Godzilla 2014 Movie Review

Since his debut in 1954, the legendary Godzilla has starred in numerous films, proving that he is indeed, “King of the monsters”. But the giant nuclear Japanese beast hasn’t been seen in a western flick since 1998. Godzilla 2014 is bent on righting the previous wrongs of Emmerich’s 1998 flop but ultimately all it amounts to is an even more lacklustre effort.

The titular monster may be in the title but unexpectedly and rather disappointingly, Godzilla follows the story of the Brody family and their endeavours with other humans to deal with the entrance of a giant monster. Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) loses his wife in a catastrophic nuclear station failure but deduces that the tragedy was not caused by man or weather but an unforeseen force. Flash forward fifteen years and Joe’s son Ford (Aaron-Taylor Johnson) is thrust into the chaos with Godzilla and two MUTOs (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms) facing off. Right from the start, it’s Godzilla so surely you’d expect some gargantuan battles to take place throughout the film. Regretfully the film contains hardly any of that and instead focuses on the humans talking and partaking in every kind of generic military fare whilst the monsters take an insulting back seat. It’s not always a bad thing to focus on the humans in a monster movie, as proven by 2008’s Cloverfield, but when almost every character is so meaningless and so under-developed, it is all too evident that this is a film where very little happens until the final act and even that is too brief to meet the quota for a monster brawl. Godzilla seems to appear out of nowhere in the film and because of shots of the creature’s back at the beginning of the film, there’s hardly any tension built throughout the film as we know he’ll show up at some point anyway. At least the 1998 film actually delivered in terms of action, and revealed the monster fairly well, however bogged down it was by terrible acting. It’s as if the film studio ran out of money making the effects for the final battle and figured that they had to throw in a heap of unrelated material that strays too far from the film’s premise. Rather than watching a Godzilla movie, it felt more like another “Battle: Los Angeles” at numerous points. With a plot as off the rails as this, they may as well have renamed the film “Call of Duty: Monsters Unleashed”.

The film’s focus on the humans, as opposed to the monsters attempts to bring some emotion to the proceedings but it only ends up serving a terribly conceived distraction that endlessly gets in the way and undermines the little action that takes place. Young Brody and his family are the same old group in peril who have been done to death in most disaster and military movies before and whenever they’re on screen you’ll just be counting down the minutes before the monsters come on again. Dr Ishiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) TRIES to relay and relate some modern themes such as the use of nuclear power but really all he’s doing is spouting dialogue which doesn’t receive any kind of payoff. Speaking of a lack of payoffs, there’s Bryan Cranston, who has been utterly wasted on this film; his character’s internal conflict over the loss of his wife is by far the most interesting thread in the film. But what happens then? He is killed off only a third into the movie without any proper conclusion to his arc. The rest of the characters are pure fluff, only present to play out the same tired militaristic situations seen in countless other films. What it comes down to is that you simply don’t care about the characters one bit, which only serves to magnify the film’s failed and fundamentally flawed approach to focus on the humans, rather than the monster rumble we were all expecting to see in a film titled “Godzilla”.

Legendary Pictures take on the classic monster may suffer from an identity crisis and have some painfully under-developed human characters but at least it looks the part. Monster based destruction has never looked better in a Hollywood blockbuster. Buildings burn, piles of rubble are everywhere; it all works to highlight the destructive nature of the creatures. And then there’s Godzilla himself; Edwards and company have truly nailed the look and feel of Toho’s monster this time around. He’s much more bulky, stands upright and breathes his trademark nuclear breath (which gives way to some sumptuous lighting effects). The music is also solid, providing sweeping notes whenever the monsters are brawling. The editing is well done, providing a huge sense of scale whenever Godzilla is on screen, though ironically many shots also emphasise the film’s biggest problem; often times you will see the monsters stomping around in the distance or fighting but then the camera will either pan or cut to the humans, resulting in many moments of frustration for the majority of us who came to see a monster brawl. All told the visual elements of Godzilla are great, but they really don’t stand a chance of saving the film as a whole.

Godzilla tries to be the big budget Hollywood monster movie we were all hoping for but it is instead a crushing disappointment that only becomes half decent in the final twenty minutes. At the very least it does get the monster right where the 1998 version failed to do so but the film’s baffling focus on the people rather than the titular character brings it crashing down.

Rating: 2/5 Stars