With the triumph of Godzilla Minus One still fresh and the box office success of Godzilla x Kong even fresher, kaiju lovers have reason to rejoice. The king of the monsters is on top as he deserves to be, blasting his atomic breath into the atmosphere as a show of victory. All things considered, there couldn't be a better time to revisit the American Godzilla that revitalized the franchise for a more global audience despite an unfavorable reputation. On its tenth anniversary, it's somewhat surprising how much Gareth Edwards' Godzilla has fallen out of favor. It was never a critical darling, but it feels that the movie has diminished in the collective consciousness. Which is understandable if undeserved…
Before a jury of actressexuals, not even the world's greatest defense attorney could save Godzilla '14 from the gravest possible sentence. After all, barely 15 minutes into the two-hour-plus movie, Juliette Binoche is summarily dispatched, lost in a chaotic prologue that's supposed to suffuse the incoming narrative with sorrow yet only manages to annoy the viewer. Similar things could be said about how Edwards and screenwriter Max Borenstein treat Elizabeth Olsen and Sally Hawkins, but Binoche takes the cake as the blockbuster's most wasted actress. Then again, the best way to enjoy Godzilla 2014 is to keep one thing in mind – this isn't a movie concerned with people.
The text might feign an interest, but the directorial approach nips it in the bud. Sure, there's a story of familial trauma unraveling, but that's not what folks remember from the movie. It's not even what the images of said movie prioritize. Monsters are the focus, enlarged to dimensions they've never possessed in Godzilla's long cinematic history and shot like deities. Like Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, the old lizard doesn't have much screen time, yet the movie belongs as much to him as the putative leads. I'd also argue that the CGI creature delivers a better performance than most of his flesh and blood colleagues, but what's the use of saying Bryan Cranston overacts and Aaron Taylor-Johnson serves cardboard cutout realness?
Self-evident truths aside, this oddity didn't go unnoticed by contemporary critics, whether they praised or lambasted the stateside kaiju flick. David Ehrlich, who adored it, even baptized Godzilla as the first post-human blockbuster, the potential herald of a new era in studio filmmaking. While that didn't come to pass, such unfulfilled potential keeps this Godzilla enshrined within a notion of uniqueness. In other words, there's nothing quite like it, not even the various sequels and side-projects it spawned as the genesis of a so-called MonsterVerse. The whole thing comes down to a matter of perspective, to the point where shot scale is more relevant than any half-assed characterization.
Humans are only here as points of access into Godzilla's narrative, his fight against two vicious bug-like MUTOs, enacting an ancient conflict that dates back to time immemorial. Gestures toward the Fukushima crisis and the haunting of 9/11 are set dressing of the most anodyne kind, going against the original 1954 picture's existence as a reckoning with national tragedy. If that's the movie you want, go revisit some classics or try Shin Godzilla, which hit theaters just two years after this movie. Moreover, Edwards doesn't consider the human element in the same way the first American Godzilla did in 1998. Rather than following Hollywood models of romantic storytelling, he breaks them.
Cribbing from the franchise's past and going further still, Edwards taps into an awed regard for incomprehensible power that's closer to Lovecraftian tales and the broad subgenre of cosmic horror. Rather than a highlight of human resilience against a titanic threat, one experiences what's on screen as a portrait of powerlessness. There's a kind of happy ending to all this, of course. However, one doesn't leave the screening feeling as though they've just watched valorous heroes prevent the end of the world. The apocalypse may have been averted, but there are no heroes, and everyone aside from the monsters is an afterthought whose ability to change the course of things is next to zero.
Godzilla thus becomes a film about a terrifying unknown whose essential truths are beyond our grasp. They're beyond the characters' grasp, too, rendering those people as easily crushed vermin whose lives are ultimately insignificant. And this isn't just a consequence of a director mishandling actors and dramatic beats, twisting them until a portion of the whole screenplay ceases to function. It's a cogent artistic approach, transversal to every bit of filmmaking in sight. Especially in terms of how Edwards constructs images, the great beast's immensity and materiality communicated at a visceral level, while the world of Man gets dwarfed by a god's eye purview.
These aren't beautiful pictures per se – though Godzilla's final stand in a ruined San Francisco features some lovely work by DP Seamus McGarvey and the CGI team – yet they have an impact strong enough to make your bones rattle. Anti-sentimental to the point of alienation, it seems Edwards is willing to turn the blockbuster on its head and make it a punitive endeavor, defeatist, and always keener on pursuing a general mood of despair than any hint of triumphalism. It's a singularly bleak and joyless take on popcorn cinema. Which admittedly sounds bad. But isn't it fascinating? Isn't it thought-provoking? Especially now that Hollywood has grown more risk-averse? I know which side of the debate I fall on. So… all hail the best American Godzilla!
Gareth Edwards' Godzilla is streaming on Netflix and Max. You can also rent or purchase it on most of the major platforms.