Monsters triumph

  Watching the newest update of Godzilla I was reminded of the quandary that seemed to plague the writing team on last year's "Man Of Steel."  How does a writing team reinvigorate a premise that is essentially built on a one note character.   With Superman the characters flies and there's much more you can seemingly add.   The writers on Man Of Steel tried in vain to come up with a premise based on the one note that ultimately defined the Superman character.  The way I see it, Godzilla has the same issue.  The films hook is the beast itself.  So the question is, how do you keep the audience interested after they've gotten what they wanted.  Better yet,  how does the premise remain fresh and engaging if the main attraction is going to have limited screen time.  You could say that both Man Of Steel and Godzilla both suffer from a lack of quality time in the editing room.  At a running time of one hundred and thirty minutes, there's only so many times that you can watch a beast like Godzilla emerge from the shadows to wreak havoc on the mortals in his path.  Yet after all this, I give the Godzilla update a solid three star recommendation.  Sure the pacing bogs way down towards the end of the second act and into the last act, I'll give you that.  This being said, it's not because director Gareth Edwards has lost control of the premise.  In the directors chair, Edwards shows a steady hand and a rare discipline to let the story and the characters develop organically.  In Edwards' hands, the appearance of the monster serves as a snack of sorts.  And what of the monster and the cgi effects?  There are no quipping extras, just some great shots of terrified mortals running for their existence when Godzilla rumbles through town.  I like the less is more approach that director Garreth Edwards takes.  Edwards doesn't try to shock and awe the audience to death when it's time to up the eye candy factor.  We're passengers on the ride but we're not captives to the special effects.  Hello Michael Bay.
  Plot:  A nuclear scientist named Joe (Bryan Cranston)  suspects that the government knows more about a blast tremor than they're letting on.  While doing field research on the tremor, Joe's wife Sandra (Juliette Binoche)  is killed during yet another nuclear breach.  Feeling responsible for his wife's death, Joe drops off the radar; his life now consumed by the need to know why his wife died and what was behind the actual breech itself.  Fast forward 15 years.  Joe's quest for the truth gets him in trouble with the local authorities and this leads to a tense reunion with his son  Ford (Aaron Taylor Johnson.)  What begins as a quest to rescue his dad from his own guilt in China turns into an odyssey for survival as Joe and Ford finally encounter the secret Joe had unknowingly fought to expose; a long sought alpha male named Godzilla.  The same Godzilla that was presumed dead in a nuclear attack years before.  Not only did the monster survive, it grew stronger by feeding on the nuclear power that was used to try and destroy it.  I'll stop there, you can decipher the rest of the plot on your own.
  It's very rare in a popcorn like Godzilla flick to see a set of characters so fully developed.  The plot line involving the Ford character and his wife Elle (Elisabeth Olsen) feels genuine because both of the characters are designed by the screenplay as more than disposable set pieces.  I can't tell you how refreshing it is to see the Stenz character (David Straithairn) actually being written with more than a seek and destroy mentality.  Strathairn's character is a man under the gun who knows he has to contain the carnage being left in Godzilla's wake.  But the character is fully dimensional enough to realize that the plan he's set in motion to destroy Godzilla may lead to everyone's undoing.   As Stenz says at one point "if you have a back up plan, let's here it."

  Is Godzilla too long?  Yes.  Are there too many shots of smoky desolation while the creature stalks his prey unseen?  Yes.  And somehow, it works.  Garreth Edwards shows a steady hand as director.  His style is simple but confident and he has a knack for staying out of the way.  For once, it's nice to have a director of a summer blockbuster that actually respects the film IQ of the audience as a whole.