Most people will want to compare Godzilla to Pacific Rim because, hey, giant monsters. And to be fair, if Godzilla didn’t want to invite the comparison, it shouldn’t feature a scene of the titular monster wrecking the Golden Gate Bridge, because Pacific Rim has a scene like that in its first five minutes. For me, though, much of Godzilla reminded me of the work of HP Lovecraft. Not necessarily in story or tone, but in the design of the monsters: they’re so otherworldly, so colossal and just plain wrong, like the monsters in The Mist, that the mind fairly staggers in trying to process them. Director Gareth Edwards knows what counts in a Godzilla movie – monsters – and he is bound and fucking determined to deliver the goods.
Which is a good thing, because the actual plot…well, it knows that it doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel. Godzilla opens in 1999, as Dr. Ichiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe, thankfully more understandable than he was in Inception) and Vivienne Graham (Sally Hawkins) travel to a mining site in the Philippines, because the crew there has unearthed something. That turns out to be the skeleton of a long-dead creature, the size of which is jaw-dropping.
Meanwhile, in Japan, Joe Brody (a very good Bryan Cranston) goes to work with his wife Sandra (Juliette Binoche for some reason) to check out some bizarre seismic activities. I’m sure you can surmise that this doesn’t end well, but when I tell you that he works at a Japanese nuclear plant, you’ll know that it really didn’t end well. Sandra is swallowed by a cloud of radioactive fog, which stalks her like the black smoke at the end of House on Haunted Hill. She dies, but not before making Joe promise to take care of their son Ford (yes, “Ford Brody”). Then the entire plant has a meltdown, turning the whole place into whatever the Japanese word for “Chernobyl” is. And this all happens on Joe’s birthday! *sad trombone* I’m making jokes, but the fact is that Cranston sells the hell out of these scenes. The whole cast is good to great, but acting opposite Cranston is a fool’s errand.
Fifteen years later, Ford is all grown up and played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson. He’s married to Elle, played by Elizabeth Olsen, and they have a son named Sam. Elle is a nurse because this is an action movie. Ford is an EOD tech in the Navy, and just as he starts his leave, he gets called away to Japan because Joe has been arrested for trespassing in the quarantined remains of the plant and its surrounding city Janjira. Once there, Joe convinces Ford to go with him to the quarantined zone so he can prove that it wasn’t a typhoon that destroyed the plant, damn it! They discover fishy things in the ruins of their old neighborhood, first of which is that the radiation level has dropped to zero. Ultimately they both get arrested, but instead of going to the Japanese hoosegow, they’re taken back to the plant site, which is now under the purview of Dr. Serizawa. He and his team have a cocoon of some sort, out of which hatches an eldritch abomination with wings and ungainly long legs. This is dubbed a “MUTO” – Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism – by David Strathairn’s Admiral Stenz, but I know a goddamn Rodan when I see one.
Ford is like Roland Emmerich’s version of Forrest Gump, always stumbling into world-changing events. In the interest of skipping rote recitation of the plot, Godzilla and the two mutos – one hatched outside of Vegas – end up in San Francisco, where Serizawa assures the Admiral that Godzilla will kill them both. I was a little confused by Godzilla’s motivation: why would he kill the mutos? Serizawa offers an explanation in the way of “He is a balance,” but that still doesn’t tell us much. Saying what something is doesn’t explain why it is that.
But that’s a minor complaint in comparison to the big picture (and trust me, the picture is big). The fights between Godzilla and the mutos are nothing short of spectacular. Unless you hate fun, I guarantee you will say some variation of “fuck yeah” during these scenes. The damage is on such a scale that there’s no way these giant cities would ever be able to recover, which is a downer ending when you think of San Francisco becoming the new Detroit because of three asshole monsters. But Gareth Edwards does a remarkable job of eliciting the audience’s sympathy for Godzilla, making him very much an anti-hero.
I saw Godzilla in IMAX 3D, and while the scope of the film was well-suited to IMAX projection, you can skip the 3D. A lot of things get blurry on the edges, but mercifully the picture isn’t darkened too much. At the end of the day, for all its faults, Godzilla is a breathtaking disaster movie, a passable action movie, and most importantly, a kick-ass monster movie. And there’s no goddamn Puff Daddy song either.
About Author
Trevor Dawson is the Executive Editor of GAMbIT Magazine. He is a musician, an award-winning short story author, and a big fan of scotch. His work has appeared in Statement, Levels Below, Robbed of Sleep vols. 3 and 4, Amygdala, Mosaic, and Mangrove. Trevor lives in Denver, CO.
