How Godzilla Squanders Potential in One of the Decade’s Most Disappointing Decisions (Film Analysis)

LINK TO PART 1: Godzilla's Amazing Trailer

Before I address the film’s biggest disappointment, I need to go over what many consider Godzilla’s key flaw and why such criticism is understandable yet misguided.  Godzilla, King of the Monsters, does not appear much in his own film.  Throughout the film’s first hour, Godzilla acts akin to the elusive Bigfoot—giving the audience only brief, partial glimpses (usually of his back scales and/or tail).  It’s not until over an hour in that the audience gets their first true look at Godzilla, and even then, it’s only for a moment before the camera turns elsewhere.  It takes over an hour and a half of this two-hour movie for Godzilla to finally get some camera-focused action (the film cruelly teases a battle earlier by showing brief snippets on a television screen), and even then, these fights are broken up by human-focused scenes.

Being upset over the titled monster appearing infrequently in its own film is a highly understandable frustration, but one that’s a misguided criticism towards Godzilla’s real issues.  It’s here I’d like to direct your attention to director Steven Spielberg—a man who’s found great success at being elusive with his films’s headliners.  Jaws, a film that drew millions in with its thrilling allure of a giant man-eating shark, barely shows the shark until its last third.  Close Encounters of the Third Kind waits until its finale to directly focus on its UFOs (the primary eyecatcher for people going to see it).  Even Jurassic Park is somewhat sparse (though less of an extent than Jaws) with spotlighting its ticket-selling dinosaurs—taking twenty minutes for the brachiosaurs and a good hour for the T-Rex to appear.  These films were met with critical success and acclaim despite the infrequent to downright rare appearances of their selling points (in fact, some reviewers criticized Jurassic Park for showing the dinosaurs too much).

Spielberg avoided criticism because simply put, he entertained audiences in other ways.  From thrilling suspense, intriguing mystery, and/or piquing science fiction curiosities, to endearing colorful characters who can hold the show until the showstopper appears.  And that’s exactly what Godzilla had with Bryan Cranston, an actor who rivaled Godzilla in selling tickets.  Cranston was a perfect fit for director Gareth Edwards’ kaiju limited approach.  The film even had the added bonus of having the very talented (though very obscure in the States) actress Juliette Binoche to play Cranston’s character’s wife (amusingly, Binoche turned down the role to be in Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, only to appear decades later in a much larger “dinosaur” film).

Godzilla opens in 1999 with a research group called Project Monarch discovering two giant spores in the Philippines—one dormant and one hatched.  The beings are large parasitic arthropods dubbed Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms or MUTOs for short.  These MUTOs feed on radiation, with the newly hatched MUTO traveling towards the nearest source: a Japanese nuclear power plant.  Married couple Joe (Bryan Cranston) and Sandra Brody (Juliette Binoche) just so happen to work at said plant—Sandra a nuclear consultant and Joe its lead engineer.  The MUTO’s arrival causes massive tremors around the area, creating a breach in the power plant while Sandra and several other technicians are working in its reactor.  Joe is forced to make the heartbreaking decision of closing off the reactor’s exits—sealing the breach along with his wife and coworkers inside.

Cranston gives a fantastic opening performance here—really conveying the panic and heartbreak of his split-second decision.  I feel Joe’s pain and helplessness as he watches his coworkers begging for help behind the sealed door, and Sandra telling him to take care of their son as she slowly dies.  Sandra’s death is a potently tragic sequence, yet equally tragic in axing her great actress so early into the film.  Tragedies aside, the scene is effective in giving its “protagonist” Joe plot objectives: discovering what killed his wife and taking care of his son.  These objectives, in addition to an already solid character introduction (as well as being played by a fantastic actor), bond the audience with Joe—making them care about his future journey.  Godzilla’s opening demonstrates it can be an engrossing experience without any monsters on screen.  It does everything right for an opening and shows great promise for things to come…that is until literally the next scene.

Fifteen minutes in and one fifteen-year timeskip later, the focus shifts from Joe to his now adult son Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson)—an explosives technician in the U.S. Navy returning home to his own family after fourteen months away.  This focus shift was not a good idea.  Don’t get me wrong, Aaron Taylor-Johnson is a good actor, and his performance here is…completely adequate—showcasing the right emotions, delivering his lines proper, etc.  Taylor-Johnson is just not a compelling enough actor, nor Ford an interesting enough character to maintain such a vital lead role while waiting for Godzilla to appear.  He works best as a secondary character working off others, which is exactly what happens when Joe reappears and seemingly takes the lead again.

Despite having just got back to the States, Ford is forced to leave his wife Elle (Elizabeth Olsen…and I just realized Ford and Elle are played by Quicksilver and Scarlett Witch.  Must be weird playing spouses in one film and siblings in another) and child to bail out his father from a Japanese jail.  Ford and Joe have been estranged for some time; the latter having become obsessed with finding out what caused his wife’s death (which has been covered up by Monarch).  Joe convinces Ford to help him sneak into the now quarantined powerplant, discovering that the air is suspiciously clean of any radiation.  The two are caught trespassing and brought to the plant where the MUTO has been lying dormant—absorbing energy while Monarch carefully observes it.  It’s here Joe gives his big damn speech from the trailer, with Monarch discovering he has vital data and knowledge from the meltdown fifteen years ago.

