Godzilla – Review

Director: Gareth Edwards
Starring: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ken Watanabe, Elizabeth Olson, Juliette Binoche and Bryan Cranston
Cert: 12A, 123 minutes

Spoiler Warning

It’s safe to say that Godzilla is the king of monsters. But it’s also safe to say that monster movies are generally cheap trash with little heart. It’s perhaps surprising then that Godzilla copies, somewhat, 2005’s King Kong by creating a monster movie with heart, where you care more about the beast than the humans. There wasn’t a dry eye in the room when King Kong fell to his death and I feel that director Gareth Edwards tried to recapture this emotion at the culmination of Godzilla. He didn’t manage to capture the magic of King Kong, but Godzillawas still rather incredible. (For a monster movie, anyway.)

If you go into Godzilla expecting death, you’ll leave happy. Except that the deaths are only superficial as nobody of importance dies. Oh, except one, and it happens pretty early – twice, in fact. But the lack of prominent deaths makes the Godzilla/M.U.T.O. (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms) threat somewhat secondary because, no matter the destruction, it’s pretty much guaranteed that everyone (except the one who dies early, twice) is going to make it out of the film alive.

Godzilla doesn’t make an appearance until an hour into the movie, but we are greeted to glimpses of M.U.T.O.s instead, bringing a new twist to the classic tale of destruction. These creatures are fantastically realised on screen, as are the various scenes of total annihilation as they destroy city upon city, but the viewers wait with bated breath for Godzilla to arrive.

And when he does, the wait if worth it. The cry. The design. The laboured walking. The emotive face. It all lives up to the hype. You can tell a lot of money went into designing and creating this fantastic CGI masterpiece. But still, once he appears we don’t truly see him in his full form until the final, climactic battle. The final fight between Godzilla and the M.U.T.O.s is simply gorgeous to behold, and it makes sitting through the cheesy human elements worth it. Godzilla and the M.U.T.O.s are somewhat robotic, but it’s a clever twist, nevertheless. Godzilla is ganged upon, and the viewers are clearly encouraged to empathise with Godzilla more than Taylor-Johnson’s two-dimensional Ford Brody. As with King Kong before it, Godzilla dies, but is hailed the saviour of San Francisco after another twist reveals Godzilla isn’t the big-bad at all.

Except Godzilla doesn’t die. After the impressive reaction this movie has generated, don’t be surprised if some of the monsters survive the carnage, in an obvious set up for Godzilla 2: The Return of Godzilla/flying M.U.T.O./eight-legged M.U.T.O. This, in my opinion, would ruin everything this movie created. Don’t do it Edwards.

Godzilla is fantastic for a monster movie, rebooting a cinematic classic and bringing a new twist to an old tale. The nods to Hiroshima are still there, especially in an iconic poignant shot of a mushroom-shaped bomb cloud, but the nods aren’t explicit, and you leave with a feeling that Edwards has tried, and managed, to create something new.

(Originally posted on Cuckoo Review on 24th May 2014. Original link: http://cuckooreview.com/godzilla/)