‘Godzilla’ Review – Soldiers Are Still Boring As Hell [Review]

Say what you will about 90s movies, the Roland Emmerich-directed Godzilla included, but they got one thing right and that was balancing out the suspense and thrill of their action sequences with decently paced character work. 14 years after The Matrix, we’ve seen pretty much every kind of CGI slugfest we will for a while, and so the emphasis in blockbusters has to return to the people in them, and it’s in that department that Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla remake begins its short fall from stirringly compelling to painfully average.

When Jordan led me into the cinema to watch the new Godzilla (I was a little late), I made a prediction for the worst possible ending this movie could have. “A triumphant Godzilla, having completed his battle against the other monsters, saunters off toward the ocean, letting out one final roar before slinking back to the depths, awaiting plans for a sequel to mark his return.” That was what I imagined would be the worst outcome for this film, not because it necessarily has to be rendered in cheesy Californian sunlight, but because I’ve seen enough of these kinds of movies to know what the bad version of the script reads like. As of late, Hollywood studios have dedicated a lot of their time to crafting “franchises”, attempting to recapture the magic of my childhood, when post-climax plot teasers were just jokes that directors planted in case they followed up on them.

I remember director Robert Zemeckis famously saying the end of Back To The Future, which suggested that there would be a sequel to the movie, was just meant to be a gag that left audiences with a big smile on their faces. If he had intended to send Marty and Doc to the future in a follow-up, Zemeckis said, he’d never have put “the girl” (Marty’s girlfriend) in the car with them. It’s why the second film spends (and I might argue, wastes) so much time on the boring future section of its story.

My point is that they didn’t go into this planning to make another, so they absolutely poured everything they had into the first one, leaving the sequel to be contemplated by fresher minds, whether their own or some other filmmakers. That’s less inclined to happen these days, purely because there’s less money to go around than before and studios aren’t as assured that they can be ballsy and succeed. Unfortunately this also means that many producers (and even directors) seem to have lost touch with what made those old “summer” blockbusters so special, and that was all the care that went into crafting the characters. It’s them that audiences would have to follow into the heart of the action after all, not the monsters or the generic soldiers getting swatted aside in the background.

Remember Alan and the kids from Jurassic Park? Or the slick Will Smith and awkward Jeff Goldblum in Independence Day? Grizzled soldier Kurt Russell and nerdy scientist James Spader in Stargate?

It’s no coincidence that I chose two of Roland Emmerich’s movies above. Despite the criticism lobbed at his 1998 Godzilla remake, if there’s one thing he was a master of, it was getting his audience to at least like the characters they would have to spend the running time of the films with. I remember watching his version of the big lizard event movie in a cinema when I was 10 and thinking the ’90s 10-year-old’s equivalent of, “This is my jam.” No, it wasn’t as thought-provoking as the Ishiro Honda original, or even as entertaining as Jurassic Park (a movie it was clearly aping), but it was big and brash and took the time to play for a few cheap laughs when it wasn’t rushing from set piece to set piece. Plus it was a team-up between Ferris Bueller and Leon The Professional which is an idea that only 1990s Hollywood could cook up.

The problem with Gareth Edwards’ modern redux of the 1954 Godzilla today is, first and foremost, its lack of Bueller.

It’s a problem the film seems to avoid, at least at first, by distracting you with strong performances from both Bryan Cranston and Ken Watanabe. The potential for a team-up between Malcolm In The Middle’s dad and The Last Samurai is just the bonus material. Cranston plays an engineer whose wife dies in a nuclear plant disaster, leaving him a paranoid conspiracy theorist determined to find the truth about what exactly killed his wife. It drives a wedge between him and his son Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), which is where we find most of the pathos. Watanabe on the other hand is only in this movie to exposit plot details and explain the themes out loud, but he does so with such conviction that it’s difficult not to want to take him seriously, so of course no one he talks to really ever does.

Cranston and Taylor-Johnson make for a good pairing of the crazed, melodramatic father and the distant, emotionless son who are trying to deal with their loss by breaking into a military secured disaster site. If that doesn’t sound like the setup for a great film, I don’t know what does, and that’s before I’ve even mentioned the monsters.

It’s when Godzilla and The “MUTO” show up, however, that the film quickly begins to shed character in favor of repetitive scenes of inaction. Left to his own devices on a mission to get back to his son and wife (Elizabeth Olsen in her blandest role yet), Taylor-Johnson struts from town to town, sequence to sequence, without ever really finding anything to do or say that isn’t something he just said a few scenes back. And he does all this without anyone to bounce off of either, making him a generally strong, silent guy who is just caught in the action. Sometimes that makes for a decent bit of tension but for the most part it just means he’s really, really boring. And in a film where the director has really chosen to stick with him as the sole character for long stretches, that is pretty unfortunate.

The monsters, meanwhile, get little more than lip service in terms of hyping them up. They are almost always shown arriving at some place with the intent to do harm and cause massive property damage – you know, monster shit – and then we cut away from them to see things after they’ve passed through town. That’s like watching a Man With No Name movie where Clint Eastwood has already left town and we’re dealing with the void he’s left in the local coffin-maker’s heart instead of the part with the tension and the gunfights. What starts out as a compelling device used to make you anticipate the climax quickly becomes a laborious way of getting audiences to stay put, something which did not sit well with the group of 12-year-olds seated in the same cinema as me during Godzilla. They got up, talked a lot, and occasionally even left the cinema entirely because, fuckit, they weren’t going to miss anything anyway.

This is not to say that the film is altogether bad. There are points where it is compelling, and when we finally do get to the action, it really is something to see. It’s just unfortunate that the film’s climax feels like it takes so long to arrive. At its root, this version of Godzilla is a story about humanity’s relationship with nature (most of the film’s imagery echoes real world disasters rather than the usual movie-style explosions) and so it makes sense that its director would want to make the humans nothing more than bystanders to the action. Unfortunately, he chooses his least compelling character of all to spectate on our behalf, and so there’s no sense of real danger or even much of a thrill. You know he’ll make it out alive and you also don’t want to watch him do it all that much. And that’s because soldiers are still boring as hell.