Let’s see whether anyone remembers the lyrics of the Blue Oyster Cult song:
With a purposeful grimace and a terrible scowl, he pulls the spitting high-tension wires
down.
Then, later:
Oh, no! There goes Tokyo!
In the newest
Godzilla movie, opening today at theaters nationwide, the setting shifts.
Oh, no! There goes (San) Francisco!
The giant monster belches back to life in the film, which harks back to the more child-oriented
versions of the Japanese
kaiju (“monster”) movies of the 1950s.
In an increasingly radioactive world menaced by
radiation-eating beasts, the return of the almost- cuddly “King of the Monsters” might be the
least of our troubles.
Gareth Edwards, the visual-effects master turned director, impressed Hollywood with
Monsters, his 2010 low-budget horror flick. This time around — given a huge budget and
hours to tell the tale — he delivers a lumbering movie that is as bloated as the roly-poly version
of the Big Guy, whom we see in all his glory only late in the film.
The opening credits cleverly revisit the 1940s and ’50s atomic testing that awakened Godzilla
the first time. Edwards’ film then jumps to the late ’90s, where mysterious goings-on in mining
operations in the Philippines and near nuclear plants in Japan hint that something bad is
afoot.
Bryan Cranston is an American engineer working with his wife (Juliette Binoche) when a tragic
accident means that their boy, Ford, will grow up without a mom.
Years later, Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson of
Kick-Ass) is a Navy bomb-disposal expert, and Dad is still hanging around the ruins of
that Japanese reactor, a wild-eyed loon determined to get to the bottom of a cover-up.
Something is awakening.
Call it a MUTO (a massive unidentified terrestrial organism), and call in the military.
Dr. Ichiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) has been following developments all these years. He knows
what’s up. Cranston blubbers with emotion: “Something
killed my wife, and I have a
right to know!”
Taylor-Johnson doesn’t break a sweat as beasts try to keep him from making it home to his wife
(Elizabeth Olsen) in San Francisco.
Watanabe runs through a panoply of stricken looks as he sees the menace, understands it and
fails to convince the admiral in charge (David Strathairn) that the natural world needs order and
perhaps the giant lizard will restore it.
Sally Hawkins was wastefully cast to simply stand behind Watanabe as Dr. Serizawa makes another “
What fresh hell is this?” face.
The effects are decent: Warships are tossed like bathtub toys; trains are trashed; nuclear
missiles are munched.
The movie is never less than competent, but the fatigue of overfamiliarity curses the
franchise.
We’ve seen Japanese men in monster suits. We’ve seen digital
kaiju and gigantic robot- armored soldiers fighting them (Pacific Rim).
So in a tale this timeworn, in a film this void of humor and with only a few moments of humanity
and tension frittered away by the tedious repetition of the fights, anybody who has seen any
Godzilla film can be excused for posing the obvious question: What else do you have?
Article source: http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/life_and_entertainment/2014/05/16/monster-hash.html