Film Review | Godzilla

Well, once the giant monsters start popping up and the only slightly less giant buildings start crumbling down, you know the summer has started.

Probably one of the most historically significant mainstays of the disaster movie genre, Godzilla has been a cross-cultural staple ever since the giant green monster – to many a post-Hiroshima metaphor for nuclear disaster – made its way to the big screens in the 1954 Japanese original.

Sequels, spinoffs, crossovers and updates have come thick and fast since, with the familiar ‘kaiju’ creature – once again, a Japanese term signifying the metropolis-wrecking lizards brought to life most recently with Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim – refusing to submerge his head into the ocean for good.

But although he has the luxury of dealing with a very familiar commodity, director Gareth Edwards – who made waves with his quiet and original take on the alien invasion genre, Monsters, in 2010 – still had his work cut out for him, as America’s most recent brush with the titular monster was critically panned and ill-remembered. Though it certainly made bucketfuls of money, Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla (1998), starring Matthew Broderick, an unimaginatively T-Rex like Godzilla and an equally tepid script is best left languishing in the forgotten vaults of our cultural memory.

But as a joyously old-school opening credits sequence declares in the first seconds of Edwards’ film – which, following a spectacular opening week in the US and UK, has already been locked in for the full franchise treatment – the boy has no qualms about this, rooting his Godzilla firmly in established generic ground and getting the ball rolling on what, thankfully, turns out be a piece of masterfully executed spectacle.

True to the priorities he had established with Monsters – i.e., of placing human drama at the centre of giant-creature-induced chaos – Edwards makes a family dynamic the main focus of his Godzilla reboot.

As the story opens in late 90s Japan, we find dedicated nuclear power-plant manager Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) gutted by tragedy, as his wife and colleague Sandra (Juliette Binoche) falls victim to suspicious seismic activity at the reactor. Fifteen years later, their son Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), now a bomb-disposal expert for the U.S. military, returns home to his wife Elle (Elizabeth Olsen) and their son Sam (Carson Bolde), only to get a call from Japan informing him that his father has been arrested in Tokyo for trespassing on the site of the disaster that changed his life for good 15 years earlier.

Though initially sceptical about his father’s conspiracy theories, Ford grudgingly agrees to accompany his father to the site, where – if Joe is in fact to be believed – new seismic activity may shed light on the incident that led to Sandra’s death: the true details of which, Joe insists, were covered up by the powers-to-be.

The father-son duo are inevitably arrested as they trespass on the supposedly ‘contaminated’ zone, but what first appears to be an earthquake gradually validates Joe’s greatest fears.

Indeed, the structure starts to crumble not as the result of an earthquake, but because the plant is keeping a giant mantis-like creature under its dome – a Massive Unknown Terrestrial Organism (MUTO) – which now appears keen to break out of its chains.

Scientists Dr Ichiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) and Vivienne Graham (Sally Hawkins) are now left with little choice but to work hand in hand with Joe and Ford to contain this beast… and it’s a matter of the utmost urgency, because the MUTO’s biological clock appears to have awakened another ancestral creature from the depths: the force of nature known as ‘Godzilla’.

It may sound funny, but it turns out pacing is the secret ingredient to Edwards’s success with this blockbuster. It may be a movie about monsters bashing the living daylights out of each other and leaving urban devastation in their wake, but you need to establish a cinematic world before all of that takes place.

While the family dynamics Edwards places a lot of stock in are fairly cut-and-dried, delaying the reveal of the central monster – while the scientific mumbo-jumbo is explained away and the MUTO supplies some ‘starter’ action sequences – is a masterstroke. (It’s also something of a relief that for once, the trailers didn’t spoil the magic).

Playing hop-scotch with locations – Japan, Las Vegas, Honolulu, San Francisco – the film is busy and textured enough to keep you involved, with a mating/fertility (and, by extension, family) thematic connection common to both the monsters and humans lending some coherence to the chaos. Coupled with the fact that – true to sci-fi tradition – Godzilla is made to stand in for environmental devastation gone awry, and the effect is that of a romping, stomping blockbuster created by a team with something of a brain behind the chaos-orchestration.