Screened Out – Godzilla

[two-star-rating]Bryan Cranston, Juliette Binoche, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen, Sally Hawkins, Ken Watanabe[/two-star-rating]

Let’s face it – the only reason we go to see a Godzilla film is that we want to see mass destruction! In Godzilla’s sixtieth year in the cinema, his story is a well-trampled path, but bring it on! We all want to have things set up so they can be spectacularly laid to waste – by aliens, by huge monsters, whatever – as long as very little is left standing at the end!

This twenty-eighth Godzilla film starts with a couple semi-dramatic beginnings – a creepy archeological dig in the Philippines in 1995, a nuclear facility meltdown in 1999. Then the dust settles for some small-scale soap opera with nuclear scientists Cranston guilt-tripping his bomb expert son Taylor-Johnson (Kick-Ass). Sonny boy gives it right back; he’d rather not be near daddy’s nuclear reactors, which are like a buffet for these giant lizards. The kid would rather quietly settle in San Francisco, where nothing bad could ever possibly happen.

Finally, the monster arises and we get the chaos we paid for. Whenever the behemoth is on screen, everything seems worth it.

The script is by new screenwriter Max Borenstein, with some assistance by Frank Durabont (The Shawshank Redemption) and Dave Callaham (who’s wrote the abysmal Dennis Quaid clunker The Horseman). There’s a sense that the writers were trying to borrow Steven Spielberg’s drawn-out tension-building techniques. So, a lot of the earlier scenes are soapboxing similar to the Richard Dreyfus character in Jaws. Other shots show the ground shaking and tremors growing, like in Jurassic Park.

This almost saves the first two-thirds of the film, which is otherwise loaded with human melodrama. Unfortunately, this touchy-feely stuff is just not as interesting as the city-leveling Goliath.

I admit I was deeply frustrated by how incredibly long it took the monster to get to screen. Then, when it appears, it still doesn’t get a lot of screen time; at first, mostly pieces and parts of it are shown – it’s nostrils, a leg, or the side of its neck. It’s so huge – five times larger than the original Japanese kaiju. When it’s shown in all its glory, it’s pretty awesome.

[rating-key]

Director Gareth Edwards (who made the tiny film Monsters and the documentary In the Shadow of the Moon) doesn’t have a lot of experience. He’s never done something this big. Yet, he and his crew handle most of this, especially the effects, with aplomb. They also borrow shots from Spielberg’s catalogue. Those special effects (by Peter Jackson’s Weta Studios) are beautifully shown.

Still, there’s no making sense of why the set-up takes so long. Cranston is a gifted actor and deserves a lot of screen time. However, that should happen in other films, not a Godzilla flick. No one’s expecting depth of character or thematic exploration. I kept thinking, “Well, Cranston’s good, but, really, when do people start getting stomped on?”