The King is Back!

The new Godzilla is thankfully a lot better than the 1998 Hollywood version (hard to believe that was sixteen years ago) but not without some significant problems of its own. First of all, the good (watch out for spoilers):

Director Gareth Edwards knows his Spielberg (one of the characters is even called Ford Brody). The slow buildup of the first half is full of nods to Jaws, Close Encounters and Jurassic Park. The monsters are kept mostly off-screen while the conspiracy angle of the plot is focused on, so when the big G finally make his entrance an hour in (causing a tidal wave in the process) it has a far bigger impact than when the stupid giant iguana showed up early on in the ’98 version.

Bryan Cranston outacts everyone else in the cast. It’s just a shame his character exits the movie so early.

The CGI is really good. The film wisely takes the less is more approach, and the rendering of the creatures puts other monster movies to shame, even last year’s Pacific Rim. Godzilla’s design is faithful to the original Toho version and the MUTO’s (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism) he faces are creepy, if a little too close to the Cloverfield monster.

Godzilla is treated as an unlikely hero (albeit one that cares about as much about collateral damage as Superman in Man of Steel) which I’ve always enjoyed more than using him as a one dimensional rampaging monster. The ’98 version was especially annoying, since it couldn’t make up its mind whether it wanted the audience to feel sorry for Zilla or cheer when he died.

The callback to Edwards’ previous film with the mating monsters was nice.

The film is well paced, kept to a tight two hours, unlike most bloated Hollywood adventure movies.

Atomic Breath! Probably the most awesome monster kill in a movie ever.

Now the bad:

Like 99% of modern Hollywood blockbusters, the script is feeble. The human characters have no development and are just shuffled from scene to scene depending on where they need to be to view whatever carnage is going on. The slow burn approach is an admirable one, but we have to actually care about the characters for it to be completely successful.

The dour, mostly humourless tone. While I appreciate taking a less campy approach than previous Godzilla movies, some comic relief would have been nice. As it is, the audience has to find humour in unintentional places, such as the captions helpfully informing us we are in Hawaii after seeing Honolulu Airport and people wearing leis, just in case we thought it was Honolulu, Arkansas. The only really successful humour is the way the film screws with the audience by cutting away from Godzilla’s first battle after his big roar to show snippets of the rest of it on TV. I appreciated the mocking of the genre conventions, but many people won’t.

The actors are all pretty much wasted. Aaron Taylor-Johnson, so good in Kick Ass, plays one of the blandest protagonists in recent memory. Elizabeth Olsen is given pretty much nothing to do as the wife he is trying to get back too. Even the aforementioned Cranston is underwritten (like every other Hollywood crazy person he wallpapers his entire room with newspaper clippings), though he does more with his role than most of the other actors.

Overall this is a good film that could have been great if as much care had been put into the human side of the story as the monsters. Hopefully the sequel will iron out the kinks and give us a movie worthy of the King of the Monsters.