Godzilla (Gareth Edwards, 2014)

A pre-review note: my only previous experience with the Godzilla franchise, which apparently has over 30 installments now, was the 98' American flick (I know, shame on me), and you can only imagine how that helped shape my view of the series. So, as much as I preserve the right to nerd over things, I wasn't sweating the small stuff here: complaints I've heard from friends with a much more substantial interest, like the title monster not appearing until too late into the movie, and not having enough screen time when it does, weren't on my mind. I just wanted a good Hollywood monster movie.

This Godzilla may have been approved by Toho (the Japanese company who made the original films) although unlike the Toho films' focus on the monster, Godzilla 2014 has the very modern-Hollywood worry of needing someone relatable for us to follow and root for in face of the monster. Here we get Ford Brody (Aaron Johnson), a US Marine who is supposed to be enjoying his leave although is called to the place of his childhood, Tokyo, by his crazed scientist father (Bryan Cranston), unaware that what his father is rambling is actually about to come true when huge creatures the government has kept secret start waking up. Thus we have our 'personal story' of Brody making his way home to his wife and son while in the background there's the 'universal story' of the world facing annihilation.

The best analogy of how this applies to the film is a scene in Martin Scorsese's Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator, which I will give Scorsese the benefit of the doubt in believing it really happened exactly as filmed: Hughes found that shots of planes, despite being real, didn't seem real or seem to have the great majesty one expects when faced with a fighter plane. He fixed this when finding the planes only seemed up to real scale when there was something else in the shots (the clouds) to give proportion to the images. In the best sequence in Godzilla we see one of the monsters attacking a small coastal resort in Tokyo all from the perspective of Brody who is trapped on a train (traveling towards one of the monsters, no less) and trying to protect a young boy. It's a brilliantly tense sequence, about as close-knit as one could want from an end-of-the-world movie, and achieves what I guess is the mission of every film of this type: giving the audience enough to go on to imagine themselves in these situations.

Anyone who knows their Godzilla history will know that the original was a way for Japan to make a statement on Hiroshima without getting censored. The reboot opens with a small clip of the blast, a little homage to the original, although also a sign that the new movie isn't built around anything as strongly as the original. The idea of monsters coming up from the Earth as an unstoppable force doing damage has obvious connotations with the very modern fear of the Earth doing things we don't want it to that we can't control; although more than anything else Godzilla 14' is built on the modern blockbuster quota, leading to moderately big cast all converging towards the area of a major final battle. The special effects are tight, the cast more than serviceable (especially Johnson, who's whole physicality seems to change by the role), and the action scenes fairly intense. Yet the movie doesn't quite get past being a more than serviceable, well intentioned blockbuster. That doesn't seem like it should be a problem when just looking for a Hollywood monster movie, but with the amount of blockbusters out these days it really is.