Chris At The Pictures: monster

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Wednesday, 6 June 2018

'Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom' - Review

toby jones 6/06/2018 10:42:00 pm 0

★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

The park has gone and so has all direction and imagination in this interminable continuation of the Jurassic Park franchise. With neither the depth of Spielberg’s first adventure, the scare factor of his under-appreciated sequel, nor the nostalgic charm of 2015’s Jurassic World (the less said of Jurassic Park III, the better), this entry settles for retreading old ground. With the facility at Isla Nublar in ruins (again), a shady businessman plans to airlift the dinosaurs back to the mainland (again) in order that they may be exploited for military purposes (again), and also to spite his more aged and more peace-loving mentor (again).

As for our heroes, Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) is now a stringent dinosaur-rights activist, and she begrudgingly recruits Owen (Chris Pratt) to assist in saving the remaining dinosaurs from Isla Nublar’s suddenly active volcano. That is, before the doomed creatures are plucked from deliverance by Rafe Spall as the aforementioned suit, armed with a smile as untrustworthy as your average social media privacy policy.

Director J.A. Byona and cinematographer Óscar Faura do their best to bring some semblance of awe to proceedings, but returning screenwriters Colin Trevorrow and Derek Connolly’s script suffocates the Spanish duo’s usual flair for likeable characters and haunting imagery. There are some glimpses of the young Richard Dreyfuss in Pratt’s portrayal of Owen, but not enough to prevent him slipping into Star Lord-lite. Howard goes all in on the running (appropriately booted this time around) and screaming, and is easily the most watchable human presence. A new sidekick played by Justice Smith is immediately annoying, and his disappearance from the middle act would be a relief, were it not another indicator of the feckless screenplay losing track of who’s where and why.

“Why?” is a question I found myself asking a lot during this film. Mostly “Why aren’t I just at home watching Jurassic Park?”. The re-heated narrative structure, knock-off set pieces (we’re treated to re-runs of the museum showdown and The Lost World’s downtown dinos), plus a perfunctory appearance from Jeff Goldblum continuously serve to remind us of movies we’d rather be watching. And it’s never scary. Not once. My entire generation can attest to the nightmares of poor Eddie being bisected by the T-Rex pair in The Lost World, and the most this softened rehash can muster is ‘occasional bloody moments’. A largely dialogue-free prologue featuring some truly stunning imagery of monsters in the moonlight is the closest we come to genuine thrills, which is more than can be said for the genetically-enhanced ‘Indoraptor’, introduced by Toby Jones doing his best Donald Trump impression.

This creature is another of the screenplay’s walking clunkers: it’s sold to us as the fusion between Jurassic World’s Indominus Rex and a Velociraptor. A key plot point of the previous film was that the multi-breed Indominus was part-Raptor, and could therefore weaponise Owen’s pack against him. Did they just add more? Extra raptor with your half-raptor, sir? The Indominus - while not particularly chilling - served as a neat analogy for Hollywood’s misunderstanding that bigger equals better. The Indoraptor’s purpose seems to be to remind us that...er...rich people can be greedy and stupid? I don’t need the film to tell me that: that it exists at all is proof enough.

Saturday, 14 April 2018

'Rampage' - Review

video game 4/14/2018 10:30:00 pm 0

★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆

Within the first ten minutes of Rampage, a giant mutant rat has downed the space station and a gorilla has given Dwayne Johnson the middle finger. What’s disappointing is that the remaining 100 minutes of this loose video game adaptation never quite live up to the ridiculousness of the opening. Johnson plays Davis Okoye, the world’s hunkiest primate specialist, who cares for the captive albino silverback, George. When aforementioned satellite comes crashing down to Earth, containers of a super-pathogen find themselves spread across America: in an alligator swamp, amongst a pack of wolves, and in George’s enclosure. Once exposed, George, a ‘gator and the alpha wolf begin an inexorable growth to giant size, possessed of remarkable genetic traits such as advanced regeneration or - in the case of the wolf - the ability to fly.

With all three headed on a collision course (George escapes captivity and becomes a target, much to Davis’ horror), it’s not hard to see where this will all end up. The Rock re-teams with San Andreas director Brad Peyton here, and the general attitude of their previous work has transferred well. Peyton wields Johnson’s uncrackable charisma like a sword of pure charm, and helps sell our musclebound hero’s interaction with the unfortunate George (portrayed in the early stages of the film through motion capture). Naomie Harris costars as Kate Caldwell, a discredited geneticist who tags along to unload handy exposition. To the films credit, she’s not a love interest and is clearly much smarter than Davis, but is sidelined by Peyton’s alternating devotion to Johnson in a tight t-shirt and the sight of George punching a giant wolf in the face. A sight which, if we’re all being honest, is what we’ve paid for.