The character and journey of Joe Brody is now all set up. He has a purpose and connection to the main story, motivations the audience can relate and care about, a son for him to reconnect with, and an actor whose potency can and will carry the film until Godzilla finally appears.  For the first time in...ever, a Godzilla film looks to be having a compelling human story alongside its popcorn Kaiju action.  By this point, all the writers have to do is let the character journey run its course and not do anything incredibly stupid...

And then Joe gets killed off...

After all the effective setup, thirty-seven minutes into a two-hour film, Joe Brody dies from a collapsing bridge after the MUTO suddenly awakens.  It is, to this day, one of the most bafflingly stupid decisions and biggest disappointments I’ve ever seen a film make.  It is such a stupefying decision that back when I first saw the film, I didn’t believe it happened.  I thought it was all a trick and that Joe was pretending to be dead or he would somehow be resurrected by absorbing Godzilla cells.  The latter sounds preposterous, but anything made more sense to me than permanently killing off the man carrying the film, played by an actor who was half the film’s hype, one-fourth into the story.  Bryan Cranston would later go on to call killing off Joe Brody a “narrative mistake”, which is a massive understatement.  Killing off Joe wasn’t just a narrative mistake for Godzilla, it was a narrative assassination.

With Joe dead, Ford permanently takes over as the film’s human protagonist, being kept involved in the plot thanks to his bomb defusing training (though he doesn’t actually defuse any bombs, including the one plot-centric bomb in the story).  The writers try their best to make Ford likable and endearing—most notably having him save a small child during a monster attack—but while Ford is likable, he’s just not an interesting enough character to care about.  Unlike Joe, Ford lacks any development or arc, remaining the same generically nice, static character throughout the film—the only change being his acceptance that giant monsters exist.

If Joe’s character had survived and remained the focused figure throughout the remaining film, I guarantee people wouldn’t have been anywhere near as salty about the lack of Godzilla.  It would have given the film an actual character arc, with Joe finding out what killed his wife, assisting the military in destroying the MUTOs, and growing closer again with his son.  Yet Joe’s journey is cut short and the audience is left with a generic character lacking any character arc—resulting in Godzilla being merely an action piece…an action piece with scattered fights that chiefly appear within the last half-hour.

The inclusion of Ken Watanabe as Dr. Ishiro Serizawa (named after both the director of the original Gojira and the in-film scientist who kills the monster) is, at least, a distracting consolation prize.  The man is an effective actor who has given several great performances in the past, including his fantastic portrayal in Inception as the morally ambiguous Mr. Saito.  Here, Watanabe plays a similar role as the chaotic good Serizawa—unnaturally obsessed with Godzilla fighting the MUTOs as humanity’s only option—“Let them fight”—making him comes across as a bit crazy and/or someone who’s read the script and knows how these Kaiju films usually work.  Actresses Elizabeth Olsen and Sally Hawkins are also welcomed talents to fill the void, or they would have if the former wasn’t stuck being Ford’s distressed wife and the latter Serizawa’s jumpy assistant who is forgotten within the background of secondary characters.

Bryan Cranston, Juliette Binoche, Ken Watanabe, Elizabeth Olsen, Sally Hawkins.  A cast like that could win you best picture in the right hands, these weren’t the right hands.  The writers had a cast of gold and they squandered it completely.  I will give the writers credit for creating a story where no one comes across as an asshole.  Even the military, notorious for being unreasonable, bullheaded and trigger-happy in these types of films, is shown to be levelheaded and open to suggestions throughout the film.  The film’s fast pacing also helps keep the film afloat while Cranston and Godzilla are away/dead.  The story is consistently moving at a swift pace, with stuff always happening and/or being unveiled with little downtime or monotony during its two-hour run.  It doesn’t feel like a trudge to get to the big kaiju finale, and that’s always a good thing.  Though fully utilizing your outstanding cast would have been much, much better.

Yet Godzilla wasn’t just designed as a standalone film.  It was crafted as the first film in Legendary Entertainment’s own cinematic universe: the MonsterVerse.  Bryan Cranston’s Joe was to the MonsterVerse what Robert Downey Jr’s Tony Stark is to The Marvel Cinematic Universe.  Whereas Godzilla and the Iron Man suit provide awesome action, Joe and Tony provide a captivating three-dimensional character portrayed by a very talented actor.  Imagine if in Iron Man, Tony Stark was killed off.  Imagine how immensely that would have negatively impacted the Marvel Cinematic Universe had it axed such a vital character piece so early into its story-building.  It would have been the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s biggest mistake, just as killing off Bryan Cranston is the MonsterVerse’s biggest mistake.

LINK TO FINALE: How Godzilla Ascends From a Typical Monster Flick, Does Its King Justice, and Has One of the Decade’s Best Scenes