As someone who hasn’t seen a single Toho produced Godzilla film and thus can’t tell you whether or not it truly lives up to the spirit of the original series, all I can do is judge it based on the godawful Roland Emmerich version from 1998. The new version, directed by Gareth Edwards, is relentlessly ambitious and often feels as if it’s trying to apologize for all of the corniness, bad dialogue and lack of interesting action in the last US produced Gojira film.
The monster king plays an anti-heroic force of nature this time, both from a physical and emotional perspective with the main human drama angle. Ford Brody, played by Aaron “Kick Ass” Taylor Johnson, is having a rough time dealing his physicist father Joe (Bryan Cranston) and his theories on what could possibly be the big green guy himself, searching the truth on what caused the nuclear plant disaster that took his wife. Scientist Ishiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe), with a very grim outlook on the situation, eventually reveals the existence of Godzilla to Ford, as well as his relationship with other strange creatures recently spotted. The humans are then left debating the best way to minimize as many inevitable deaths as possible.
One of the best things the 2014 Godzilla has going for it is tone. I doubt there’s more than sixty seconds worth of people smiling, everyone treats the thousands upon thousands of lives being lost as seriously as you’d hope they would. The body count and mayhem is as high as a PG-13 film allows, and the atmosphere is dramatic and solemn without really any sort of comedy relief to be found. There’s no “Mayor Ebert” or Matthew Broderick commenting on piles of fish this time. Alexandre Desplat’s score pounds into the viewer’s heads with sharp, terrified notes, and there’s a good deal of pain and agony in the screams of the bystanders. Godzilla himself is far more impressive than his iguana-like 90s counterpart, and his battles with the Mutos are incredible.
Unlike that other film, the humans aren’t necessarily annoying or bothersome, but unfortunately they don’t get much of a chance to develop into fleshed out characters within the confines of the usual disaster movies. Cranston is more than happy to act up a storm as an emotional conspiracy theorist, and Watanabe is appropriately solemn and brooding. Sadly Taylor-Johnson isn’t given much to work with outside of being a generic military grunt most of the time. He’s not unlikable by any means, but his wife played by Elizabeth Olsen has to carry the emotional weight of the relationship. The people here spend a lot of time standing around in awe and/or stunned horror, and the dialogue is mainly either exposition, yelling and screaming in terror, or saying potentially last goodbyes. None of the cast aside from maybe Cranston at times is allowed to be too memorable, so hopefully anyone returning in the planned sequel (which will suck if they rush it) will have their stories expanded on.
But then again, it’s the monsters’ show, and they don’t disappoint. I enjoyed it, and I’ll recommend it if big things smashing each other is all you’re after, but don’t expect anything Oscar worthy or profound outside of that. Or any songs by Rage Against The Machine on the soundtrack criticizing the film for being a massive corporate distraction from important real world issues.