Godzilla

**Spoiler Alert**

Director: Gareth Edwards, Starring: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen, Ken Watanabe, Brian Cranston, Juliette Binoche and Sally Hawkins

Gareth Edwards' Monsters was a strange, creepy aliens-invading-earth film that managed to make a political statement about illegal immigration and execute it with more nuance and drama than Godzilla, his sophomore film feature. Godzilla is more of what summer movie-fare has become: incoherent, thrill-free, CGI-drenched destruction and noise that you wish would end sooner than it does. What is more peculiar than the creatures plodding across the screen is the presence of Juliette Binoche and Sally Hawkins; two fine actresses more accustomed to more demanding characters and scripts. It's a real head-scratcher but actors have to make a living too and both Binoche and Hawkins are probably unaccustomed to earning salaries like those they earned here.

(Brian Cranston) and his wife Sandra (Juliette Binoche) are engineers for a nuclear facility in Japan (the initial shot of three nuclear silos I'm sure are meant to evoke an uncomfortable image of the Fukushima Plant) when he notices strange seismic readings that go unnoticed by everyone else. Before he can bring this data to anyone's attention, the nuclear plant suffers a major catastrophe; the three silos collapse into the earth. But Joe suffers a greater loss; the loss of his wife to radiation during the accident.

The story leaps ahead 15 years. Brody's son Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) has returned to his home in San Francisco after serving in the Army, where he is greeted by his wife Elle (Elizabeth Olsen) and child enthusiastically. He isn't home long before he receives a call from his father, who has been arrested for trespassing on the premises of the former nuclear plant--now off-limits to the public. As Joe awaits bail, Ford flies to Japan to see his father, still haunted by the loss of his wife and still obsessed with the seismic anomaly he discovered years before. Ford, impatient with his father's inability to move on, asks Joe to accompany him back to San Francisco. The father insists he stay to unravel the mystery behind the nuclear plant. Donning protective suits, Joe and son wander through the former plant grounds. Joe then discovers the place isn't the radioactive site the Japanese government would have everyone believe after removing his headgear.

The two are eventually caught and incarcerated near where the government guards something top-secret: a "thing" not of this world, thrusting above the surface. The object begins to move and what it is connected to emerges from beneath the ground; a hulking, multi-storied creature that crawls on all fours (and sometimes flies), which embarks on a destructive ramble through the plant and beyond. In the carnage and chaos, Joe and Ford escape. Once the world learns of the rampage, the American Navy is alerted and assigned the task of confronting the creatures.

We learn the creature is a primordial, dinosaur-like beast who once lived deep in the earth but has surfaced in a figurative response to man's rapacious need for minerals and environmental plundering. We also learn the creature has a mate, who carries unhatched offspring in her glowing womb. The creatures feed on radiation and in their hunger for more, they turn to west-coast America, specifically San Fransisco (allowing Elizabeth Olsen to remain connected to the narrative). Why the creatures don't attack a nuclear energy-rich country like France is, I guess, beside the point. (It probably goes without saying that film-goers in this country need to see their own shores menaced; Parisians being crushed by monsters probably wouldn't elicit much sympathy from American audiences).

As the creatures arrive on the west coast, they begin their savage tour of destruction; the U.S. military powerless to stop them.

Meanwhile, the American navy tracks another large creature moving slowly under the ocean; its vertebrae riding ominously above the surface. The creature heads for San Francisco Bay and in due course it is revealed the creature is called Godzilla and has emerged to re-set the balance of nature and more to the point; kick some monster butt in San Francisco.

The characters all become part of the drama, save for those who perish along the way. Aaron Taylor-Johnson is the movie-stud who becomes implausibly involved with the military in their various missions while Elizabeth Olsen is given little to do but stare with mouth agape at the gargantuan terrors kicking buildings around. Sally Hawkins seems lost in all commotion while Cranston often seems a little-over-the-top.

The battle commences, carnage becomes rife and what the hell it all means beyond mankind upsetting the balance of the planet not even Ken Watanabe's Dr. Ichiro Serizawa can answer. What it does mean for Hollywood is a franchise opportunity and employment for the legions of special effects crew hired to make San Francisco architecture look expendible and rubble-sexy.

I actually had to fight off the drowsies several times during the movie. I've noticed this has become a ritual for me during Hollywood blockbusters. That so much mega-decible racket could cause drowsiness means Hollywood may have developed an antidote to insomnia. Can't sleep? Godzilla just might challenge NyQuil for sleep-inducing supremacy.