Go Go Godzilla

Godzilla fan art — the film aspires to a moodiness that rivals the original.

I have waited many years to hear the great actor David Strathairn say, "And where is Godzilla?"
The 2014 blockbuster spotlighting the giant radioactive lizard who was born the same year I was — 1954 — does about everything you can do dramatically within the very narrow range of a Godzilla movie. Director Gareth Edwards has brought visual poetry to a surprising amount of the film. And the destruction was both splashily spectacular and seen from a human's-eye view, which lent it a kind of awe sometimes.

Godzilla is kept offstage for much of the time, as befits his star status, so that the human story can carry the freight. And for once that human story isn’t merely an annoyance while we wait for the monster battles, thanks to actors like Strathairn and Bryan Cranston doing the heavy lifting.

Cranston’s emotional reality does a lot to ground the film right from the beginning. Strathairn brings his restraint and intelligence to the role of an admiral here, giving it authority without making it the usual blustering, he-doth-protest-too-much testosterone fest. The husband, wife and child at the “center” of the story are generic white bread bought at the discount store, but they don’t get in the way of anything.

The plot double-talk doesn’t bear too close an examination, and unfortunately the film’s most effective dramatic moment (which features Cranston) comes right at the beginning. But the plot gymnastics manage to make us sympathetic to Godzilla without impeding those metropolitan destructive capacities for which we love him.

“That HALO jump was beautifully shot,” my friend Matt Mattingly observed. “There was applause when SPOILER ... Godzilla breathed fire for the first time.”

One thing that might have made it better would have been to have Matthew Broderick casually incinerated in the blast, but you can’t have everything, I guess.