Godzilla

The king of the monsters is back! In a movie that makes us all but forget 1998's Godzilla, This year's Godzilla returns the king back to his true form, a terrifying, massive beast that lives to hunt out other monsters and dominate them, all while us puny humans have no other choice but to watch in horror, shock, and awe.

Puny humans.

This reboot of Godzilla centers around a family and their history with the famed gigantic monsters. The story starts with a Godzilla sighting in the 1950's, where the government uses atomic bomb testing as a cover up for trying to destroy the king of the monsters. Fast forward to 1999, Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston), a nuclear engineer and supervisor of a Japanese power plant. An unexplained earth tremor (which he does not believe to be a mere earthquake) causes the accidental death of his wife who also works in the power plant. 15 years later, the story follows Joe's grown up son, Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his family in San Francisco. Ford flies to Japan after getting word that Joe has been arrested for trespassing onto the old power plant facility (which is supposed to still be irradiated). After bailing Joe out of jail, Ford is convinced to trespass again with his dad in order to recover information from their old house that would help them to prove that the tremor that claimed Joe's wife (Ford's mother) was covered up as a natural phenomenon, but is actually something else. Well not only is Joe right, but they discover from the scientist heading up the cover up op that the tremor 15 years ago came from a then young creature, which they classify as a MUTO (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism). The creature which feeds off of nuclear energy was drawn the power plant and has been lying dormant, feeding off of the plant for the past 15 years, until now. The MUTO wakes and after putting a serious hurt on the research team headed by Dr. Ishiro Serizawa (Ken Wantanabe), flies off. The second act of the film largely revolves around Serizawa and Ford (who is a US navy bomb disposal officer) chasing after Godzilla and the MUTO trying to neutralize the situation, with mostly futile efforts, while Ford tries to make it home to his own wife and son. 

"Now can we see a Godzilla fight?"

The story is a slow burn, like a soccer game where the anticipation builds up for 90 minutes and everyone waits for just one goal at the end. But the story does a great job of explaining the existence and the scientific reasoning behind Godzilla and the MUTOs. But like I said, by the end of the second act, you still will not have seen any major action between Godzilla and the MUTOs, and furthermore, you still will not have seen all of Godzilla in one frame. The movie really stretches out the suspense before finally revealing what Godzilla looks like and how massive he really is the final act. And he is massive, and the final act in my opinion, makes all the build-up worthwhile. 

Granted Bryan Cranston may be considered bigger than Godzilla by "Breaking Bad" apologists, even his sometimes overacted scenes don't steal away from Godzilla. And Kick-Ass hero Aaron Taylor-Johnson does not hold up nearly enough intensity to match up to Cranston, but by the third act, it's a good thing (and I wonder if it's not by design, which would be giving Taylor-Johnson the benefit of the doubt) because Godzilla should be the main star, and boy is he. I won't give away too much, but he kicks so much MUTO backside, we were all cheering at the end of the final fight hailing him as truly the king of the monsters. 

The thing I loved the most about Godzilla was that he really was like a natural phenomenon. He is just so massive in scale and power that we are like ants. He doesn't even want to bother with us because it's probably such a bother like it would be if we were to search out a line of ants to step on. So most of the movie he just dodges as many people on his main goal of battling against MUTOs. If people are killed in the chaos of battle, it's collateral damage, nothing personal. I think it's a valuable lesson to learn for us humans that are often quite arrogant in the face of nature. We think with our brains and our science that we are on the top of the food chain, but nature humbles us every day, some how and some way teaching us that we are not the masters of the universe that we think we are. Most of the time, We are not in control. By the end of the movie, everyone who was so determined to be involved in some way had no choice but to get out of the way and watch. 

This movie really saw Godzilla return to form. If you don't mind a movie that builds its anticipation and suspense slowly and intentionally for some awesome pay off in the end, then I highly recommend it to you. Great movie!

Blessings~!