GODZILLA

It’s easy to think that just because we can strike a match that we have it within ourselves to control the flame. We know how to foster a fire, tend to it, use it to provide and protect. Such mastery of an element makes it easy to get cocky and believe that the element works for us, and not the other way around. Oh how foolish we mere mortals are. The truth is that we have so little control over nature, and every once in a while nature rises up to humble us. When it does, there’s not enough mastery in the world that can help us.

In 1999, an American named Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) is a nuclear physicist working at a power plant in Japan. Brody has been tracking seismic activity in the area, and telling anyone who will listen that something bad is on its way. His pleas fall on deaf ears, until it’s too late. “Too late” arrives in the form of what seems like a giant earthquake – one which causes a radiation leak and takes the life of Joe’s wife.

Fifteen years later, Joe’s son Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) has become an explosive ordnance disposal specialist in the American military. Home on leave in San Francisco, he is called to Japan one night to collect his father. Joe has been trespassing in the zone of Tokyo quarantined after the nuclear accident, and managed to get himself arrested. Re-united with his son, he pleads with him to help him. Turns out that seismic activity he recorded in the run-up to the 1999 happening has started occurring again, and he wants to retrieve his data to prove it.

After Ford reluctantly agrees, he and Joe manage to get data in hand – just in time to be arrested and trotted back into the nuclear facility. It’s then that the truth is confirmed. The reason for this round of seismic activity is a large larva-like egg that seems to be feeding off nuclear energy. A top scientists at Brody’s former employer Ishiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) listens to Brody’s pleas, but offers no confirmation…until it’s too late.

“Too late” arrives with the larva hatching and unleashing a giant bug those in the know have named MUTO on to the earth. This creature is massively big and destroys everything in its way, including Brody. It’s then that Serizawa fesses up; the MUTO were first encountered back in the 1950’s, and believed to be in hibernation if not completely eradicated. He also reveals that the MUTO aren’t the top of the food chain – that a bigger creature that looks like a giant lizard is also somewhere deep below the surface of The Pacific. He believes that mankind has awoken the MUTO and prompted it to mate, and that this course of action might awaken its natural predator – Godzilla.

Hellbent after the death of his father, Ford enlists into the counter attack to bring all three creatures down, but the question that needs to be answered is what mankind can possibly use to bring down one of these beasts…

…let alone three.

GODZILLA is obsessed with humanity trying to control that which we cannot control. We see this early on when Joe Brody tries to give his wife the longest possible opportunity to escape certain death by radioactive exposure. He is being prodded from all sides to seal the breach, but he can’t bring himself to stop holding out hope that he can change things. That’s our arrogance as humans – believing that anything we want to overcome is strictly a question of will. The truth is that so many things in existence are so much bigger, and so much more powerful than us, that all the willpower in the world won’t help us. Doesn’t stop us from trying though – not if it’s a question of how much time we afford people, or what sort of tool we want to use on a 350 foot lizard.

For a blockbuster, it’s also deeply fascinated with the idea of legacy. Both Serizawa and Joe Brody seem to believe that they need to contribute to solving the riddle that is Godzilla in an effort to make good on something from their past. Their desire to course-correct their legacy clouds the nobility of their efforts. Their actions around and towards Godzilla aren’t about saving lives so much as they are trying to atone for the lives already lost. It’s a lovely idea, but ultimately a selfish one – and something that we see can do more harm than good.

GODZILLA is a really fun film, on that knows how to balance furrowing brows and things going boom. Late in the game, the stage is set when Serizawa declares “let them fight”…and at that point the film wisely steps back and does just that. In doing so, the movie delivers a payoff that it’s been building up to for ninety minutes. However, this payoff does not come without cost. The cost in this film is that we don’t care about any of the humans put in harm’s way. Not the ones trying to help, nor the ones looking to escape. Not the ones with guns, nor the ones who run. Everybody who is brought in front of us is play their part in a piece of exposition, or to move a piece around the board. As such, there is no emotional investment in GODZILLA…which doesn’t make it bad, it just prevents it from being great.

What we’re left with when the roar stops echoing in our ears and the ground stops shaking underfoot, is something  awesome and entertaining if not overly affecting. I dare you not to smile when you watch that giant lizard do some of the things he’s capable of doing – tricks that brought me such joy that I don’t even want to tip them off. In the end, GODZILLA wants more to focus on the power of nature than the intricacies of man – which is what allows it to stand out from other films of its ilk. Unfortunately it’s what holds it back from standing out as a film.  Still, we can’t knock it for that – after all, the film makes a promise, and it kept that promise.

What more do we want?

Matineescore: ★ ★ ★ out of ★ ★ ★ ★

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