Wrinkled and crinkled, huge in Japan, heroically reluctant to give up, and forever touring the world on a mission to make us scream, Godzilla is the Mick Jagger of giant amphibians. In the latest version of the legend, directed by Gareth Edwards, Godzilla even has a Ronnie and a Keith to mess around with: a pair of scaly, primeval throwbacks who rise from the depths and join him in merry mayhem. For food, they snack on nuclear power plants and other sources of radiation, chomping atomic warheads as if they were Twinkies. All that’s missing from this film is a Charlie Watts figure: some slender beast, nicely preserved, calmly beating time at the back of the action.
We begin in 1999, in the Philippines, where mining operations have unearthed what is either a fossilized rib cage the size of an aircraft hangar or a stage set that Ridley Scott ordered for “Prometheus” and then forgot to use. Its principal function is to allow a visiting scientist (Sally Hawkins) to utter the phrase “Oh my God, is it possible?,” indicating that the next two hours are unlikely to stray from a well-trampled path. Other pleasing examples, for any scholar of disaster movies, include “I can’t believe this is happening!” and—a truly outstanding contribution to the genre—“I’m assuming that your organization has situational awareness of the unidentified creature.” In common parlance, this means “Where’s the big bug gone?,” but that would break the mood. The screenplay is by Max Borenstein, and the story by David Callahan, but no doubt other hands were involved. The computerized imagery in “Godzilla” is so prodigious, and therefore so greedy for the filmmakers’ attention, that it seems to have sucked the life out of the writing.
From the Philippines, we spring to Japan, where Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) and his wife, Sandra (Juliette Binoche), both work at a nuclear facility, which has the misfortune to be treated as an all-you-can-eat buffet by predators unknown. Next, we advance fifteen years, by which time Brody—strangely unaged, with the same bad hair, as if a dose of plutonium keeps you young—is still hung up on what happened. By contrast, his son, Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), has brushed the past aside and become a valiant, buff, and indomitably boring naval officer, with a devoted wife (Elizabeth Olsen), a home in San Francisco, and a job in bomb disposal. He has one of those tricky talks with his father about moving on, making a change, and so forth; they then wake up the next morning and have the same conversation all over again. I took this to be an editorial oversight, but it’s the start of a pattern. We get an exciting scene on a bridge, for instance, which is then compounded by a slightly less exciting scene on a different bridge—the Golden Gate, indeed, which not long ago had an army of indignant chimps clambering all over it, in “Rise of the Planet of the Apes.” When was the last time that anyone actually succeeded in driving across without interruption?
The geography of “Godzilla” is a curious matter. Once the monsters get their heads down and start causing serious damage, their first port of call is Honolulu. Then comes Las Vegas. The implication is clear: these are not mutants, or Jurassic dinosaurs that have somehow survived the eons, or the result of technological hubris on the part of mankind. No, they are tourists—hellbent on the nation’s hot spots, like the students in last year’s “Spring Breakers,” but minus the Day-Glo bikinis. “Why would they go to Nevada?,” somebody asks, and the obvious answer is “To get rat-assed on forty-dollar mai tais, hauled off the blackjack tables, and married in an Elvis suit at two o’clock in the morning.” Some hope. The beasts just want to have fun, but the gravest letdown in Edwards’s film is that, most of the time, he fends off the chance to have fun himself. How he manages to insert a humongous creepy-crawly into the Strip, have it stomp around in the footsteps of Sinatra, and not derive a single decent visual gag from the experience is, to be honest, beyond me. According to this movie, the best reason to go to Nevada is to gather radioactive waste. Get a kick out of that.
It didn’t have to be this way. Four years ago, Edwards made his first feature, with the no-frills name of “Monsters.” There were frills on view, but much of it consisted of two young Americans journeying across the “Infected Zone”—a portion of Mexico where a probe, sent into space by NASA to collect samples of alien life, had crashed. The movie had its longueurs, but there was a scruffy plausibility to it, and, for anyone interested in the issue of border control, a whiff of acrid political unease. Though the monsters were few, they were hardly far between; you sensed them dangling at the edges of the tale, and, when they did arrive in plain sight, like tentacled towers, the awe was unfeigned. The climax, which unfolded by night at a deserted gas station, was so frightening, and also so beautiful, that it moved our heroes—and maybe some viewers—to the verge of tears, although others, lured by the title, may have been outraged that so little blood was shed.
The budget for “Monsters,” whose special effects were created by Edwards on his laptop, was eight hundred thousand dollars. “Godzilla,” his second feature, is estimated to have cost a hundred and sixty million dollars. There’s a moral here somewhere. The smaller movie was unhurried, but it knew where it was heading and set a clear course, whereas the blockbuster lopes and lollops around like a stoned stegosaurus, neither knowing nor caring where it needs to go next. The invading beings in “Monsters” were vast, yet their motions—and the meetings between them—bore the air of a delicate, writhing dance, which belied their aggression and made you wonder whether, despite the evidence, they were really here for a rampage. Was mankind not reaping what it had sown?
A trace of that worry lingers in “Godzilla,” and I was impressed by the film’s idea that the nuclear tests in the Pacific in the nineteen-fifties were not tests at all but attempts to destroy what lurked beneath the oceans. The emotional crux of the movie, however, after all the international to-and-fro, turns out to be the safety and togetherness of one middle-class family on the West Coast. The leading man of “Monsters,” gazing from the Zone toward a walled frontier, murmurs, “It’s different looking at America from the outside in,” but the new film never risks such an audacious thought. Instead, it takes refuge on the inside, and girds itself against the enemies from beyond.
To be fair, Edwards is not the first director to have his style cramped, rather than liberated, by being given a ton of money to disburse. Nor is he the first to be blessed with a wonderful cast—as well as Cranston, Binoche, Olsen, and Hawkins, we get Ken Watanabe and David Strathairn—and to contrive, by some miracle of mishandling, to waste every one of them. But who is at fault here? Who set up the grim routine whereby, whenever the drama flags, a child—sometimes an entirely random one, without a name, about whom we couldn’t give a damn—is tossed into peril and plucked free? That could be a desperate decision taken at the executive level, or simply a formula so commonplace, like the flea-bitten dialogue and the hokey delivery, that no one could be bothered to rethink it, still less to throw it away and start afresh. After all, the audience might complain.
Credit to Edwards, then, that, here and there, he grabs the opportunity to flourish. Give him an overhead camera, say, and he’s a happy man. There’s a lovely shot of Godzilla at sea, his ridged spine plowing through the waves, with a warship riding shotgun on each flank, and an even cooler moment when he dives under the hull of an aircraft carrier, crossing smoothly at ninety degrees. (This is a straight steal from “Jaws,” but there are worse films to plunder.) As for the bright-blue, electromagnetic projectile vomit that one of the monsters coughs up, by way of a party piece, well, that’s not something you see every day. Best of all, as the light thickens and dies over the Bay Area, toward the end, the movie does grind and smash its way into a kind of majesty—a shadow play, almost, with airborne troops dropping in free fall through the storm clouds, devil-red flares strapped to their heels, and Godzilla and his cronies going mano a mano in the murk. By now, the beasts are barely distinguishable: an abstract, infernal chaos of warty skin and swipes of vicious claw. That’s what the perfect “Godzilla” should be: no character development, no backstory, no winsome kids, just hints and glimpses of immeasurable power—enough to make you jump and twitch and leave you sweating for more. Luckily, that ideal already exists, and it requires only two minutes, not two hours, of your time. So, skip “Godzilla” the movie. Watch the trailer. ♦
