Director: Gareth Edwards
Writers: Max Borenstein and Dave Callaham
Cast: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Bryan Cranston, Elizabeth Olsen, David Strathairn, Sally Hawkins, Juliette Binoche and Ken Watanabe
Studio: Warner Brothers
“Godzilla” has been a long time coming. The 1998 version was a mistake that was only made because you had the Independence Day team behind it. When Roland Emmerich spent entire interviews talking about how he never cared for the franchise, that should’ve been the first tip-off. But, time passes and a second bite at the apple emerges. Let me tell you…it was one hell of a bite. Calling on everything from Paranoia Cinema to ecological Sci-Fi to classic Spielbergian tropes, this new Godzilla shows Asia that America has got this one by the balls.
The build to the reveal of the monster is going to make so many people crazy. You see the King of Monsters on TV screens, computer monitors and various points of flashback. It’s hard not to feel the shadow of Cloverfield hanging over the approach, but it pays off. Gareth Edwards takes the audience through the heartbreak of Bryan Cranston losing his wife to the initial MUTO attack and up to the present assault on these terrible Kaiju. The sad thing is how little Olsen gets to do with Johnson during the family scenes. They’re a young family and we’re meant to see parallels between how Aaron Taylor-Johnson acts in relation to Bryan Cranston. It just never comes through.
You’d have to be blind to ignore all of the callbacks to classic Spielberg work. The approach in the water, the use of sound and even the fact that we have a man named Brody trying desperately to get authorities to do the right thing. I’ll just give most of you guys a heads up. Not a lot is going to happen for you until the HALO drop. When you see it coming, that’s when you can collectively grab each other’s dicks and start making the theater uncomfortable for women and families seated next to you. I TOTALLY LOVE that Warner Brothers had the audacity to make you guys wait for half a movie before you get to see Godzilla in full. I wish that I saw this film in 3D, so I could see Thomas Tull’s middle fingers float out of the screen and poke some Ed Hardy wearing dudebro in the throat.
Kaiju (Giant Monsters) are the best. They represent the fantasy and thrill of the cinema, when we acknowledge that the world has a place for them. During the San Francisco sequence, when Godzilla takes care of that spider thing…I felt like I was 10 years old again. The sense of abandon when the US Military decides to use Godzilla as a walking WMD was just perfect. Embrace the crazy of the last three eras of the Japanese films and give it a reckless American budget. Together in our shared appreciation of killer monsters, the World will become a better place.
RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW!