Everybody’s favorite metaphor-for-Atomic-Age-Anxiety turned 60 this year and Hollywood’s idea of a great birthday gift was-you guessed it-a big budget, star studded reboot. It should have gone with a necktie. Even a bad one would’ve been better than this.
Sitting through Gareth Edwards’ (Monsters) lumbering, muddled Godzilla certainly is no party. We could spend all day listing its shortcomings but how’s this for starters: the guest of honor is an hour late.
This is the 28th feature to star the lizard king so you might imagine they’d have this down to a science. You’d be wrong. The latest makes Roland Emmerich’s maligned 1998 update look like Alien. Which is fitting because the real stars are a pair of giant mantis mutants that look like they were inspired by a Giger doodle.
You didn’t realize this is a monster movie in which the monsters with the most screen time are total unknowns? Speaking of surprises-Bryan Cranston turns in borderline embarrassing work here, which isn’t helped by a silly wig and even sillier dialogue. The actor plays a scientist who works at a Tokyo nuclear facility and suspects the truth hasn’t been told when the place is totaled and the tragedy is blamed on geological tremors.
That’s 1999. Fast forward to the present and his paranoia is proved to be well founded when he sneaks into the quarantined site with his son (a personality-free Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and sets in motion a chain of events awakening a sleeping giant in the form of a MUTO, or Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism.
Two of the creatures ultimately are roused. One’s male, the other female, and both are in really bad, if randy, moods. Movie mayhem ensues. Skyscrapers are reduced to rubble. People run down the street screaming. The military launches Operation Why Bother?
A lot of money was spent on this yawnathon, and a lot of gifted writers worked on the script, among them unbelievably Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, The Walking Dead). Beats me completely how a talent like that could produce characters, storylines and dialogue this generic.
Likewise squandered is a top notch cast which also includes the likes of David Strathairn, Juliette Binoche, Elizabeth Olsen and Ken Watanabe, none of whom is given anything remotely interesting to do. It’s a sad day when an actor of Watanabe’s stature is reduced to upchucking lines like “The arrogance of man is thinking nature is in our control, and not the other way around” while gazing up at a green screen.
No explanation is offered as to how he’s alerted to humankind’s peril, or why he considers it his problem, but eventually the G-man does make his entrance and engage the MUTOs in the sort of smackdown that’ll absolutely leave your jaw dropped, assuming you’ve never seen a Transformers film, Independence Day, Armageddon, 2012, War of the Worlds, Cloverfield, Pacific Rim or any of the dozens of other earsplitting effects-fests that have offered pixelated spectacles of mass destruction since the dawn of the CGI.
If devastation porn is your cup of tea, this is the picture for you. That’s all it has to offer. No characters developed enough to care about, no narrative coherence, no tweaks to the genre, not so much as a suggestion of humor and zero metaphors. Just monster-on-monster, building bashing action like you haven’t seen since maybe last week.
Are the effects good? It goes without saying at this point and at this price they are. But the movie’s not. At a cost of $160 million, I’d venture to say Warner Bros. didn’t get its money’s worth. I can say with certainty you won’t get yours.
Good review. I hated this movie. And the CGI is mostly clouded in rain, darkness & smoke. If they’re going to spend so much money on the “effects” why not show them? Oh and how about a story with real people? Plus the director keeps referencing Spielberg with his work. Ugh.
Rick, I know what you meant, I was just being funny. I personally rate Alien as the same kind of turd as Godzilla 98.
Nice review. After seeing the trailers hit the web I was put off by the scale of destruction, the human cost and the devastation thrown at the camera, making Godzilla regurgitate some of that lingering 9/11-Katrina social angst and pain. Big mistake. Godzilla will always be camp. Even the 1998 American movie – camp. We see enough destruction and heartbreak on the news. Give me a man in a rubber suit any day.
I also disliked the movie immensely. Godzilla I felt was frequently a man in a suit and that was confirmed after articles I read on the internet. Why in hell was using a man in suit deemed a good idea? Anyway as for the dialogue everybody tends to blame the writer(s) but you would be surprised how much of the dialogue produced by the writers actually make it into the actual movie! Directors and producers have egos the size of a planet and they will, more often than not, butcher the script for a variety of reasons. Anyway I though it was bad and that’s all I have to say.
Hi Gary, just to clarify: I didn’t actually compare the 98 Godzilla to Alien; I wrote that the new version is so bad it makes the 98 one look like Alien, in other words like a classic film in comparison. Thanks for taking the time.
Funny you compared the 1998 Godzilla to Alien. Alien being a lumbering, paper-thin movie populated by zero-dimensional characters that moves at an absolute snail’s pace and doesn’t greet its titular monster until 70 minutes in (MUCH later than Godzilla in the new flick, which I loved btw). In Alien they land on the planet LV426 at the 59 minute mark!! Maybe a bit more research next time?