“Out of the depths, 30 storeys high…”
For those of us of a certain vintage, our first encounter with Godzilla will have been with the 1980s cartoon series, the theme tune from which those lyrics are from. In director Gareth Edwards‘ modern blockbusting (and believe me, a lot of blocks are busted) take on the daddy of all monsters, the titular beast is probably a bit more than 30 storeys high.
In fact, he’s a towering 355 feet tall, and as the production notes for the film describe him, a “bipedal, amphibious, radioactive leviathan with armoured dorsal fins spiking menacingly all the way down to his long, sweeping tail.” Imagine the spawn of a Tyrannosaurus, a stegosaurus and a dragon and you get the idea. Certainly, it’s a creature the creators of the original 1954 Japanese movie would approve of. But enough of the beast, what of the story?
Edwards has ensured the personal stories are as important as the action in his film, centring on the father-son relationship between Bryan Cranston‘s nuclear engineer and Aaron Taylor-Johnson‘s bomb disposal expert soldier. Cranston and his family are eye witnesses to the first ‘monster event’ when a Japanese nuclear plant and nearby city are ruined.
Hushed up as a nuclear accident, the threat seems to have passed but it’s just the beginning of a wave of attacks by a number of beasts, in the grand tradition of Godzilla movies. Amid all the monster mayhem, military hardware and city levelling, Edwards keeps the human interest high as we switch from Taylor-Johnson trying to find his wife and son in a besieged San Francisco, to Ken Watanabe’s scientist who’s been tracking the creatures for years, to David Strathairn’s US fleet commander trying to come up with a plan to destroy the beasts before they destroy mankind.
As with his brilliant, low budget debut Monsters, Edwards gets exactly the right balance between the epic and the intimate in Godzilla. When it’s spectacular, it’s jaw-droppingly so, but the human stories are what make it all cohere. Clearly, this film is a treat for monster movie-lovers, which Edwards obviously is.
At an interview after a special screening of Monsters, Edwards declared his love for Alien and Jaws and fellow fans will appreciate the nods to those films in this movie (in the monster’s nest, Godzilla swimming under an aircraft carrier). There are nice touches like that throughout, little details that take you back to the human scale of things after a skyscraper has been smashed to smithereens.
Gripping, exciting, eye-poppingly epic and emotionally engaging too, Godzilla is a genuinely thrilling blockbuster, a monster achievement in itself.
