Let me paint a clumsy metaphor. In this metaphor, Warner Bros. is Godzilla. Huge and powerful, it plunders the landscape with scant regard for those who are trampled underneath. Director Gareth Edwards, is a skyscraper directly in its path. Although this skyscraper may be admired for its design and integrity, it only takes a flick of Godzilla’s tail to reduce it to matchsticks. So it is that a promising indie director can be completely undone by the demands of the big budget. In short, for Gareth Edwards it’s a case of mo’ money, mo’ problems.
It’s easy to see why Edwards was the man chosen for the job of bringing the Japanese behemoth back to the big screen. His debut feature Monsters is a thing of beauty; a road movie set in a monster-ridden world that used a limited budget and home-made effects to craft an interesting, post-modern take on a well worn genre. I have no doubt that Edwards approached this new project with the same spirit but somewhere along the way, his vision became irreparably muddied by excess.
The story begins at a Japanese nuclear plant where American scientist Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) is worried about some mysterious underground rumblings that may threaten the stability of the plant. He’s right to be worried, as what appears to be a quake hits the plant, destroying the surrounding town. Jump forward fifteen years later and Brody is still in Japan, searching for answers about what really happened. Everyone thinks he’s a crackpot, not least his military son Ford (Aaron Taylor- Johnson) but as those rumblings start up again, something big and scaly is unleashed from beneath the earth.
The design of Godzilla himself is beautifully imagined – a pear-shaped beast with a back lined with jagged spines. He is frequently viewed through smoke and looks majestic. It’s a shame that the film spends relatively little time in his company, instead focusing on the other monsters of the piece – H.R. Giger rejects with spindly legs. When the monsters clash towards the end of the film, I at least expected spectacle on a par with Pacific Rim but most of the action is seen from a distance as we hang out with one or other of the boringly archetypal characters. Speaking of which, the characterisation is terrible. Everywhere you look there is a good actor playing a thankless role – Ken Wannatabe as Scowling Scientist, Sally Hawkins as his near mute sidekick, David Strathairn as Serious Army Guy, Elizabeth Olsen as Left Behind Love Interest. The leading man meanwhile seems to have had a charisma bypass specially for the occasion.
This lack of excitement left me deflated. As a fan of monster movies, I was genuinely excited by the prospect of what seemed like the dream cast and crew to bring the daddy of them all back to life. Unfortunately, aside from a couple of stand-out sequences, I found Godzilla to be a monstrous disappointment.