Gareth Edwards Buried a Better Monster Movie Inside His Godzilla

In 1999, Monarch scientists Ishiro Serizawa and Vivienne Graham descend into a cavern in the Philippines, unearthed by a collapsed uranium mine, and find the skeleton of a monster like Godzilla. Two giant spores sit beside it — one dormant, one hatched. A trail leads to the sea.

That image is the best thing in the film, and it is also the problem. Godzilla is a movie built around the promise of enormous creatures, then spends most of its 123 minutes keeping them off screen. The 2014 reboot of Toho’s franchise, the 30th film in it and the first entry in Legendary’s Monsterverse, has scale, gravity and a genuinely good monster. It also has a script that mistakes withholding for suspense.

Trailer, via Godzilla: King of the Monsters.

The Janjira reactor and Sandra Brody

The film’s strongest stretch is set in Japan. At the Janjira Nuclear Power Plant, supervisor Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) sends his wife Sandra (Juliette Binoche) to lead technicians into the reactor after unusual seismic activity. A tremor breaches it. Joe closes the reactor door before Sandra and her team can escape, and the plant collapses.

Fifteen years later, their son Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is a U.S. Navy EOD officer in San Francisco, married to Elle (Elizabeth Olsen) and father to Sam. He flies to Japan after Joe is detained for trespassing in Janjira’s quarantine zone. Joe wants the cause of the meltdown; he persuades Ford to help retrieve data from their old home. The zone turns out to be uncontaminated. They get the data, get caught, and get taken to a facility in the plant’s ruins.

What waits there is the film’s cleanest idea. A massive chrysalis has fed on the plant’s reactors for fifteen years, emitting electromagnetic pulses the whole time. A winged creature emerges, destroys the facility and escapes. Joe is severely injured and later dies. The incident is reported publicly as an earthquake.

Cranston is the reason this section works, and his exit is the reason the rest of the film sags. He plays obsession without vanity, and the movie never finds a replacement for that energy.

Serizawa’s warning and the MUTO

Ken Watanabe’s Dr. Serizawa and Sally Hawkins’ Dr. Graham join a U.S. Navy task force under Admiral William Stenz (David Strathairn) to hunt the creature, dubbed a MUTO — Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism. Serizawa and Graham tell Ford about a 1954 deep-sea expedition, the one that tried to kill Godzilla with a nuclear weapon at Bikini Atoll. The ancient alpha predator is back, and the MUTOs are his rivals.

Watanabe has said he was skeptical about a new Hollywood Godzilla until he met Edwards. “If you are telling the Godzilla story, you cannot separate it from the nuclear element,” he said, “and the first thing I asked was whether there was going to be the nuclear element, as that now, in Japan, is a really sensitive problem.”

That is the film’s central tension, and Edwards treats it seriously. The nuclear material is not decoration here; it is the engine of the plot and the source of the dread. Serizawa’s character is named for Ishiro Honda, who directed several Godzilla films, and for Dr. Daisuke Serizawa, the scientist who killed Godzilla in the 1954 original.

What the MUTOs do to the running order

The film’s structure is a chase across the Pacific toward San Francisco, and the creatures leave colossal destruction in their wake. What the film will not do is let you watch much of it.

The table reads like a monster movie. The film often does not. The camera keeps finding humans in corridors instead of the creatures.

Taylor-Johnson is a capable actor given almost nothing to play. Ford’s arc is a series of transports — from San Francisco to Japan to the task force to the final battle — and the film mistakes his movement for development. Olsen, an enormously gifted performer, has a handful of scenes as Elle and spends the climax waiting. Binoche appears in one sequence and is gone. The cast list promises a drama the script does not deliver.

Godzilla’s insufficient screen time

The film drew generally positive reviews, with praise for the direction, visual effects, music, cinematography, its respect for the source material and Cranston’s performance. The criticism landed on the script, the characters and Godzilla’s insufficient screen time. That split is correct, and the last item is the one that matters most.

A Godzilla film has one job above all others: make the monster feel like an event. Edwards understands the build. He does not understand, or does not trust, the payoff. When Godzilla finally fights, the scale is right and the sound design is right, and the sequence is over almost as soon as it starts. That is a strange choice for a film with his name on it.

The film made $529.1 million worldwide against a $160 million production budget. Its success prompted Toho to produce a reboot of their own, Shin Godzilla. Legendary built a franchise on it. Commercially, the gamble paid off.

The verdict on Godzilla

Godzilla is a good film trapped inside a great one. The Philippines cavern, the Janjira meltdown and Watanabe’s quiet gravity all point toward a movie that takes the nuclear wound seriously and lets a monster carry it. The long middle points toward a movie that is afraid of its own star.

This is the part worth watching: Edwards can stage dread, and he can stage scale, but he cannot bring himself to let the audience have the thing they paid for. The result is a reboot that respects Godzilla enough to name him and not enough to show him.

Gareth Edwards · Godzilla · Godzilla 2014 · Kaiju · Monsterverse · movie review