There’s something about classic monster movies that I like. Can’t really place it, to be honest. They aren’t particularly scary (just a dude in a large rubber suit, frequently…), but for people at the time these movies were popular 60+ years ago, they were probably terrifying. Godzilla is perhaps the most enduring of franchises, undergoing multiple evolutions and reinventions over the decades, for better or for worse.
This new interpretation of the franchise was set up to bring us into the summer’s blockbuster season: big cast, big effects, big destruction, the works. It does a pretty good job of playing off the original movies, where nuclear testing in the South Pacific leads toward ancient monsters waking up from a slumber lasting millenia. Brian Cranston stars as a scientist running a nuclear power plant in Japan back in 1999, one that is summarily destroyed when some “thing” causes a melt down. He spends the intervening years between then and now working on his conspiracy theory of what was responsible. His son, a survivor of the catastrophe, doesn’t believe him, but soon learns the truth as he and the rest of the military chase the beast(s) across the Pacific to San Francisco. As the previews indicate, Godzilla is not the only monster the movie will deal with, and when they finally fight near the end of the film, the results are pretty spectacular.
Unfortunately, the focus of the film is on the humans and how they deal with the monsters. The director, Gareth Edwards, is a relative newcomer, yet did a good job “teasing” the reveal of Godzilla until the latter portion of the film. Though I appreciate that aspect of the movie, it also meant that it took a long time before we really saw Godzilla himself. We saw the other monster, but not the one headlining the movie. Once he finally showed up, we got to see monster-on-monster fighting that all too rarily shows up in major motion pictures (aside from the mostly great Pacific Rim last year).
In the end, I enjoyed the movie, but felt it dragged quite a bit in the middle. It started off pretty good and really “stuck the landing” by the end, yet the middle tried going the route of “character drama” without having any truly compelling characters to care about. They weren’t bad, per se: I just didn’t care. So, it’s a good rental, for sure. I’m not mad I spent money on it in theaters (though I thought the 3D was largely unnecessary…), but I could understand waiting a bit to see it. Worth seeing, but not worth going out of your way.