Godzilla

The fiance and I tend to be "wait until we can rent it" people when it comes to seeing new movies. I mean, really, who likes leaving the house? We really only make the exception when it comes to summer blockbusters. Sure, we have a nice big TV at home, but we don't have an awesome sound system to go along with it, and there isn't much that can compare to seeing Godzilla tear through San Francisco on a big screen with some powerful surround sound to back it up. Unfortunately we only have one theater here in Bozeman, so opening weekends tend to be pretty crowded. This whole paragraph is basically a round-about way of me explaining why I'm writing this review a week after the movie came out. Expect the same for X-Men next week.

Godzilla is a fantastic summer movie in a style we don't see much anymore. The blockbuster has kind of become a bloated mess in the last couple of years. As much as I enjoy movies like Man of Steel and The Avengers, I'm starting to feel a bit of fatigue for the big, convoluted plots and action sequences that have started to plague them. It's why some of my favorite summer movies from the last couple of years have been stuff like Dredd andLooper because they focus on telling a smaller, well crafted story.

Godzilla certainly bears some of the trappings of the modern blockbuster. There's the line from the trailer where Bryan Cranston yells "It'll send us back to the stone age!" It establishes the threat posed by Godzilla and MUTO as a global one, but the story is more about Aaron Taylor-Johnson's character trying to find his way back to his family than anything else. It's a grounded, human story wrapped in special effects that keeps the stakes personal and gives the action much more impact than it would have had otherwise. A lot of reviewers said that the human characters are essentially unnecessary, but I'd disagree with that wholeheartedly. Without them, the destruction would have felt completely lifeless. The characters in the movie aren't especially complex, but they still serve a vital role.


Plot wise, this movie really isn't what the trailers made it out to be. In that Cranston line I references above, he's not referring to Godzilla, but a new monster called MUTO (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism).Godzilla is structured like one of its classic predecessors; Godzilla is basically the hero, fighting off another monster and saving humanity in the process. That isn't to say that he's just an oversized superhero; it's clearly established that Godzilla is a force of nature that exists to restore balance. A whole bunch of people die in a tidal wave caused by him coming aground in Hawaii, for example, but he still ends up being the hero of the movie.

This combined with its simple human story and some nods to classic monster fights make Godzilla feel like a modern version of the kind of summer movie we don't really see much these days, and it's a great return to form. Godzilla exercises a patience we don't see much in blockbusters these days, waiting until about halfway through before even showing the audience Godzilla in all his glory and until the very end before really showing the monsters throw down. It lends the whole thing an amount of suspense and awe that wouldn't have existed if they'd structured it any other way, and I absolutely loved it.