Godzilla (2014)
Directed by Gareth Edwards
Ford Brody, a Navy bomb expert, has just reunited with his family in San Francisco when he is forced to go to Japan to help his estranged father, Joe. Soon, both men are swept up in an escalating crisis when an ancient alpha predator arises from the sea to combat malevolent adversaries that threaten the survival of humanity. The creatures leave colossal destruction in their wake, as they make their way toward their final battleground: San Francisco.
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What critics say influenced Godzilla
Where the 1954 Ishiro Honda classic Godzilla (or Gojira as originally titled) - with its primitive yet innovative effects and miniature sets - gave inspiration to the likes of Steven Spielberg, it’s Spielberg classics Jurassic Park and Jaws that has fuelled the creative fire in Gareth Edwards as he tackled the mighty monster Godzilla and made it his own.
Helmed by a quixotic director who is undeniably and irrefutably the real deal, "Godzilla" has what it takes to stand the test of time in the same way much of Steven Spielberg's most popular entertainments (e.g., 1975's "Jaws," 1982's "E.T. - The Extra-Terrestrial," 1993's "Jurassic Park") have.In 1999, scientists Dr. Ichiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) and Dr. Vivienne Graham (Sally Hawkins) are called to a mine collapse in the Philippines where mysterious radiation pockets have been detected.
Clearly Edwards’ background as a VFX artist has paid off tenfold with Godzilla delivering a bounty of jaw-dropping moments smacking with a sense of wonderment and triumph that its arrival in theaters this weekend feels akin to what fans first experienced back when Jurassic Park stormed theaters over 20 years ago now.
The story begins in the Philippines in 1999 (the year after the last Godzilla , directed by Roland Emmerich–a dreadful picture to which this one makes no reference).
Godzilla returns in an installment that's certainly better than Roland Emmerich's disastrous 1998 effort, with the movie's relatively subdued vibe ensuring that the film, at the outset, stands in sharp contrast to most contemporary blockbusters (which are, with few exceptions, overblown and oppressively frenetic).
Godzilla (birth name: Gojira) was such a popular commodity that even the Yanks elected to take a crack at the big guy: The result was 1998's risible Godzilla vs. Ferris Bueller, with the oversized monster no match for Matthew Broderick's shtick.
“Godzilla” climaxes in a welter of expertly staged monster-on-monster action that honors the memory of Ishiro Honda’s 1954 classic Godzilla debut (and its numerous sequels) far more effectively than did Roland Emmerich’s jokey 1998 reboot.
The discovery of an underground lair nods toward Alien in more than just Giger-esque design; a repeated riff from Alexandre Desplat's score seems to quote Jerry Goldsmith, just as the heavily trailered strains of Ligeti later echo the Star Gate sequence from 2001 .
These are enormous insectoid reptiles whose razory, goo-dripping teeth strongly recall the titular monstrosity of the Alien movies.
He’s not just reworking Godzilla here; there are echoes of the Alien movies, the less-beloved Gamera series, and pretty much every big Spielberg movie (there’s an abundance of images of people looking past the camera at the Rapidly Approaching Something).
That’s the Muto (for Massive Unidentifiable Terrestrial Organism), a flying insect that snacks on radioactivity, looks like a spawn of H.R. Giger’s creature from Alien — in other words, like most sci-fi creature villains since that 1979 classic — and has an appetite for destruction.
To his credit, Edwards brings on some new creatures — the two MUTOs look like crosses between the "Alien" monster and a cricket.
From the aerial shot showing the title character swimming beneath a ship (to showcase his enormous size, something also done in "Jaws") to the government cover-up ("Close Encounters") and far too many moments lifted from "Jurassic Park" (even including the head-down deafening roar of the T-Rex that G-zilla seems to be imitating here), there are too many moments that will likely remind savvy viewers (or even those simply with good memories) of those far better pics.
It’s a risky approach, reminiscent of the one Steven Spielberg took in “Jaws,” which allows for not just tension but context.
Where the 1954 Ishiro Honda classic Godzilla (or Gojira as originally titled) - with its primitive yet innovative effects and miniature sets - gave inspiration to the likes of Steven Spielberg, it’s Spielberg classics Jurassic Park and Jaws that has fuelled the creative fire in Gareth Edwards as he tackled the mighty monster Godzilla and made it his own.
Helmed by a quixotic director who is undeniably and irrefutably the real deal, "Godzilla" has what it takes to stand the test of time in the same way much of Steven Spielberg's most popular entertainments (e.g., 1975's "Jaws," 1982's "E.T. - The Extra-Terrestrial," 1993's "Jurassic Park") have.In 1999, scientists Dr. Ichiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) and Dr. Vivienne Graham (Sally Hawkins) are called to a mine collapse in the Philippines where mysterious radiation pockets have been detected.
The movie borrows from Steven Spielberg's " Jaws ," " Close Encounters of the Third Kind " and " War of the Worlds ," as well as from earlier popcorn classics that shaped Spielberg.
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The movie borrows from Steven Spielberg's " Jaws ," " Close Encounters of the Third Kind " and " War of the Worlds ," as well as from earlier popcorn classics that shaped Spielberg.
