Garguatuan delivery of monsters, lax drama

Rating: 5/10 (2 June 2014)

Gareth Edwards reinvigorates Godzilla on the American soil with his gargantuan portrayal of the famed post-nuclear monster, which retreads the origins of its fame and imprints them within this big-budget modern-day extravaganza. Even Godzilla itself diverts form the T-Rex blunder of the 1998 movie and captures the big-footed original monster of the Japanese series in CGI perfection. However Godzilla is not the sole malevolent creature to appear in this movie, as the famed mega-predator enters into a all-destructive chase for another humongous kaiju (or MUTO as it is defined in this movie) with a devastating EMP blast.
In the midst of this epic battle humanity and the army struggle to contain the destruction, while Edwards, like in "Monsters", struggles to imprint human drama as a backdrop to events. Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston), a scientist at a nuclear power plant, loses his wife (a brief cameo by Juliette Binoche) to one early attack by the MUTO, thus becoming obsessed with the monster and the encompassing government cover-up brought in effect to hide the truth. As a character and as an actor Cranston is a short-lived emotional highlight in the story, which unfortunately soon loses traction with what feels like his premature death. This loss leaves us battling for interest in the lax son of Joe, demolitions expert soldier Ford Brody (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who is a bland shell of a character, generic to the extreme, effectively keeping us disinterested in the story and leaving us hoping for a fast-forward to more massive destruction of metropolis. MUTO expert Dr. Ishiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) and the wife-nurse Elle Brody (Elizabeth Olsen) are equally unengaging, dull as a dishwater and forgettable. The overall lack of character imprint into the story coupled with audacious coincidences littering the movie, make the drama inert and feel like an important position on Edwards' checklist of blockbuster movies components.
I did however immensely like as Edwards slowly builds tension, initially only showing massive bones of the leviathan creatures or just the aftereffects of their presence, then only sifting through bits and pieces of destruction through news reports, whilst avoiding showing the battles between Godzilla and the MUTOs, leaving space for total San Francisco annihilation for the final act. Nonetheless with the lack of emotional engagement "Godzilla" feels like but a mild success, a poor dramatic relative to the much more successful giant-bashing "Pacific Rim" feature of 2013, who has a superb mix of absurdity, pathos and general character formation that is vastly superior to Edwards effort.