Godzilla *** (2014, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Bryan Cranston, Elizabeth Olsen, David Strathairn, Juliette Binoche) – Movie Review

The 355-ft fire-breathing Japanese lizard is back, and so is wide-eyed, constantly frowning 5ft 11in Aaron Taylor-Johnson as a US naval officer in San Francisco who goes to Japan to help his troubled scientist dad (Bryan Cranston) look into mysterious tremors near Tokyo.

Something has been feeding off the nuclear reactors at the power plant where dad worked, and 15 years after a supposed earthquake there, that Something is awake. And Godzilla isn’t the only monster about to threaten mankind.

British director Gareth Edwards is at the helm for this $100million reboot of the cinema monster icon, suddenly promoted (Edwards, not the monster!) from jobbing visual effects man to director of the mini-budget indie hit Monsters (2010) and now to blockbuster. Wouldn’t it be great if Godzilla could direct himself as star of his own movie, like Clint Eastwood?

Edwards knows and loves his monster movies, no doubt about it, and it shows on screen with the care over the monsters. But he’s not nearly as good with telling a story, handling characters or his actors’ performances.

The monsters and FX here are awesome in IMAX 3D, and the big beast, though a bit rubber looking in CGI no doubt in homage to the 1954 original, is scary enough and even properly alarming a couple of times, all exactly as exciting as you’d expect. And it is also very good that the monster action, when it finally comes, after a long build-up of half the film, is ferocious, and taken totally seriously. The big yin is sure tall, dark and gruesome – wow!

Monsters fine then, but Edwards also wants to play fair by the human story. However, his human story gets completely lost very early on, with Cranston giving easily the best performance, and providing the film’s only actual sense of loss and pain. But that’s all in the film’s 1999-set prologue – and that’s entirely dispensable and so is his character in fact.

The brave attempt at a character-driven monster movie falls apart with Cranston’s departure from the story. For Taylor-Johnson’s all-American hero character is then left adrift and on his own, wandering about and miraculously turning up just when he’s needed in the story to do whatever he’s got to do. Which isn’t that much, getting dirty or bruised a few times, but basically emerging scratch-free and squeaky-clean looking.

He’s a nice, caring family man, but in his man’s world he is separated by the story from his lovely, saintly nurse wife (Elizabeth Olsen) and little kid. Olsen’s part is just sitting at home suffering and looking anxious and wandering around suffering and looking anxious, till she can be rejoined with A T-J at the end.

Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins’s scientist characters spout a bit of scientific mumbo jumbo, and Hawkins looks a bit anxious, too, while David Strathairn’s US admiral looks anxious, too. And that’s all they have to do! But at least it’s more than Juliette Binoche has to do as A T-J’s mum. Her role is so brief you wonder why she signed on at all, and how the heck she got fourth star billing.

The hero of a Godzilla yarn needs a small band of mates to join with him on his quest to see off the monster, but that never happens in this movie. The other main characters are also adrift, don’t relate to A J-T, or each other and they aren’t assembled to form a coalition against the big bad guy. And, although the sinister covering-up Japanese authorities have paid no attention to Cranston’s whistleblowing back in 1999, in the present there’s no American government or business cover-up to battle, like the life-endangering mayor in Jaws, for example.

Did I mention that the film is no fun at all, that there are no laughs, no trading of quips, and that there’s no let-up in the grim disaster-movie scenario? Why do these movies have to be so darned serious? They’re fantasy entertainment’s for heaven’s sake!

However, the two hours whiz by enjoyably enough in best popcorn movie fashion, A J-T is the sweetest of heroes, the monsters are serious items, it’s lovingly crafted and it’s fine as a summer blockbuster.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson has been married to Sam Taylor-Johnson, the director of Fifty Shades of Grey (2015), since June 21, 2012. 

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(C) Derek Winnert 2014 Film Review

Link to Derek Winnert’s home page for more film reviews: http://derekwinnert.com/