The last time Hollywood took its claws to remaking Toho Studios' Godzilla, the result was the dire 1998 Roland Emmerich helmed disaster movie. Fortunately, this remake by Gareth Edwards is more faithful to the original series (that began in 1954), and an improvement over that last ramshackle endeavour. Unfortunately, it's still not very good.
Beginning with an exhilirating, somewhat arch, credits sequence that delivers a potted history of Godzilla's relationship with the military, heightened by Alexandre Desplat's bombastic score and some - often humorous - titlecards. We then shift to 1999 where two scientists (Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins) discover a gigantic skeleton in the Philippines, and then to a nuclear facility near Tokyo.
Here we meet Joe and Sandra Brody (Bryan Cranston and Juliette Binoche), it's Joe's birthday - which, in the context of a Godzilla film, doesn't bode well. His son, Ford (CJ Adams), has made him a birthday surprise, but dad's concerned about goings on at the plant, and well he should be, because disaster strikes with devastating results.
15 years later and Ford has grown up into the shape of Aaron Taylor-Johnson, a bomb disposal exper for the American military, happily married to Elle (an utterly wasted Elizabeth Olsen), with a five year old kid Sam (Carson Bolde). Just as he's got back from a tour of duty, eager to spend some quality time with his family, he gets a call from Japan where his father has been arrested snooping around the supposedly radioactive wasteland that used to be their home. So, Ford heads to Japan to bail out his dad, and discovers that maybe his father isn't as crazy as he'd begun to believe.
Obviously, his father's theories revolve around the titular beastie, but there are a few surprises in store for anyone unfamiliar with the original Godzilla films. Once you cotton on to what Edward's (and screenwriter Max Borenstein) intend to do with this film there's a certain degree of giddy anticipation, however this quickly evaporates as the film lumbers on.
Now, it's utterly commendable, and understandable, that Edwards employs a slow build technique, gradually setting everything up for an epic. rip-roaring finale, the only problem is this means that we have to care about our cast of characters and unfortunately the film's main focus is dull, distancing and tiresome. So much so that it saps away the pleasure that could be had from any of the other elements at play, because it keeps cutting back to our protagonist.
The most interesting characters either have very little to do or are unceremoniously removed from proceedings, one inparticular is such a loss to the film's narrative that the audience audibly sighed with disappointment that the rest of the film would go on without them. Unlike, say, in Deep Blue Sea where a main character is surprisingly killed half way through the film at an unexpected moment in a delightfully barmy twist, this shock is such a slump that the you just hope the rest of the film stops focusing on any humans at all, because Godzilla's motivation is far more interesting than almost anyone who's left.
One might argue that it's all about the monster mayhem, and, perhaps, for some that will be enough. But, what is Jurassic Park or Jaws without its characters (it can't have been unintentional that the main characters in this film all share their surname with Roy Scheider's police chief). Especially considering how much time we spend with the people, you would hope that there was something to invest in, instead, the film is a series of coincidences - or dumb decisions - that allow our lead to be in the same place as various bits of carnage. Heck, even Anaconda featured a more likable assortment of characters than this.
When it does all kick off, for me, my goodwill had all but vanished, and I cared so little about the fate of humanity that it seemed irrelevant as to how the special effects fared. Meanwhile, there's a muffled ecological message in there somewhere and one neat nod to the real-life tragic inspiration behind the 1954 original. Overall though, this film is a lumbering, uninspired feature, that perhaps - shockingly - is less rewatchable that even Emmerich's 1998 popcorn feature because at least that has the appeal of being entertainingly awful.
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