A Reptile Dysfunction? Godzilla Reviewed...

Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) and his wife Sandra (Juliette Binoche) a pair of nuclear scientists, live with their young  son, Ford, in Japan. They are somewhat baffled by strange sonic vibrations that are affecting the local nuclear power-plant. Joe loves his family, but he’s so distracted by his work that he even fails to notice that it is own birthday and the efforts made by his son to celebrate it.  However things start to go drastically wrong when the nearby vibrations start to cause a catastrophic effect on the plant and the two adults try to separately stop a disaster.

The tragedies of the day will be long-standing and the years turn Joe from a respected scientist into a reclusive conspiracy-theorist determined to prove his theories that there has been a cover-up as to what caused the disaster. Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is now a grown man and military bomb-disposal operative, tired of his father’s absence, but willing to fly to Hawaii to bail him out of more trouble.

What neither man knows is that the secrets of the past are about to be uncovered... as up from the depths, thirty storeys high, comes a threat unlike any humanity has faced. What can possibly stop such a massive monster(s)? Perhaps another titan of legend, one that some say is a natural balance to the chaos… a creature known as Godzilla.

1998’s Godzilla was largely seen as a total mess of a movie – the western version of the eastern icon fumbled with good intentions but a lack of clarity over what made the creation work so there were many expectations for the 2014 outing.  Would it go the darker, subdued route seen in director Gareth Edwards’ previous outing, the low-budget ‘Monsters’, or try to recapture some of the original kitsch value of the olden movies.  Basically: melancholy monster or a a man in a suit? There’s no doubt that CGI has improved and budgets have been extended, but even enlisting the ‘performance-capture king’ Andy Serkis in the development process seems to have been unable to totally bridge that gap.

While the 2014 version of Godzilla has all the rich ingredients for success, the result is not  the sum of its parts. It's hard to remember a film that has taken quite so many Oscar-nominees and placed them in such under-developed, inconsequential and lightweight roles. The casting of women in the film is derisory at best - taking the likes of Juliette Binoche and Sally Hawkins and criminally wasting them. The former's participation is curtailed early (no spoilers, the show-all trailers gave that away) and the latter is given nothing more to do than wander around three paces behind a similarly under-appreciated Ken Watanabe,  carrying files. It's a role - like many here -  that could be performed by someone in a sleepy am-dram society or could disappear from the film entirely and nary leave a ripple.  Equally, David Strathairn as a military commander has barely enough dialogue to fill a page. Cranston (and perhaps Godzilla) aside, almost any role could have been replaced with a string of lesser actors. Johnson, for example, is a perfectly fine actor, but it’s telling that the likes of Sam Worthington or Jai Courtney could have provided just as much (lack of) depth.

It would be one thing if these actors were merely giving space to the titular star, but Godzilla is little more than a maguffin. Like the recent The Winter Soldier, the title of the piece seems something of a misnomer - the title character not having the prominence expected. Here it's way into the film before we see a real glimpse of Godzilla and for much of the film he lurks off camera only coming out for random encounters and then  a lengthy, drawn-out monster-mash climax in the final act. While there is an argument to be made that far, far superior films like Alien benefitted from keeping the monster away from viewers to build up the tension, that's hardly true of a film in which we know that footage of the creature is being beamed around the world to millions of televisions and to the terrified public - so in essence, WE are the sole people being denied the show. And even then, Cloverfield did that better.

The problem is that the best part of the film is the first act - with Bryan Cranston shifting from a distracted family-man to mourning conspiracy-theorist. It all feels like a solid, emotional set-up for the action to come:  the second-act begins, the years pass and his grown-up son, military man Aaron Taylor-Johnson , tries to help him. This is how the film has been marketed. Instead... the narrative switch to Ford, a fairly generic soldier trying to get home to his own family leads to the film becoming SO by-the-numbers that it could well have been made over a decade ago were it not for the superior special-effects.  Seriously – when you get to the point where we see Ford forced to save and briefly look after a random errant youngster, when we see a dog trying narrowly escaping the carnage by the skin of its paws and people rush to close a glass door to (successfully!) prevent being victims of a tsunami, the lessons of the least fifteen years start to evaporate.

On the positive side, set-pieces such as the military parachute-drop work well and the FX are as good as expected.The design of Godzilla itself is also, importantly, spot-on. What we do get to see is impressive – capturing elements of both a mega-movie monster and yet something almost human behind the gait and stance - and helped in no small part by a Sound Department utilising every aspect of the superior Dolby ATMOS system. The roars vibrate through the entire cinema. Last year’s Pacific Rim, full of beautiful rain-swept neon hues showed just how beautiful good cinematography could be in an action film. Here it’s somewhat more muted, a darker screen on a visual level, perhaps not helped by the perils of the 3D format that always takes away some of the more vibrant elements.

In the end, Godzilla is more opportunistic mash-up than clever monster-mash and is ultimately a disappointment – perhaps perfectly acceptable as an early salvo in the summer blockbuster battlefield, but with many frustrating glimpses of what it could have been with a tighter field of vision. Unlike the specific design of the title star, the film looks designed by committee and it’s hard to know whether the obviously talented director Gareth Edwards, whose Monsters made so much of a small budget, merely failed to make the shift from Indy hit to Independence Day budget or was simply dominated by a controlling studio wanting to fall back on tired, old-faithful movie dynamics.

It will satiate casual audiences and has enough action to pass its two hours of running time, but  it all feels like another missed opportunity.