Godzilla does an incredible job of bringing back the classic monster, but the film also makes its characters feel irrelevant, except in the sense that they need to get out of the way.
Legendary Pictures/Warner Bros.
It's not until nearly the end of Godzilla, the Gareth Edwards-directed update of the classic Toho monster franchise, that one of the giant creatures that's been unleashed on the planet pays direct attention to one of the human characters. It's a hair-raising moment, the kaiju equivalent of that scene in Rear Window where the neighbor Jimmy Stewart's been peeping on suddenly looks back at him. But until that point, for all the destruction they've unleashed and all the delicious nuclear power they've sought to consume, the monsters have seemed largely indifferent to the individual people scrambling like ants to get out of their way. And it's hard to blame them, because in Godzilla, mankind feels like a grudging distraction from all the awesome large scale action going on.
Godzilla's monsters are terrific — lumbering and massive with a sense of incredible heft to them, despite being CGI creations. And the movie understands that the tease is part of the pleasure. So when the antagonists, vaguely insectile creations called Mutos (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms), then Godzilla itself, first appear, they do so in pieces — limbs emerging from underground, spines like a mini-mountain range arising from the ocean. Godzilla's creatures feel huge, because the film provides constant reminders of their scale, of how flimsy things like buildings and bridges are when in their path. The screenplay, co-written by Max Borenstein (of the upcoming Seventh Son) and Dave Callaham, also deliberately sets the monsters on a path that has little to do with humanity except in the sense that it needs to get out of their way. People have rarely felt so unnecessary in a film that spends an unfortunate amount of time on them.
Legendary Pictures/Warner Bros.
Disaster movies need characters to invest in — otherwise the disaster has no impact. But Godzilla feels particularly halfhearted about the people it's using as narrative scaffolding. The film's got a great and notably hip cast — Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen, Bryan Cranston, Ken Watanabe, Sally Hawkins, and David Strathairn — who feel like they've been placed on screen only to provide different points of view on the monsters.
As protagonist and bomb disposal technician Ford, Taylor-Johnson jumps through a series of increasingly improbable plot hoops to stay in the path of the creatures, while his wife Elle (Olsen) ends up on the ground during a battle mainly so that she can make a Spielberg–style face of awe and terror, and their son is shamelessly placed in danger in a way that makes little sense when giant monsters are things you can see coming from miles away. Strathairn plays a stock military blowhard while Hawkins and Watanabe deliver exposition and look unhappy.
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