Film review: Godzilla
There’s a lot to love about Godzilla. While the trailers played up the weightiness of the human drama, that’s not a reason to watch it. If you want to see Godzilla fight massive monsters while destroying stuff, though, this does not disappoint.
When the incredible action is considered alongside gorgeous cinematography, Alexandre Desplat’s tense score and a palpable atmosphere of dread created by director Gareth Edwards, it’s not hard to see how much Godzilla gets right. The human characters are somewhat thinly drawn clichés that you’ll struggle to care about but, let’s be honest, you came for the monsters in the first place.
The story is, as it should be, rather basic. Essentially, Bryan Cranston’s character is obsessed with finding out what happened to cause a disaster at a Japanese nuclear power plant many years ago while his son Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) thinks his dad’s gone nuts. Meanwhile, Ken Watanabe is investigating enormous prehistoric monsters living at the bottom of the ocean. He’s aware that Godzilla’s down there, and essentially just wants to see him fight. When a Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism (or MUTO) starts causing some mayhem because it has cravings for radiation, humanity will need Godzilla to save it.
Sure, elements of that premise are somewhat ludicrous, but that’s all part of the fun. The plot is simply constructed as a series of events that’ll get us to the final confrontation between Godzilla and the MUTO, with the film flinging in a fun surprise when it’s revealed that he’ll have to do battle with more than one MUTO. The humans really don’t have much impact at all on the plot, to the extent that I wonder why we follow them as much as we do. For some of the duration it is compelling to watch how these people react when forces of nature choose a highly-populated city as the arena for their death match, but it does get to a point where you’ve seen Elizabeth Olsen (who plays Ford’s wife, Elle) look up to the sky and do her terrified face a few too many times.
In general, the acting is strong. The lacklustre script just provides no reason for us to get invested in the characters. Ford is essentially the main character and it’s just impossible to care about him or anything he does. His main concern is getting back to his wife, but we all know she’s waiting in a city that’ll soon be rubble. Oh, and most of the dialogue is awful too. The dull moments are few and far between, though, as Godzilla knows that what it needs to do is deliver in the scenes of pure spectacle. The film delays Godzilla’s first appearance, initially introducing the MUTO before moving to Hawaii. With the tension heightened, the unveiling of the awesome sequence where Godzilla rises up from the ocean to attack the beast just makes your jaw drop. If you’re going in looking for thrills like this, there’s no doubt you’ll be satisfied.
The camerawork is amazing, although the lack of colour in the film does make you respect how much Pacific Rim does to bring visual excitement to a large-scale punch-up. There are some glorious shots that have been glimpsed in the trailers, and the recurring one of Godzilla moving from the bottom of the frame to the top until he dominates the screen is awesome. As is the simplicity of watching Godzilla gracefully swim alongside or underneath aircraft carriers, making them look like tiny toys.
That’s the thing, really, humans are so tiny and inconsequential when the monsters are this huge that it’s hard to feel like they have any part in this conflict at all. Of course that’s the point but it’s also a frustrating element of the film because it makes it more difficult to get into the story. Godzilla looks beyond awesome, though, and it has so many moments of visual (and auditory) brilliance that the eye-opening action will make you quickly forget the boring people milling around like ants at the bottom of the screen.
Godzilla is in cinemas now
