Godzilla movie review & film summary (2014)

Gareth Edwards' 2014 "Godzilla," a brilliant reimagining of an old story, takes its cues from that great scene, and from the 1954 original's Hiroshima-and-Nagasaki inspired tracking shot past a row of bloodied hospital patients, and the camcordered immediacy of "Cloverfield," and the gas station sequence in Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds," and the Do Lung Bridge sequence of "Apocalypse Now," in which American soldiers' enemies are distant silhouettes, shooting flares and shouting obscenities. These moments are all about perspective and point-of-view—not just what you're seeing but how much, and under what circumstances. 

"Godzilla" is about that, too. It's less interested in a giant monster's rampage than in what it might feel like to be a human watching it from close up, or far away, or on a television set. It is not about Godzilla or the beasts that he fights. Like the 1954 original, it's a combination epic horror film and parable of nature in revolt, filled with odd ellipses and surprising but appropriate storytelling choices, such as a monster duel that plays out mainly on CNN. 

"Godzilla" doesn't just show. It unveils. It builds sequences gradually, withholding important information until the end of a scene or sequence. In the spirit of the first few Toho pictures, every incarnation of "King Kong," Steven Spielberg's sci-fi and suspense pictures, and the original "Alien,"  the film reveals its beasts striptease-style, partly obscuring them with catwalks, cranes, window frames, TV monitors, and the like, and illuminating body parts with spotlights or flashlight beams: a leg here, a proboscis there. Edwards’s style is assured enough to toss off shots that lesser films would showcase on their posters. A newborn creature's progress from a subterranean egg chamber to the ocean is conveyed in a slow tilt-up that reveals a zigzag ditch joining mountains to sea. An impending fight between nuke-eating, electrically charged kaiju is foretold by a rolling blackout that turns a city's lights out one neighborhood at a time. Commandos on a city rooftop fire flares into darkness; the camera traces their arcs through smoky blackness until the flames illuminate Godzilla's torso, framed from neck to solar plexus. In these moments and others, Edwards contrasts the smallness of the humans against the hugeness of the beasts. 

This "Godzilla" is a mural movie, and it's a good idea to remember that as you watch it. To appreciate  what it's doing, you have to take a step back. The movie has a likable international cast, including Bryan Cranston and Juliette Binoche as married nuclear physicists, Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins as scientists who've devoted their lives to studying ancient monsters and searching for Godzilla; Aaron Taylor-Johnson as their son, a war veteran and explosives technician;  Elizabeth Olsen as his wife, a nurse; and David Strathairn as an admiral. All the characters have simple goals and strong emotions, and they never feel awkwardly shoehorned in, as humans in kaiju flicks often do. But the film still sees them as representatives of an endangered species rather than complex individuals. Don't get attached to any of them. They are deployed in a metaphorical or dreamlike capacity, like the kaiju. For all their sincere distress, they're about as deep as characters in a Toho movie. None have the melodramatic spark you'll find in last summer's robots-vs.-kaiju action thriller "Pacific Rim," a grandly silly adventure so invested in its characters that it spawned a dramaturgical test.