Definitely thrillin'

Rating: 8/10 (31 May 2014)

You know, I did like the original 1954 Godzilla, but part of me saw it more as a tongue-in-cheek monster movie of the time than as a straight- up horror film. And when the oh-so-American version came out in 1998, I saw that one as almost a comedy, and not in a good way. But this one? This new version of the oft-told tale is downright terrifying, combining a plausible origin with sterling special effects and not one but three really big monsters.
Our story begins in the Phillippines in 1999. Scientists are called to a mine in which a huge skeleton has been unearthed; within this skeleton are two pods - one broken open, with a trail leading to the sea. Not long after, unusual seismic activity is recorded at the Janjira nuclear power plant in Japan. The plant's operator, Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) sends his wife Sandra (Juliette Binoche) and her team down into the core to check the sensors. But then there's this big explosion, and Sandra and the other scientists in the core are trapped. Publicly, the disaster, which affects all of Japan, is attributed to a 6.3-magnitude earthquake.
Some 15 years later, the Brodys' son Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is a Navy bomb-disposer guy, to use the technical term, and he's a bit estranged from his dad, who's become obsessed with finding out the true reason for the so-called earthquake. Shortly after Ford returns home to San Francisco to be with his wife Elle (Elizabeth Olsen) and son Sam, he learns that Papa Joe has been arrested in Japan for trespassing on the grounds of the old, now-quarantined plant. Joe insists that there was no earthquake, that an electromagnetic pulse was behind the disaster. And he may be right, because while Ford is in Japan collecting his dad, there's another incident, and a gigantic winged creature flees the scene. No, it's not Godzilla, but he's around somewhere.
Fret not; Gozdilla does show up, and when he does it's a real heart stopper. He's not King Kong tall, he's more like ten or eleven King Kongs tall. He's Kanye's ego tall. He's Donald Sterling's racism tall. He's a big fella, is what I'm getting at here. Anyway, he and Winged Monster (called a MUTO, for Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism) are soon joined by another creepy dude, who's like Winged Monster although without wings. They both sort of look like the monster from Cloverfield, come to think of it, but much more realistic.
Would it be spoiling things if I noted that all three beat the heck out of each other? Probably not. It's also not a spoiler to note that the armed forces attempt to use everything from handguns to tank ordnance on our friendly neighborhood monsters, to little avail. Nuclear weapons are mentioned.
This is such a visceral movie. There's little in the way of shaky-cam cinematography, and you almost never get a full-on look at any of the monsters. This is good, because it highlights how damn huge these guys are; if you or I were there, we wouldn't be able to fully comprehend their colossal stature without moving back, oh, a couple hundred miles. All of this makes the movie feel very much real and as if you're very much in the middle of things, 3D or not. The CGI is worlds better than it was for Roland Emmerich's 1998 dud.
There are plenty of jaw-dropping moments of terror, and there are a multitude of on-screen deaths, PG-13 rating or not. There's always this lingering feeling of being trapped. After all, you can't go into the water (Godzilla swims!), and you can't go into the city (Godzilla smash!), and you can't even go into the mountains, because these guys are tall, tall, tall. How tall? Grande from Starbucks tall. So you're trapped, and you can't figure out how to stop them, since bullets don't work.
Turns out it's not complicated, but I'll let you see for yourself on that score. Anyway, although I watched the 3D version of this, I don't think the 3D added much to the experience. It didn't take away from it (that is, it wasn't distracting), but it did seem needless in retrospect.
But the bottom line for me is that Godzilla is a lot less campy and much, much scarier than the version from olden times (1954). Think World War Z without zombies or the ability to zip around from continent to continent. Okay, so technically here we move between North America and Asia, but you get the idea.