Godzilla

The eighth one

Spoilers

After sixteen years since his last big screen outing (or ten if you've seen the Japanese ones) the undisputed king of monsters is back to smash up iconic landmarks and have your inner nine year old squeal with glee. Dinosaurs are cool but nuclear dinosaurs top everything.

The premise of the film basically follows the life of Ford Brody (Aaron Taylor-Johnson. Kick ass) an explosive ordnance disposal technician and his family in two points of time. It initially begins in Japan where Ford's father Joe (Bryan 'Heisenberg' Cranston) an overworked nuclear power plant supervisor sends his wife and a team to look at the damages to the plants core. Disaster arrives on cue and after a huge explosion and the plant being quarantined we hurtle forward fifteen years to see Ford happy with a wife and son. All seems to being going well until he gets a call from Japan to go bail his now estranged father out of prison. The years have not been kind to Joe and his son only see's him getting lost in his conspiracy theories. You know whats bound to happen from here anyway, Joe's not so crazy and it gets a bit late to listen to him. There is one man who seems to have an almost prophetic knowledge of the giant monsters however, Ken Watanabe (Inception) plays Dr Serizawa (possibly an Easter egg from the nineteen fifty four movie) a scientist who works with Monarch, an organisation tracking a number of giant monsters for decades.

Despite a somewhat decent cast the human side of the monster story lacks tremendously, Taylor-Johnson and his on screen wife Elizabeth Olsen are almost a paint by numbers family and it will make you wince in horror. Hopefully it's just what they had to work with that is the problem and not their chemistry, otherwise Avengers 2: Age Of Ultron is going to have it's weak link. Aside from this the usually hard hitting actors are woefully underused, Cranston is as always a pleasure to watch and his trauma and outright frustration with shady government cover ups are one of the films highlights, and yet he's out of the film before the halfway mark. Watanabe also begins the film as a believable and mysterious character who devolves into a cliched mannequin who's sole function is to utter cryptic one liners and spout exposition no ordinary human would be able to arrive at, he unintentionally provides a few laughs however so I guess he has that going for him?

In this aspect it remains faithful to the Toho Studios films. Faithful in that around 85% of the film is comprised of lackluster human stories you sit through in anticipation for the real star of the movie. The build up is worth it and even after giving up a lot of screen time to the films villains (Giant monsters this time! Not the army for once.) Gojira's eventual debut is monumental, hats off to the art department because he looks incredible, and this version of the roar is both heroic and terrifying. He commands a presence and the sluggish but jarring shots he throws at the rival monsters are something you feel the force of, also his atomic breath is Awesome.

You weren't expecting an Oscar winner were you?
With all its faults and a tendency to drag every now and again Godzilla is a welcome return to the big screen and the lack of Matthew Broderick can only improve a movie. Look forward to the sequel, here's hoping for an appearance of this young lady.