Review Tuesday: GODZILLA (2014)

I was born in 1971 and was blessed with an amazing childhood that included many MONSTER WEEKs starring GODZILLA on television after school. I recall the very first Godzilla movie wasn't a joke, but was horrifying. After that Godzilla movies could go any way. Usually some rogue monster or some other enemy of mankind would dare show it's evil face in Tokyo or Monster Island and Godzilla would teach it a stern lesson all the way into the grave. Over the years the movies took childish tones with the king of monsters doing victory dances, flying through the air under the propulsion of his atomic flame breath, and even the introduction of his offspring which looked like a pile of shit and no one knew who the mom was. Even though American audiences weren't aware of it, the Japanese kept putting out monster movies starring Godzilla for years and they kept pushing up the seriousness and brutality of the films. Meanwhile, Hollywood pushed out a Godzilla movie starring Matthew Broderick that was more like a Jurassic Park movie that soured audiences for years to come. It took a movie starring (I use the term starring loosely) Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad dad) to change around the perceptions.

GODZILLA (2014)

After an ancient monster menace was unwittingly unleashed on the world, would Godzilla be the savior or destroyer of mankind?

I must say the shroud of secrecy around this movie was amazing. I have been watching trailers for this flick thinking that Godzilla was going to come out of the sea and Bryan Cranston was going to lead the charge against the king of the monsters. 

I couldn't be more wrong. 

Joe Brody (played by Bryan Cranston) is a nuclear power engineer who loses his home and wife after what seems to be a natural disaster in Japan. He spends the next 15 years of his life trying to learn the truth behind what happened that terrible day. He's barely in half of the movie as he checks out as he learns that there was a massive cover up. The movie is really about Joe's some Ford. He's a child when the initial accident occurs, fast forward 15 years he's US Army Bomb Specialst with a wife and child in California. He had to get his father out of a Japanese prison for snooping around where he didn't belong, which ended up putting them in the middle of the boiling pot of trouble about to erupt. 

That's the big unveil: the natural disaster at the nuclear power plant 15 years earlier wasn't Godzilla but some other monster that was hatched in the Philippines that came looking for radiation. 

It appears that these creatures (Godzilla included) came from a time in world history when the planet was far more radioactive than it is now. As a result most creatures from that time period hid the the depths of the ocean where they can still enjoy the radiation from the Earth's core. However, these new creatures were born on the surface in modern times. The only radiation they can find are from man-made nuclear power and arms. Those same nuclear arms could possibly kill the monsters. 

Possibly.

When the balance of nature becomes skewed, nature figures out a way to balance things. Godzilla detected the activity on the surface and came back to set things right with the other monsters, called MUTOs.

There was apparently a mate to the MUTO in Japan in the USA, and the two met up in San Francisco. That set the stage for a monster showdown. 

The first half of the movie is all set up, and the next half is all the turmoil within the Brody family, the military, the population of the West Coast and, of course, the monsters. The two MUTOs are trying to nest and that would mean unleashing their destructive spawn into a modern world likely not capable of dealing with such a menace. They are trying to ward of Godzilla and to buy time for the eggs to hatch. The battles between the monsters in that effort were better than any of the classic Godzilla movies in memory.  It's almost amusing watching the military attempt to plan to destroy the monsters. If we do this they will do that. They are MONSTERS. There's no telling what they will do and how they'd do it. Trying to lure the MUTOs with a nuke just seemed like a silly idea from the start. Were they able to successfully predict any of the monsters' moves before that? What made them think they could? Who has studied ancient monster logic?

The movie is over two hours long. I found it entertaining and fun to watch. It had that old cheesy monster movie feel at points, while keeping it deadly serious at the same time. The story was written well enough that you couldn't predict what was going to happen next. Lots of fun! Worth watching!

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