The world is beset by the appearance of monstrous creatures, but one of them may be the only one who can save humanity.
I’ve lost count of all the various Godzilla iterations over the years but while I never really got into the old Japanese versions, even as a kid they were way too corny, director Gareth Evans ditched the cheese factor and went instead for weightiness and Hollywood spectacle when bringing his portrayal of the Japanese mutated dinosaur to the big screen in 2014. And it paid off. The movie was a huge success, spawning a sequel, “Godzilla: King of the Monsters” in 2019, and a second follow-up, “Godzilla vs. Kong,” which will be released simultaneously in the US in theaters and on HBO Max on Friday, March 31st.
Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) is a supervisor who works at the Janjira Nuclear Power Plant in Japan. He lives a short distance from the plant with his wife Sandra (Juliette Binoche) and young son Ford (CJ Adams). When he begins to notice unusual seismic activity near the plant, he sends Sandra and a team into the reactor to try and figure out what is going on but when a tremor breaches the facility, within a matter of minutes, the entire plant is brought to the ground, killing Sandra and her team in the process.
Fifteen years later, Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is now a U.S. Navy EOD officer and has just returned home to San Francisco from a tour of duty to be with his wife Elle (Elizabeth Olsen) and young son Sam (Carson Bolde). Before he has time to enjoy being with his family, he receives a phone call from Japan stating that his father Joe has been arrested for trespassing inside Janjira’s quarantine zone and that he needs to come and get him. The area where they used to live in Japan before the power plant was obliterated, is now restricted and has been cordoned off by the Japanese government, citing nuclear contamination from the collapse of the plant. He bails Joe out of jail and almost immediately he wants to go back into the quarantine zone so he can prove the collapse of the plant was no accident. Reluctantly, Ford goes with him and Joe is able to retrieve some of his old data from 1999 but they are quickly apprehended and brought to a facility in the plant’s ruins.
There, they discover a massive chrysalis that has been living off the plant’s reactors for the past 15 years and is emitting a strong electromagnetic pulse. A giant insect-like creature with wings emerges from the reactor and destroys the facility in the process. In amongst the chaos and pandemonium, Joe is killed when he falls from a platform, leaving Ford by himself. Monarch scientists Ishiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) and Vivienne Graham (Sally Hawkins) reach out to Ford and ask him if his father said anything to him about his findings that reach back to 1999 when the Janjira Nuclear Power Plant was first destroyed. Ford tells them he was monitoring echolocation signals, and that he felt the creature, now dubbed MUTO, was communicating with something much bigger. In return, they reveal that back in 1954, a deep-sea expedition accidentally woke up Godzilla, a huge antiquated monstrosity, and that all of the nuclear tests that were recorded in history during that timeframe, were actually attempts to try and kill it. When that didn’t work, Monarch was created to study Godzilla and any other corresponding creatures that might one day materialize.
As MUTO makes its way towards Hawaii, Godzilla intercepts it and they have a massive fight but MUTO manages to escape and heads towards the continental US. Ishiro and Vivienne realize that MUTO is heading to the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada where a large spore they discovered in the Philippines many years ago, was stored but by the time the military arrives at the location, a larger wingless MUTO has emerged. Ishiro and Vivienne conclude that the first MUTO, which is male, was actually communicating with the second, bigger one, a female, and that it was a mating call. As the military desperately tries to stop the two creatures from uniting, nothing in their arsenal appears to be working, and a last-ditch effort of dropping nuclear warheads on the creatures in San Francisco is recommended. With time running out, the two MUTOs converge on the city but they are not prepared for what awaits them there…GODZILLA!
Gareth Evans, who, two years later, would go on to direct one of the best Star Wars movies to date with “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” delivers the respect and reverence a big-screen Godzilla adaptation deserves. Gone is the memory of the hackneyed, soulless rendition of Roland Emmerich’s disastrous 1998 “Godzilla,” a film that was critically maligned and bored audiences to death and at the time, put a nail in the celluloid coffin of any future big-screen adaptations. Thankfully, Evans and co. hit all the right beats and although Godzilla is pretty much kept out of sight in his glorious enormity until the big finale, believe me, it is worth the wait. The film manages to infuse the human characters with some much-needed character exposition and story development, something typically missing from movies of this ilk but in the end, we’re not here to watch the human interactions, rather, we want to see the big mutated dinosaur take on his two mutant adversaries, stomping on and pummelling them into the ground.
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