Stubs - Godzilla (2014)

Godzilla (2014) Starring: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ken Watanabe, Elizabeth Olsen, Juliette Binoche, Sally Hawkins, David Strathairn, Bryan Cranston. Directed by Gareth Edwards. Screenplay by Max Borenstein. Based on Godzilla aka Gojira (1954) by Toho. Produced by Thomas Tull, Jon Jashni, Mary Parent, Brian Rogers. Run Time: 123 minutes. U.S.A. Color Monster, Horror, Science Fiction

Hollywood has a long history of remaking foreign films in their own image. The Magnificent Seven (1960) is a remake of Seven Samurai (七人の侍 Shichinin no Samurai) (1954); Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986) is a remake of the French film Boudu Saved from Drowning (Boudu sauvé des eaux) (1932) and so on and so on. No film is safe, including monster films, like Gojira (1954), a Japanese film better known in the U.S. as Godzilla. Even that first film was bastardized by Hollywood with the insertions of scenes with American actor Raymond Burr to make it more accessible for American audiences.

That trend continued with a full remake of Godzilla (1998) directed by Roland Emmerich and starring Matthew Broderick. Budgeted at $130 million, the film would underperform at the U.S. box office. Originally projected to make $90 million on its opening weekend, it only made $55.7 million. It would top out at $136 million domestically and make only $379,014,294. Considering its cost, that is not blockbuster numbers. That film received generally negative reviews and would win two Golden Raspberry Awards for Worst Supporting Actress and Worst Remake Sequel.

Sony, which had dreams of a franchise, instead let their rights to the Toho property expire in 2003 and Legendary Pictures picked up the property. Legendary, in turn, brought in Warner Bros. as a co-financier and co-production company. Thomas Tull, chairman and CEO of Legendary Pictures, announced “Our plans are to produce the Godzilla that we, as fans, would want to see. We intend to do justice to those essential elements that have allowed this character to remain as pop-culturally relevant for as long as it has."

It is rumored that Guillermo del Toro was approached about directing, but turned it down. In January 2011, Gareth Edwards was announced as the director. Edwards had directed exactly one film up to that point, Monsters (2010), a film with a budget of $500,000. Godzilla would have a budget of $160 million.

David Callaham wrote the first draft, but as is the way with blockbusters in Hollywood, he would not be the only writer. David S. Goyer was hired to act like a script doctor before Max Borenstein was hired to continue the rewrites in November 2011. Drew Pearce was hired in October 2012 to do a polish, but it was Frank Darabont who did the final rewrite in January 2013.

Principal photography got underway in Vancouver on March 18, 2013. Location shooting in Hawaii took place in June and July and principal photography wrapped on July 13-14.

Warner Bros. handled distribution worldwide, excluding Japan, which was handled by Toho. The film opened in the U.S. on May 16, 2014.

The film starts in 1954 (the same year as the original film). Godzilla, an ancient alpha predator, is lured to an atoll in the Pacific in an attempt to kill it with a nuclear bomb. (Note: This is not the way the monster is killed in the original.)

Fast forward to 1999. A collapsed mine in the Philippines reveals a colossal skeleton underground and Monarch scientists Ishiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) and Vivienne Graham (Sally Hawkins) are sent to investigate. In the cave, they find two giant spores; one dormant and one hatched with a trail that leads out of the cave to the sea.

One has hatched.

Meanwhile, in Japan, the Janjira Nuclear Power Plant experiences unusual seismic activity; Supervisor Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) sends his wife Sandra (Juliette Binoche), a nuclear technician, and a team of other technicians into the reactor to investigate. However, another tremor breaches the reactor. Joe rushes to the blast door, but the team is too far in to make it out before Joe has to close it. Sandra and the team make it to the door, just long enough for Joe to feel awful about what he had to do. Following the breach, the plant collapses, because that is what nuclear plants do.

Fast forward 15 years ahead to 2014. Stateside, Joe’s son Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a Navy explosive ordnance disposal officer, is just home in San Francisco from his latest tour of duty. He wants to spend time with his wife Elle (Elizabeth Olsen) and their son Sam (Carson Bolde), but a phone call changes all that. Joe has been arrested, again, for trespassing in the Janjira quarantine zone. Ford flies to Japan to get his father out of jail. Joe is determined to return to the zone and persuades Ford to accompany him back to their old home.

When they get there, they find that the zone is not contaminated with radiation, which is the official story. Back in their old house, Joe finds the data he’d been looking for. Shortly thereafter, soldiers discover them and they are taken to a secret facility in the ruins that had once been the nuclear plant.

While they’re there, there is a series of power failures and the facility is ultimately destroyed by a giant winged creature. In the attack, Joe gets severely wounded and dies on the helicopter that is taking him and Ford to the U.S.S. Saratoga. The news reports the incident as an earthquake.

Serizawa, Graham, and Ford join a U.S. Navy task force led by Admiral William Stenz (David Strathairn) to search for the creature, called a "MUTO" (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism) that attacked the plant.

Serizawa and Graham reveal to Ford that a 1954 deep sea expedition triggered the appearance of Godzilla and that the nuclear tests in the 1950s were cover stories for attempts to kill him. Project Monarch, of which Serizawa and Graham are a part, was established to secretly study Godzilla and other similar creatures such as the MUTO, which traveled from the Philippine mine to Janjira and caused the meltdown at the nuclear plant, killing his mother. Ford reveals that his father had monitored echolocation signals which seemed to indicate the MUTO was communicating with something.

Meanwhile, the MUTO attacks a Russian submarine and pulls it out of the ocean, dropping down on a Hawaiian island, so that it can digest the sub's nuclear material. Godzilla finally arrives, causing a tsunami in Honolulu and briefly battles the MUTO until the latter flees.

