Godzilla
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Godzilla

The year is 1999, the place is Japan, and the worried face on the screen belongs to Bryan Cranston as a nuclear scientist too worried about the unnatural seismic readings he’s picking up to remember it’s his birthday. Turns out he’s right to be concerned: whatever’s causing the readings also causes a breach at the reactor where he and his scientist wife (Juliette Binoche) work, resulting in disaster, destruction and evacuations all around.
Jump ahead to today, where their son Ford (now played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is barely home from a tour of duty as a bomb disposal expert when his wife (Elizabeth Olsen) is taking a call from “the consulate”. Seems dear old dad has been arrested in Japan and it’s up to Ford to get him out. Dad is convinced that the evacuation zone is radiation-free and the military is covering up something bigger than just your typical nuclear accident. Ford eventually goes along with this seemingly crazy story, only to find that not only is his dad 100 per cent right, but the cover-up is bigger – literally – than anything he could have expected.
Godzilla constantly shows the monsters from human-level height but the focus remains firmly on those monsters: the occasional sharp line aside, the character development here is nil. If you thought going by the trailer that this Godzilla was going to be an examination of human fears in the face of a force we can barely understand let alone control, well… there’s a reason why director Gareth Edwards makes sure so many of the monster attacks are seen from the point of view of children; compared to these monsters, that’s all we are.
Just about everything you want to see in a Godzilla movie is here and done in exactly the right fashion. Edwards – whose only previous film was the low-budget giant monster film Monsters – constantly stresses the sheer inhuman size of these creatures, forever having them looming out of mist or smoke, often having characters unable to realise they’re seeing a leg or limb because they can’t grasp the scale of what they’re facing. The humans might get short shrift here – some of the collapsing buildings have more personality – but as an instrument of mass destruction you can cheer for, Godzilla delivers.
Written by Anthony Morris