Where the 1998 Godzilla borrowed heavily (and clumsily) from Jurassic Park , particularly in its middle act, Edwards occasionally looks back to the Spielberg of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind , with a particular fondness for slow camera movements that reveal first a little, then a lot of an awe-inspiring spectacle.
The opening sections, featuring an archaeological dig in the Philippines and the coverup of the events surrounding an earthquake in Japan, owe a debt to Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Bryan Cranston sinks his teeth into what I’m calling the Richard Dreyfuss Close Encounters of the Third Kind role — the guy who knows something big and ominous is coming to the planet, and yet no one will listen to him.
Instead of revealing his hand right from the start and then trying to top himself a la Transformers or Pacific Rim, Edwards makes you wait for the good stuff, teasing you along the way with crumbs but keeping his main attraction offscreen until the second half (Spielberg is an obvious influence here, specifically Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind).
Cranston’s slightly crazed, obsessed, gloriously overacting scientist dad rings of Richard Dreyfuss’s mashed potato sculpting kook in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
His giddy inventiveness rivals the stark grandiosity of 2008's " Cloverfield " while offering up exceptionally photorealistic creature designs that nonetheless manage to pay loving homage to the Japanese features of generations' past.
But rather than harken back to the aesthetic of Godzilla’s traditional adversaries—Rodan, Mothra, etc.—the MUTOs are exactly the kind of oddly-jointed grotesqueries that have been in such vogue more recently, from Starship Troopers to Cloverfield to Pacific Rim.
Gareth Edwards' 2014 "Godzilla" takes its cues from that great sequence, and from the 1954 original's Hiroshima-and-Nagasaki inspired tracking shot past a row of bloodied hospital patients, and the camcordered immediacy of " Cloverfield ," and the gas station sequence in Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds," and the Do Lung Bridge sequence of " Apocalypse Now ," in which American soldiers' enemies were portrayed as faraway shadows, shooting flares and yelling obscenities.
And the whole monster film from the helpless human perspective was already done in far more riveting fashion with the exhilarating Cloverfield .
Like Cloverfield or Pacific Rim — both Godzilla movies that happened to not actually star Godzilla, both movies this one is obligated to one-up creatively if not commercially — it tries to logically extrapolate how our first contact with Big G might play out if it happened today.
These nuke-eaters resemble insect versions of the “Cloverfield” creature, with alien-like heads and eyes like LED strips running around their faces.
The second half of “Godzilla’’ is definitely more fun than the first part of a film I enjoyed overall, if less than last year’s similar dip into giant monster blockbusterdom, “Pacific Rim.”
The picture becomes a grimier, humorless version of last summer's "Pacific Rim" at that point, when the roaring, stomping and clashing beasts at skyscraper heights demolish the people on the ground in both a literal and a figurative sense.
In “Godzilla” (2014), Dr. Ichiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe), a more solemn version of Charlie Day’s kaiju fanboy in last year’s “Pacific Rim,” gives the movie’s director, Gareth Edwards, the best advice he could get.
The new-school Godzilla is a majestic, massive beast with bulk and power in every step; using motion-capture and good judgment, Edwards and his effects team make a film that’s quantum leaps above and beyond the silly, Power-Rangers-on-steroids shallowness of the hard-to-endure “Pacific Rim.”
Like Kevin McCarthy in the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which matched Gojira as a vibrant Cold War parable in sci-fi garb, he is the lone sane man in a world myopic to the truth; his research got him a serious prison term.
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Similarly idiomatic is a Clive Barker-style affection for the creatures; a sequence in which two monstrous mantis-like "mutos" (escapees from Starship Troopers ?) rub heads amid the carnage reminds us of the bittersweet denouement of Monsters , the title of which was as pointedly ironic as that of Tod Browning's Freaks .
But rather than harken back to the aesthetic of Godzilla’s traditional adversaries—Rodan, Mothra, etc.—the MUTOs are exactly the kind of oddly-jointed grotesqueries that have been in such vogue more recently, from Starship Troopers to Cloverfield to Pacific Rim.
After establishing itself promisingly as a kind of Spielberg tribute flick, replete with Cranston (whose name, Dr. Brody, is snatched from the jaws of Jaws) doing the nutty-professor version of Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters and lots of awe-struck staring into windy huge holes in the ground, Godzilla morphs into James Cameron-style martial porn – without even having the decency to pause and be as knowingly silly as Starship Troopers or Pacific Rim for a few minutes along the way.
A flapping super-mantis with a can-opener head, the MUTO resembles one of the bugs from Starship Troopers grown colossal, and its introduction lets Edwards fire up the catastrophic-property-destruction portion of the film while keeping the guest of honor off-camera for a while longer.
The movie borrows from Steven Spielberg's " Jaws ," " Close Encounters of the Third Kind " and " War of the Worlds ," as well as from earlier popcorn classics that shaped Spielberg.
But he has little knack for emotionally cohesive storytelling, and seems unable to decide whether he's making a militaristic techno-thriller or a fairytale nightmare in the vein of Spielberg's War of the Worlds.
Godzilla borrows the delayed gratification of Jaws, the towering menace of War Of The Worlds, and a commingling of fear and awe familiar to any Jurassic Park fan.
It's instructive to compare Godzilla with the far superior War of the Worlds (2005).