Truth be told, the eagerly
anticipated American reboot of the long-running Godzilla franchise had me a
little worried. After all, the previous
attempt by Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich to bring our beloved kaiju monster to the mainstream American
audience was a dismal failure on every level and made 'Godzilla 1985' seem like a
masterpiece by comparison. That 1998
travesty's greatest sin wasn't its horrible plot or the laughable characters in
it but that it deviated from Toho's Godzilla and turned our beloved 'King
of the Monsters' into a giant velociraptor with no bearing whatsoever to the
original. They might as well have called
it by another name.
It turned out that my
apprehensions were unfounded. Brit
director Gareth Edwards' 2014 update is not only a faithful and respectful contribution
to Toho's Godzilla canon but also an intensely personal and visceral viewing
experience. With the cutting edge visual
effects that a $160 million budget can provide, never before had Godzilla been
brought to life with such realism and immediacy. While there is something undeniably endearing
and nostalgic about the old-school, 'man in a suit' Godzilla we grew up
watching, that doesn't mean we shouldn't appreciate if not fully embrace what
modern technology can bring.
Keeping both the (anti-)nuclear
theme and ambiguous 'is he good or bad?' force-of-nature quality of the giant
lizard monster, 'Godzilla 2014' maintained the spirit and style of the original. Godzilla-philes might even recognize a
reference to the original 1954 film in the Japanese scientist played by Ken
Watanabe. The creature designers also thankfully
kept the classical thick-in-the-middle look of the original monster as well as
his trademark "atomic breath" attack, but that didn't mean they can't exercise
creativity elsewhere. The MUTO's (Massive
Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms) are new creature designs that are cool,
unique and frightening, and the climactic monster mash between Godzilla and the
tag-team duo of MUTO's in downtown San Francisco is both unrivaled in realism
and exciting to behold.
Eschewing camp and cheesiness for
realism and sheer destructiveness, 'Godzilla 2014' is apocalyptic in scale,
serious in tone, suspenseful in a 'Jurassic Park' kinda way and a visual
spectacle never before seen in the kaiju
genre. Sorry, but not even 'Pacific Rim' came close.
Grade: A
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