Such confidence is all the more remarkable since Edwards is here wrestling a multimillion dollar blockbuster beast (a reported $160m) the size and scale of which is utterly incomparable with the homemade micro-budget Monsters, in which he self-shot all the live footage on the hoof and then knocked up the special effects in his bedroom.
Godzilla: 'for its first hour, it is judicious with its spectacular displays'.t's l Photograph: c.Warner Br/Everett/REX
Directors invoke such comparisons at their peril, but in Edwards's case there's something perversely admirable about daring to aim so high, proving that he's not frightened of taking his subject matter seriously. The discovery of an underground lair nods toward Alien in more than just Giger-esque design a repeated riff from Alexandre Desplat's score seems to quote Jerry Goldsmith, just as the heavily trailered strains of Ligeti later echo the Star Gate sequence from 2001.
Which, of course, they are – albeit not quite what Joe expected.įor the first hour of its running time, Godzilla is judicious with its spectacular displays, concentrating on character development in a manner that will be familiar to fans of Edwards's first feature, 2010's Monsters. Racked with guilt, Joe (Bryan Cranston) has become a cracked conspiracy theorist, convinced that the government are hiding something. Leap ahead again and the traumatised young son has grown into bomb-disposal expert Ford Brody (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), taken away from wife Elle (Elizabeth Olsen) by news of his dad Joe's arrest in Japan for trespassing upon the radioactive ground where his home and workplace once stood proud. From here we fast-forward to a nuclear family (mother, father, son) being torn apart as an atomic reactor falls prey to a "natural disaster" with shades of Fukushima. Things get off to a flying start with a terrific opening sequence that places grainy images of a giant reptile amid the faux archival blur of Bikini Atoll. And just as Gojira transmuted over the course of several movies from fire-breathing scourge to savage saviour, so Edwards's lonely samurai dinosaur emerges from the depths as an avenging angel, safeguarding the natural order so blithely abandoned by man. With his terrifying size tempered by an oddly endearing scaly-dog face (the designers cite bears and komodo dragons as inspirational), Edwards's "monster" emerges as an awe-inspiring noble beast a cross between the massive kaiju of Guillermo del Toro's Pacific Rim and a fiercely loyal overgrown bull mastiff. While British director Gareth Edwards's jaw-dropping Godzilla may not have the depth of Honda's original, it exhibits an appreciation and understanding of what made that movie great, alongside a healthy contempt for the mind-numbing vacuity of Roland Emmerich's headache-inducing 1998 reboot.
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