A second, larger, wingless MUTO, meanwhile, emerges from the other spore in Nevada and devastates Las Vegas. The scientists deduce that the second MUTO is a female and the one the other MUTO was communicating with. Based on their movements, they figure the two MUTOs will meet to breed in San Francisco.

Godzilla on the way to San Francisco.

Meanwhile, the Navy is following Godzilla to the mainland riding on the water right above him.

With all three in the Bay Area, Stenz approves a plan to use nuclear warheads to lure the monsters to the open ocean and destroy them. When the scientist objects and points out that this has been tried before, they are reminded that the nuclear weapons that we have now are much more powerful than the ones we had in 1954.

The Army greets Godzilla at the Golden Gate Bridge.

Ford, meanwhile, ends up joining the team delivering the warheads by train. His past experience as an explosive ordnance disposal officer is considered useful by the force making the delivery. But when the track comes to a narrow bridge, the female MUTO intercepts it and consumes most of the warheads.

The Army escorting the missiles on the way to San Francisco.

However, one remains and Ford is airlifted with it to San Francisco. After a confrontation with Godzilla at the Golden Gate Bridge, the weapon is activated. However, before it arrives at its destination, the male MUTO steals it and presents it to the female. She uses it to form a nest around it in Chinatown.

Mr. and Mrs. MUTO in Chinatown.

While Godzilla and the MUTOs do battle, a strike team, which of course includes Ford, enters the city via HALO jump to find and disarm the warhead in Chinatown. However, when they are unable to access the timer, the team takes the warhead to a boat for disposal at sea.

Ford and other troops HALO jump into Chinatown.

The MUTOs get the upper hand on Godzilla, but when Ford blows up the MUTO nest, burning all of the eggs, the MUTOs are distracted enough to allow Godzilla to emerge victoriously. He kills the male MUTO by slamming him with his tail into the side of an office building and the female by firing his atomic breath down her throat. Exhausted, Godzilla collapses on the city shore.

Godzilla kills the female MUTO with his atomic breath.

With the rest of his team killed, Ford uses his last bit of energy to maneuver the boat with the warhead on it out to sea. Rescued at the last moment before the warhead explodes, Ford is finally reunited with his family at the Oakland Coliseum emergency shelter the following morning.

Meanwhile, Godzilla awakens and rises from the destroyed San Francisco. After a final, victorious roar, the monster returns to sea while the local media hails Godzilla as "King of the Monsters - savior of our city?"

The film was released in the U.S. on May 16, 2014 and made $529.1 million worldwide, resulting ultimately in what is estimated to be about $52.5 million in profit after all distribution and marketing costs are figured in. That seems to be enough profit for Legendary to propose a sequel pitting Godzilla against King Kong, tentatively titled Godzilla vs. Kong, for 2020 release.

When you see highly touted actors like Bryan Cranston, Ken Watanabe, and Juliette Binoche in relatively small roles, it makes you realize that even actors have mortgage payments to make. Why else would they be in a film like this? I doubt it was the acting challenge their roles presented them. Tentpole films are not generally known for winning acting awards.

The others in the cast, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen, Sally Hawkins and David Strathairn are not bad, but Hawkins and Strathairn, in particular, seem wasted here. The acting may be the least of the film’s problems, but there are still many.

Primary among them is that in this retelling, the titular character, Godzilla, does not make an appearance until halfway through the film. The film’s somewhat plodding pacing makes it seem like it takes forever before we finally see the monster the story is supposed to be about. And then it’s a bit of a disappointment.

Does this look like a natural creature?

The creatures, Godzilla and Mr. and Mrs. MUTO, appear more mechanical than biological in appearance and don’t seem to have any evolutionary purpose. The eggs we are “treated” to in the female’s body seem to glow in an unnatural manner. I know it’s supposed to evoke radiation, but they don’t look natural. Not that I want to see it, but there never seems to be a time when Mr. MUTO fertilizes the eggs, which is still required in most biological reproduction. Perhaps the nuclear missile is a Freudian stand-in for the act, though the film leads us to believe the missile is just a missile.

Fertilized MUTO eggs wrapped around a nuclear missile.

The idea that they feed off of nuclear radiation makes the idea of killing them with a nuclear weapon seem sort of like trying to kill someone through making them overeat, perhaps hoping they would explode. Except for Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983), has that ever really worked? There is a lot of pseudo-science in Godzilla, the kind where if they talk fast and through in an explosion you’ll just have to accept.

Even for a science fiction fantasy, the film suffers from too much coincidence for me. Ford just happens to have the skill set necessary for the plot, even though one would have to imagine that there would be many currently in the military with the same skills. The fact that the military launched a plan without someone like him seems somewhat incredulous. Ford just happens to also be the son of the man and woman who ran the Japanese nuclear power plant that was attacked and he happens to live the same city where the action culminates. Was Ford born under a bad sign or what? But all too often, he just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And frankly, I'm not really sure what Godzilla's motivation is to kill the MUTOs. It is not for food, Godzilla doesn't attempt to eat them after killing them. It's not for sport, like the Predator. And it can't be to help mankind since the last thing we'd done to him was to try and kill him. But for some reason, Godzilla puts his life on the line to save us. Why? Because this film needs a big battle, that's why and that's not really a good reason.

We watched this film on the anniversary of the original Gojira’s Japanese release in 1954. It is a great reminder that sometimes simple is better and more effective. A man in a Godzilla suit is more realistic than a CGI one. So, if you’re itching to watch a Godzilla film, I would recommend watching Gojira over this reincarnation.

Be sure to check out other Horror films in our Horror Films Review Hub.