Sadly, the most colossal thing about Godzilla is how underwhelming it
is, and perhaps my own expectations were inflated because of all the hype. I
was there on the floor of Hall H when Edwards made the big Godzilla
announcement and showed his early vision for the reboot, and the room was thick
with the energy of anticipation. That excitement really never subsided thanks
to a smart marketing strategy that kept the monster largely out of promos and
trailers. The mystery is what mattered, and that tension over Godzilla's
arrival is a large reason why the film works so well initially, yet is so
disappointing once he appears. 
The atomic era serves as sturdy ground for the story, penned by relative
newcomer Max Borenstein (with a Frank Darabont assist), building on old fears
of planet-killing nuclear destruction. Edwards uses stock footage from
Hiroshima and other nuclear events, and later on uses many of these tragedies
as a visual road map to the epic disasters he's capturing on screen. The film
is at its best long before Godzilla ever enters the frame thanks to a superb
cast adding such rich, emotional stakes one forgets this is supposed to be just
another summer popcorn flick. Bryan Cranston is Joe Brody, a physicist
struggling to get past the death of his wife fifteen years earlier when she was
killed by an accident at a Japanese nuclear plant. Having lost his job, Joe has
also lost the respect of his son, Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who believes his
father to be a total whack job obsessed with conspiracy theories that the
Japanese government is hiding something big. The father/son dynamic is easily
the best aspect of the story early on, with Cranston and Johnson playing off
one another beautifully. Joe's haunted quest for the truth lends dramatic
thrust to what is essentially a slow burn mystery. Ford, who now a husband,
father, and soldier in the Ordinance Disposal unit (that'll come in handy later),
is reluctantly dragged into exploring the quarantined zone where the original
disaster occurred. There they discover a secret that threatens the world, and
Ford learns that his dad wasn't a total nut job all these years.
From there all of the compelling emotional stakes and familial dynamics get
roasted like they were caught in Godzilla's atomic fire. The typically-awesome
Ken Watanabe doesn't do much but look bewildered as Dr. Ichiro Serizawa, a
scientist who has been studying these disasters for decades and knows the truth
about them. Now he's working at a secret facility where cocooned radioactive
energy-sapping creatures are being housed in secret, even though their mere
presence screws with all electronics and threatens the whole planet. It's also
just kind of stupid in general terms. When the creatures inevitably escape and
cause all types of havoc, another monster awakens to combat them, with Serizawa
hypothesizing it's nature's way of finding balance. Godzilla has often been
portrayed as an avatar of Mother Earth, a protector of the planet, and the film
works this aspect into the story seamlessly without going too far with it.
Nobody wants to see Godzilla turned into Captain Planet or anything like that.
The humans scramble around to make their plans to stop all of the monsters
walking (or flying) the earth, and as one might expect it involves nukes and
lots of gunfire, things we know are never going to work. Meanwhile, Ford is
bouncing from location to location trying to get back home to his family, but
he's really sort of adrift without a whole lot to do. There comes a point where
human focus leaves Joe and shifts to Ford, and the story never quite recovers
from that. We have no emotional investment in ford other than his return home,
while the long-held tension he had with Joe provided the greatest heft.
Elizabeth Olsen is sorely wasted as Ford's wife, and the same can be said for
other bit players Juliette Binoche, Sally Hawkins, and David Strathairn. The
amount of talent gone to waste here is phenomenal. As I said before, Godzilla
movies all tend to leave their human characters in the background or relegate
them to stock roles, and this is no different. Mostly the humans fumble around
dumbfounded while the monsters cause wide scale disasters, and the whole thing
just comes off as empty and pointless. We know it will be Godzilla who saves
the day in the end, so where's the drama in everything that comes before that?
Poorly executed story aside, Godzilla is often the jaw-dropper we were always
hoping it would be. This is the first big movie by Edwards, who floored
many with his small-budget creature feature, Monsters.
That film was an immigration parable clearly inspired by Godzilla movies, and
here he throws in a dose of Spielberg-ian wonder to much of the spectacle. The
visuals are impressive and will have you geeking out over the awesome scale of
it, especially the design of Godzilla himself. He looks great and there's an
incredible level of detail in every movement. Edwards keeps him hidden in a
thick haze of smoke, fog, and shadow until the time is just right for maximum
impact. The way he builds tension is a thing of pure beauty. Less
impressive are the other monsters, called MUTOs (Massive Unidentified
Terrestrial Objects) which look hastily thrown together and rather generic.
This severely hurts the monster clashes which never quite live up to the
exhilarating display they ought to be.There are good ideas here, and Edwards is a genuine talent and perhaps does the best with a modern Godzilla film than anybody could have hoped for. Godzilla as a character simply doesn't hold a lot of appeal outside of being a force of nature. He's awesome to look at and be in awe of but without human characters audiences can connect with, Godzilla might as well keep that mighty roar to himself.
