Godzilla - film review: 'Top-class whacking and astounding collateral damage'

Gareth Edwards, hailing from Nuneaton just like George Eliot, decided he wanted to become a film director at the age of six. His first feature, Monsters, made when he was 35, on a tiny budget with a cast of two and a crew of four, won multiple awards in 2010, including the Evening Standard Film Award for Best Technical/Artistic Achievement. Edwards wrote, designed, filmed and directed it all himself — and then personally added the special effects too on a laptop. This wasn’t just a funky monster movie, it was a calling card to Hollywood. And it has been picked up.

For this, his second feature, backed by Legendary Pictures under the auspices of Warner, Edwards was presented with a budget of no less than $165 million and the chance to remake perhaps the greatest monster movie of them all, Godzilla, under licence from the Japanese company Toho, which has owned the rights since Ishiro Honda’s original masterpiece of 1954.

Since then there have been numerous more or less potty, spoofy sequels and a crash-bang Hollywood blockbuster, directed by Roland Emmerich in 1998, in which the monster had peculiarly morphed into a distinctly Jurassic Park-type tyrannosaurus, running around with its tail up for balance as per the latest dinosaur locomotion theories, rather than shambling about in the style of the original, an actor in a cumbersome suit demolishing a toytown set.

That first Godzilla, rampaging around just nine years after Hiroshima, blasting away with his fiery breath, issued directly from the trauma of the atomic bombings of Japan. Sixty years later, Edwards has turned instead to the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster for a back-story. In 1999, a nuclear reactor near Tokyo goes critical after some kind of earthquake, and scientist Joe Brody (Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston, channelling Harrison Ford) loses his wife (Juliette Binoche, somehow) in the disaster. But he doesn’t believe the official explanations. “This wasn’t just a reactor meltdown,” he insists.

The might of the American navy and airforce is helpless to stop these critters. But then it appears that yet another monster is joining the party: the alpha predator, Godzilla, steaming through the ocean towards the final showdown in, as luck would have it, San Francisco, where Ford’s wife and little boy are now in deadly peril. Heck!

What to do? Perhaps nothing. A wise old Japanese scientist (Ken Watanabe, with Sally Hawkins as a surprise sidekick) suggests that Godzilla has come to “restore balance”. The best plan for mankind is to stand aside and let them fight: “The arrogance of man is thinking nature is in our control, and not the other way around.” James Lovelock could hardly have put it better. So that’ll do for motivation, thanks.