Crim at the Movies: Godzilla (2014)

♫ Oh no, there goes Tokyo! Go go Godzilla! ♫

Once upon the time, back in the early 2000’s, my younger self used to spend hours upon hours watching the old school Godzilla movies from the 1960s. Usually, there was other things that I could watch, stuff like Sonic X or Power Rangers. But there was something about Godzilla that fascinated me as a child. Of course, with me being so young at the time, when I watched that god-awful 1998 Hollywood attempt to created the King of Monsters that shall not be named, I thought it was cool. Now that I’m older, I’ve realised that it’s complete garbage. So when they announced a reboot, I got super excited yet paranoid about the new movie if it would live up to the hype, and when it finally came out, I went to the cinema just after my birthday to watch what Hollywood had done with good ol Godzilla a second time.

The film opens in the past. In 1954, the United States tests atomic bombs during Operation: Castle, detonating one when a large creature surfaces from the ocean. Fast-forward to 1999 and we have the head scientists of the top secret, Project Monarch, Ishiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) and Vivienne Graham (Sally Hawkins) investigate a colossal skeleton inside of a collapsed mine in the Philippines. It is there that two egg-shaped pods are discovered. One has broken open, leaving a trail to the sea while the other remains intact. Meanwhile as Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) and his wife Sandra (Juliette Binoche) head in for just another day at work for the at the Janjira nuclear power plant in Japan where they work as part of the safety team. Joe begins to feel concerned about a strangle electrical pulse that seems to be building to some sort of event, and on this particular morning, it reaches its crisis point. What would follow next would tear himself, and his family, apart.

Picking up in the present day, Joe's son Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is a bomb disarming specialist in the US military, and Joe is still grappling to make sense out of what happened in that Japanese plant was not his fault, and he felt that it was going to happen again. When Joe is arrested trying to get back to their family's old house inside what has been a quarantined zone since the incident, Ford travels to Japan to bail him out and is embarrassed by his father, still angry over everything that happened. Characters in this movie convinced that Joe is crazy, not knowing that the conspiracy theorist would be right.

So when a nuclear crisis causes the birth of a strange....bug....praying mantis....creature in Japan, it begins to set the stage for a major kaiju showdown. Naturally, I was excited for what this movie and it’s new fresh take of our favourite monster. Instead of revealing his hand right from the start and then trying to top himself, director Gareth Edwards makes you wait for the good stuff, playing games with you until the second half of the movie. And when our favourite monster finally appears, he just unleashes to the audience. We finally have a *good* modern monster movie ladies and gentlemen. Godzilla’s first appearance finally rises to his ridiculous height, a hauntingly beautiful wonder to the uncontrolled essence of nature and a symbolic reminder of nuclear weaponry/energy, and utters that ear-splitting roar that seeming shook the entire cinema. The audience I saw this with had completely went ballistic, and with good reason. I had the largest smile on my face when our ‘hero’ appeared and the crowd roared in excitement.

[video=youtube;v420wLLI5nY]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v420wLLI5nY#t=10[/video]​

The human characters serve as the ‘human scale’ in this movie – to the point where we’re led to believe that our existence and our affinity for love, great novels and the sense of adventure and wonder is just a meaningless struggle. You never truly experience the characters full potential. You could almost feel their emotions but it just slips away from your grasp. You wish to feel what they feel, you wish to see what they see and you wish to experience the wonders and horrors of this movie. It comes so close but it just misses its mark. But with that being said, the characters themselves were great and there isn't a single bad performance. Yet again, this is a monster movie. If there was a bit more human drama, then this had the potential to be an absolute masterpiece. But of course, this movie is not exactly about humanity. It’s about a giant reptile locked in mortal combat with two also giant insects and humanity tries to survive the onslaught that is left behind. Not only is it not ridiculous, it’s amazing.

Spoiler: “And just when you think that the fighting in this movie was not good enough, this happens....”

Holy Jumping Jesus on a pogostick, Batman. Is that atomic breath ?

Godzilla has its own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in California. (It’s true!). The King of Monsters is an icon of the industry that loved and revered by many, not to mention his pop culture status. I originally thought that this movie, like the Hollywood version before it, was going to be awful. Since the first monster movies appeared on our screens many moons ago, it usually was made up of various city-stomping fever in a man against nature vibe. But it’s only been recently that the style that is been taken on these movies have not only evolved, but has been inspiring to me as technology tends to evolve from time to time. From his humble and respectful updating of the original Toho monster, Godzilla himself is purely a monster, standing at 350ft tall (Which is enormous when put in comparison to the older movies, where he stood at only 50 ft tall).

The fight scenes went something like this​

The CGI in this film is just ridiculously good; I’ve never seen anything done as well as this is at the moment. The majority of the movie is focused on humanity and the struggles that make our species, but when a Kaiju appears onto the screen, it’s going down. Unfortunately, there is not enough of it. The movie builds from a slow start to an absolutely colossal climax. Depending on your tastes, it either worked or it didn’t. I liked how this movie was built through this technique, which is a page from Steven Spielberg’s book, but it’s unfortunately not for everyone if you wanted to see two hours of solid kaiju fighting. And for people and critics who complain there wasn't enough Godzilla in this movie, have they ever heard of ‘tension-building'?

A powerful monster film, Godzilla is a satisfying blockbuster made by a "small" director with a great eye for detail, perspective and performance. I can safely say that this absolutely destroys the 1998 version. The acting is very impressive, the CGI is absolutely brilliant and the soundtrack was also very good. If the acting of the human characters were to be any better, this would have received an almost perfect rating. Godzilla is well worth seeing, and with a future sequel already in the works, this could be the start of an awesome series.

After all, a King's arrival is never silent...​

This movie received Three and a Half out of Five Lionhearts