural wasteland that the tech yuppies are turning it into.

The stars:

Duh.  Godzilla movie, and not the god awful Godzilla 1998.  Two stars.  When you could finally see him Godzilla was the classic, awesome monster.  One star.  What action there was was really great.  Two stars.  Bryan Cranston and the first 40 minutes with him was a really interesting, in depth story with great characters.  One star.  Amazing CGI and effects.  One star.  Camera work was superb.  One star.  The film really made you feel like you were in the movie during the action scenes.  The term to use is immersive.  One star.  In truth a really fun movie experience well worth your time.  Three stars.  Total: twelve stars.

The black holes:

Our time with Godzilla was limited, and a lot of it was really murky and hard to see.  The rest of the film was filled with people who might have just been little Godzillas in rubber human suits.  One black hole.  SPOILER ALERT Once Joe dies all the time spent trying to get us to engage with the characters was totally wasted.  One black hole.  SPOILER ALERT Also once Joe dies what was a fairly well written and professional story turned into a lazy mishmash of random crap that only distracted us from what was going on.  Can someone tell me the point of the little Japanese kid on the train who appeared from nowhere and ten minutes later disappeared like a rogue Spanish swashbuckler from a heaving bosom romance novel?  One black hole.  With the exception of Bryan Cranston pretty much every scene involving humans was boring military crap or even more boring exposition.  One black hole.  SPOILER ALERT While I think Aaron Taylor-Johnson is a talented actor his character was really pointless.  He treated the death of his father like the passing of a neighbors pet guinea pig and dropped the very interesting obsession with finding what killed his mother in order to become a very boring military guy.  I felt a stronger connection with his wife, who spent most of her time starring at a phone, the Japanese scientist of indeterminate nature who spent most of his time off center looking fretful, and Godzilla who spent most of his time underwater.  When the guy in the rubber suit has a stronger connection to the audience than your protagonist you need to look at your writing again.  One black hole.  I know I shouldn’t but I can’t help myself: the “science” in this film makes applying leeches to bleed illness out of you look like a valid medical treatment.  (I’m just too big a fan of science to let really bad stuff slide.  Science is Awesome image from the funny t shirt category)  One black hole.  Total: six black holes.

So a total of six stars, a solid score from me.  Could it have been better?  Absolutely.  Should you see it anyway?  Absolutely.  See it on the biggest screen you can find to maximize the insignificance you will feel as another potential grease stain under Godzilla’s might foot.  Date movie?  If she’s into it.  If not she will (correctly) determine that you are subjecting her to your interests and really don’t care what she wants to see.  See it with some dudes, dude.  Bathroom break?  Any scene sans Godzilla or MUTO is a good candidate.  There is a scene where they are all standing around planning on how to detonate a nuke that should work pretty well.  Also most of the train business could be missed easily.

Thanks for reading.  I’m seeing Million Dollar Arm tonight so let’s see if my love of sports films while hating actual sports has me enjoying this one.  I’m also a fan of Indian culture (and by “culture” I really mean “women”) and hope to see some good stuff tonight.  Disney doesn’t screw up too often so it should at least be fun.  Follow me on Twitter @Nerdkungfu.  Post a comment here if you have a thought on this film or my review and email me at [email protected] if you want to ask an off topic question or make a suggestion.  Talk to you soon.

“the Infamous” Dave Inman

 

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