By Jeremy Hannaford (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: May 21, 2014
In terms of monster suspense, Godzilla is the biggest tease. Instead of blasting the viewer with violence and pretty lights like Pacific Rim, Godzilla is full of exposition and build-up — but there is only so much a person can take before feeling ripped off.
Director Gareth Edwards has experience with suspenseful monster flicks. His 2010 film Monsters was unique: he made the creatures emotionally powerful characters who left an impact on the audience. But he failed to carry this over to his human characters, who were weak and forgettable.
In the opening 30 minutes of Godzilla, there is hope Edwards has improved in this aspect: Bryan Cranston gives a great portrayal of a mad scientist searching for the truth. His performance is a great draw for the film.
Yet as other characters are introduced the film loses that emotional connection. The lack of multifaceted characters comes into full swing when Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Elizabeth Olsen are introduced. Johnson is a military figure who moves from incident to incident, all while maintaining the same facial expression, while Olsen is simply the archetypal mother in the film. Their performances and lack of narrative importance show Edwards still hasn’t learned anything about emotional characters.
Cranston’s talent makes him stand out, but his lack of screen time hurts the film. His storyline is the only thing worth caring about, but the attention is shifted to Godzilla, who is so rarely shown that emotional attachment drops off.
Turning Godzilla into a thriller is an interesting move, and pays off, at least initially. Films like these thrive on exposition to grab your attention, but lose their appeal over a second viewing. Godzilla is, in essence, Edwards’ version of Super 8. The build-up of revealing the creature while shrouding the narrative in mystery is straight out of Abrams’ film. The marketing campaign was also similar to that of Abrams’ other project, Cloverfield. But when you build up a reputation, you need to execute a payoff.
One movie gimmick of monster thrillers is to surprise the audience with the sudden appearance of the monster. That does work when used well, which Godzilla does. But then it’s done again and again in this film, to the point of thinking everyone in the world is deaf, or Godzilla can move very quietly for a 100-foot monster. The gimmick becomes a broken record: scared humans, monster appears out of thin air, destruction ensues.
Edwards provides some great fan service with many nods to Godzilla films of old, but these are wasted as the film doesn’t pay service to the biggest feature of any Godzilla movie: the battles. The structural damage is colossal and never stops; the visual effects are stunning from beginning to end; and the utter destruction that befalls San Francisco in the finale is amazing. But despite all this visual eye candy, the battles are extremely dull.
With such a big build-up, one would expect the film to exceed every single fight scene from Pacific Rim and then some. However, just like in Monsters, Edwards constantly returns to the human characters no one cares about — he is so fixated on telling the stories of these dreary characters, he forgets what the movie is all about. Super 8 followed a similar narrative path, and some people disliked it for these same reasons, but it had characters actually developed with care.
Godzilla does a great job of building suspense for the king of monsters and his rivals, but it does this too well: suspense engulfs the film and slides over a proper payoff. Monster mashers and thriller mysteries can work if done well. For everything Edwards does right with this film, he makes all the same mistakes he did with Monsters.
Going from a low-budget personal project to a $100 million blockbuster is obviously a daunting task. But repeating mistakes from a film you just made about the same concept just makes me scratch my head. Had Bryan Cranston been a more prominent character, or had Edwards taken some nods from other monster films, this may have been a worthy entry into the Godzilla franchise. While it certainly beats the 1998 disaster, it doesn’t stand up to its original inspiration.
