“Godzilla” belches back to life in a new Warner Bros. film that harks back to the kid-friendlier versions of these Japanese movies. In an increasingly radioactive world, the return of the almost cuddly “King of the Monsters” may be the least of our troubles.
The opening credits cleverly revisit the 1940s and ‘50s atomic testing that awakened Godzilla. Gareth Edwards’ film then jumps to the late ‘90s, where mysterious goings on in mining operations in the Philippines and nuclear plants in Japan hint that something bad is about to go down.
Bryan Cranston is an American engineer working with his wife (Juliette Binoche) when a tragic accident means their little 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’s still hanging around the ruins of that Japanese reactor, a wild-eyed loon determined to get to the bottom of a cover-up.
Dr. Ichiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) has been following developments all these years. He knows what’s up. He’s seen the old movies.
Gareth Edwards impressed Hollywood with his low-budget “Monsters.” Given a huge budget and hours to tell the tale, he delivers a lumbering movie that’s as bloated as this new roly-poly version of the Big Guy, whom we only see in all his glory in the later acts.
Cranston blubbers with emotion. Taylor-Johnson doesn’t break a sweat as beasts try to keep him from making it home to his wife and child. Watanabe runs through a panoply of “stricken” looks as he fails to convince the admiral (David Strathairn) in charge that the natural world needs “order.”
The effects are decent — warships tossed about like bathtub toys, trains trashed and torched, nuclear missiles munched. The movie’s never less than competent. But the fatigue of over-familiarity curses this franchise like few others. We’ve seen Japanese men in monster suits. We’ve seen digital kaiju, and gigantic robot-armored soldiers in”Pacific Rim”.
So in a film this devoid of humor, with only a few moments of humanity, with tension frittered away by the tedious repetition of the fights, anybody who has ever seen “Godzilla” in any incarnation can be forgiven for asking the obvious:
“What else have you got?”
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