It seems odd to use words like ‘restraint’ and ‘moderation’
on a movie whose budget for craft services probably equals my yearly earnings
five times over. But Gareth Edwards has done just that with Godzilla,
making a movie so effective at generating awe in the presence of its
skyscraper-toppling monsters that it manages to overcome a near-terminal dearth
of personality from its lead performer. Modern blockbuster film making and its
preponderance of computer-generated imagery is rightly lauded for its ability
to ‘show us anything,’ but most of the films that populate the megaplexes
during the summer months seem content to rest on their laurels for that very
same reason. When you’re capable of showing us anything, thanks to the
technical expertise of the major FX studios, there
isn’t a lot of incentive to think cinematically, instead settling for sweeping
panoramas that while technically impressive, have the emotional sweep of a
video game-cut scene.
What Gareth Edwards does so impressively in Godzilla
is give us a sure sense of scale when dealing with such epic imagery. His
camera strains to take in these creatures throughout the early stages of the
picture, often situated from the POV of its characters, allowing us only
fleeting glimpses of a tail or foot (in one impressive occasion, a
debris-shrouded silhouette). Only by films end, when Godzilla has reached the
shores of San Francisco on a direct collision with the Massive Unidentified
Terrestrial Organism (MUTO) that we humans unknowingly incubated, do we finally
broaden the frame and allow us to take in the majestic scope of their
knock-down, drag-out. In an era of escalating action scenes, it’s astonishing that
a film would take its time and build anticipation for its main conflict. So
much so, in fact, that I wonder how audiences trained to receive action beats
with the dependability of a train schedule will react to a slow burn with such
a long fuse.
Edwards smartly populated the fringes of his picture with
celebrated performers capable of keying an emotional investment from the
audience with even the thinnest of motivations and some liberally sprinkled
generic dialogue. Bryan Cranston and Juliette Binoche as a married couple, in
particular, set the table here. A tragedy at the nuclear facility they work for
is the inciting action for which the rest of the film follows. This makes it
even more of a shame that lead actor Aaron Taylor-Johnson comes across so flat
through the picture as the military brat son of Cranston and Binoche.
Taylor-Johnson’s work previously on film suggests an actor capable of a wide
array of emotions (Kick-Ass and Anna Karenina are both good examples
of this) so the fact that he suffers from Hunnamitis (or early stage Chris
O’Donnell Syndrome) here should be chalked up to the material and not the
actor. Elizabeth Olsen, another talented performer, is given nearly nothing to
work with as his wife, suggesting a movie working in the proud Toho tradition
of making you care more deeply about the monsters than the people.
So while that human element is lacking, what Edwards has
managed in an era of wanton cinematic stimulation with this new Godzilla
is well worth celebrating all the way through from measured beginning to
triumphant end. What struck me most as the end credits rolled, was just how
much true-to-its-source material this Godzilla hews, an old-school kaiju
film that prizes the connection of a giant tail to an insectoid abdomen over
that between two characters, albeit one with a mega-budget and a spectacular
eye for composition. This is old school
crowd-pleasing entertainment that has much more in common with Jaws
than Transformers,
an achievement as awe-inspiring as the titular character himself.
