Last night I saw Gareth Edwards' film Godzilla at Event Cinemas on George Street, here in Sydney. I saw it in one of their big-screen VMax sessions in 2D.
I can recommend this movie to anyone who enjoys spectacle on the big screen. I can't recommend this movie to anyone who needs solid characterisation and story through-lines in order to make spectacle worth their while. Fortunately for me, I don't find it too hard to accept thin characterisation and elided plot for the sake of the action.
(Sidebar: this is actually why I disliked Michael Bay's Transformers film from 2007. Compared to Godzilla, the scenes with regular people going about their business invest too much time and attention in what are, in the end, shallow and uninteresting characters. The irony is that Gojira and the other creatures in this film, despite having no dialogue, come off much better than the Transformers who are able to speak and have personalities in their own film, probably because the monsters don't have to interact with the human characters on a personal level.)
Reviewers have remarked upon the fact that Godzilla shows a surprising amount of restraint in its approach to the title character and the other creatures. Once everything gets going, it's still not a zero-to-60 "now the monsters are fighting" situation. Each fight scene is cleverly foreshortened to build anticipation for the final conflict, which doesn't disappoint in any way.
The film also properly places the monsters in the context of the tiny humans scrambling around their feet. The most powerful shots of the creatures are always from "our" point of view, lending some truth to a claim made early in the film that Gojira is effectively a god.
As I said earlier, however, these human characters aren't particularly compelling. It's true that Ken Watanabe's Dr. Serizawa is the best of the lot, and Bryan Cranston does what he can as Joe Brody, but Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Joe's son Ford and Elizabeth Olsen as Ford's wife Elle are really just there because someone has to be. Even Ford's promise to get back to San Francisco to be with Elle and their son Sam is really just a pro-forma element out of any disaster-movie playbook. Sally Hawkins as Dr Graham doesn't get much to do, but there are some interesting hints at the nature of her professional and educational relationship with her sensei Serizawa that I, at least, perked up at a little bit.
In the end, though, you go to see Godzilla for monsters fighting, and this film delivers. It's also efficiently constructed and only a few minutes longer than 2 hours, which goes some way to showing the restraint I mentioned earlier. For comparison, the 1998 American Godzilla directed by Roland Emmerich was 142 minutes long.
See it for yourself, and, of course, see it on the biggest screen possible.
