Godzilla Isn't a Train Wreck, But It Sure Is Boring - Wired

Image courtesy Warner Bros.

Godzilla always has been a strange beast. Born from the ashes and trauma of post-WWII Japan, it was a slumbering monster awakened by nuclear tests—a threat to Japan but also the reaction to that threat, and a metaphor both for the threat of nuclear warfare and for national pain.

Over the years, however, Godzilla changed dramatically, transforming first from menace to savior, and later to mascot and ultimately cinematic legend. Now, after an extremely unfortunate first attempt in 1998, director Gareth Edwards finally has brought a remake of the classic Japanese film to American shores. And while it certainly is a respectful film, one deeply aware of the history of its franchise, it’s not a particularly interesting one.

The highlight of the film, surprising nobody, is Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston as Joe Brody, a scientist-turned-Godzilla-truther, along with the severely underutilized Juliette Binoche as his wife. If you’ve see the preview, you’ve heard Cranston’s grim, half-screamed warning, “It’s going to send us back to the Stone Age!” If only the rest of the film were so gripping. Alas, the focus quickly shifts from Joe to his son Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), the far less interesting Ken Doll deemed a handsomer and more suitable companion for our journey.

It’s a very American change as well; although the Japanese Godzilla films tended to be about the citizenry’s unified response to disaster, the U.S. version transposes the role of humanity into a far more singular and ubiquitously square-jawed savior: the great American hero, handsome Lt. Brody. Without spoiling too much of the story, he’s a Navy bomb specialist currently on leave, motivated to stop the monsters partly by sad events in his past. He also ends up trying to save his own endangered family (of course), which is made of Pretty Blonde Wife and Adorable Child, neither of whom are memorable enough for their names to matter. Although they ostensibly form the emotional core of the movie and Edwards spends a lot of time cutting away to them, they feel more like tropes than people, a familiar “motivation” spell invoked by yet another movie magician chanting the same words as countless people before him.

All of this might be forgivable if the movie delivered on the slam-bang monster battles everybody came to see. But despite some impressive CG that evokes a couple of genuinely pleasurable boo-ya moments, Godzilla too often feels determined to pull you away from interesting things in order to show you… less interesting things. At first, this seems like an attempt at coyness, the same sort of tactical modesty we saw in the previews where we glimpsed naught but an ankle or wrist of fair Godzilla.