GODZILLA REVIEW
Let me put my cards on the table.
"I am a huge Godzilla fan. So much so that I took my father out to see it with some passes i got from IGN last Tuesday and I was very nostalgic."
I was one of those kids who wasted their youth watching
"Creature Double Feature" smackdowns between Godzilla and his arsenal
of enemy combatants such as Mothra and Ghidorah. There was something about
seeing these behemoths stomp Tokyo to dust that made me absolutely giddy: the
primal doomsday terror of a beast created by A-bomb radiation, the model-shop
ingenuity, the laughable man-in-a-rubber-suit campiness. It's been 16 years
since Hollywood nearly soured that love affair, thanks to Roland Emmerich's 1998
atrocity. And I was hopeful that the splashy new 3-D reboot might rekindle the
old flame.
Unfortunately, Gareth Edwards' "Godzilla" feels
like two movies Scotch-taped together. In one, Bryan Cranston plays a nuclear
engineer with a tragic past who's racing to expose the truth about a series of
seismic anomalies, Aaron Taylor-Johnson is his estranged soldier son, and Ken
Watanabe and Sally Hawkins are a pair of exposition-spouting scientists trying
to keep straight faces while talking about electromagnetic pulses and mankind's
hubris. In the other, mammoth CG beasts knock the snot out of one another. Only
one of these movies is any good. Thankfully, it's the monster one.
Edwards, whose only previous film was 2010's low-budget
"Monsters," has been given a quick call-up to the majors with the
reported $160 million "Godzilla." He doesn't seem too interested in
his actors — they're more plodding than their reptilian costars and you don't
care about a single one of them — but Edwards does know how to fashion some
serious monster mayhem. Taking a cue from "Jaws," he wisely delays
Godzilla's appearance, building suspense. In movies like these, it's all about
the slow tease and the big reveal. As an appetizer, though, he gives us a pair
of ''MUTOs'' (massive unidentified terrestrial organisms) — a male and female
duo of giant, Giger-esque creatures with sleek pincer jaws that resemble
humongous staple removers. The MUTOs, who arrive on the scene after leveling a
Japanese nuclear reactor, care about two things: feeding on the radiation that
created them and mating with each other in...San Francisco of all places. Tony
Bennett would be proud.
When Godzilla first lumbers on screen to hunt the MUTOs and
''restore balance,'' he feels both nostalgically familiar and excitingly new.
As big as a Sheraton and with a shriek that rumbles your insides, he appears
beefier and meaner than you remember. But looks can be deceiving. Godzilla is
humanity's only hope for destroying the MUTOs. Or as Watanabe's Dr. Serizawa
says, ''Let them fight!'' And fight they do, in an epic clash that turns the
Bay Area to rubble. Unlike last year's disappointing Pacific Rim, Godzilla
actually shows us its monsters without a scrim of rain and a cloak of darkness.
And the thrill of the film is getting the chance to fetishize their sheer size
and physicality as they rip through power lines and demolish buildings with their
lashing tails. In its handful of moments like these, "Godzilla"
almost makes you feel like a kid again. Grade: B-
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