The argument always levelled at the critics when movies like this inevitably fail to draw great write-ups is “you’re just supposed to turn your brain off and enjoy it”. For once, I agree with them...to a certain extent. Though the onanism of this genre’s usual suspects (Bay, McG, Snyder) is absent, Rampage still retains a total disregard for civilian casualties (the stunningly realistic toppling of a massive Chicago skyscraper is very disquieting), plus that very odd Transformers loophole where the military’s combined attempts to fell a giant monster consistently fail, yet Davis and his gorilla buddy alone are enough to trump them.

Which brings us to Malin Akerman’s villain and her pet brother (Jake Lacey). They’re multimillionaires who plan to reap huge amounts of money at the expense of the civilian population, also falling prey to an investigation by the authorities(!). Their introduction does bring everything to a screeching halt, but it says a lot that we’ve now reached the point where villains who - barely five years ago - would have been dismissed as caricatures now appear real enough that we delight in their downfall. That we’ve no sympathy for them at all is unsurprising, but how much we feel for the unfortunate George is a welcome shock, at least until he becomes responsible for most of the debris.

This final section of the movie (during which everything and everyone falls down or blows up at least three times) is undeniably entertaining, even if it doesn’t quite give into its premise with total abandon: introducing a growth- enhancing MacGuffin and The Rock in the same movie yet never uniting the two feels like a missed opportunity. Nevertheless, for a film where someone literally says “Thanks for saving the world”, it’s never two minutes shy of a good guffaw, cheap thrills or, at the very least, an expensive demolition display.

Sunday, 25 March 2018

'Pacific Rim: Uprising' - Review

uprising 3/25/2018 09:31:00 pm 0

★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

In a move designed seemingly to please only the signatories of internet polls, this drift-incompatible sequel to 2013’s monster mash has double the action but half the charm. The Kaiju threat has returned, and now Jake Pentecost (John Boyega), son of the late great Stacker (Idris Elba) must begrudgingly rejoin the Pan Pacific Defence Corp and assist old drift partner, Lambert (Scott Eastwood), in training a breed of new recruits to pilot the giant mechanoid Jaegers against the aliens.

Guillermo Del Toro’s fling with giant-sized filmmaking did a lot of things (bring smiles to lovers of Godzilla movies, prove you could make a movie about robots punching each other an enjoyable experience, and allow Ron Perlman a fine slice of ham), but ‘demand a sequel’ wasn’t one of them. It was a flight of fancy; a chance for the Mexican director to take a break from horror and pay his respects to long-gone titans of entertainment like Ray Harryhausen and Toho. When Del Toro spoke about the Jaegers, he carried a gleeful geeky grin as he waxed lyrical about their fusion of World War 2-era aesthetic and futuristic tech. He sweated the small stuff and ensured the giant mechs had personality, or as much personality a honking, creaking mass of metal and gears can have. When one arrived on screen, a sense of perspective and scale was maintained by low-angle shots and thundering sound design. Now, the revamped Gypsy Danger is slimmed-down, polished to a mirror shine, and wields a lightsaber-esque sword; little more than a Lancaster Bomber turned Megazord.

That awe-inspiring sense of scale is abandoned almost entirely here. Save for a few quick shots of giant feet threatening to crush faceless civilians, most of the combat is shot as though the robots are the characters. Entire city blocks are demolished with all the impact of collapsing card castles, and there’s no moment to equal - let alone top - the moment from Del Toro’s original where Gypsy Danger wields a cargo liner like a baseball bat and wallops a Kaiju in the face. Dan Mindel’s (Star Trek, Star Wars: The Force Awakens) grainy cinematography works wonders with the in-cockpit action and physical props, but reduces the Jaegers themselves to little more than weightless action figures.

That’s in the moments his images survive the atrocious editing, anyhow: this is a film not so much cut together as hacked and shunted into something vaguely resembling a coherent whole. It takes an awful lot for a film to dump the vacuum of charisma that is Charlie Hunnam and somehow get worse, but Uprising is just that: a lot. The narrative moves at a ridiculous pace, squashing at least three hours and change worth of plot, subplot, character building and sequel setup into less than two. We barely have time to get acquainted with our new batch of Jaeger pilots before moving on to more of Charlie Day’s gurning, then whip-panning back to Boyega and Eastwood sweating at each other.

Boyega, mountain of engagement that he is, almost singlehandedly ropes everything together with bravado and some expertly-timed delivery, but is overwhelmed by the film’s insistence on pushing past him to the next scene. Eastwood is there purely to grin “Hell yeah” every once in a while, and Day has all the personality squashed out of him. Newcomer Cailee Spaeny (playing a Rey-like scavenger who cobbles together her own miniature Jaeger) has just about enough room to make an impression, but falls victim to the film’s preference for breaking over building.

No-one’s going to hold up the original as a bastion of great characters: Hunnam’s Raleigh Beckett and Rinko Kikuchi’s Mako Mori (the former is absent without explanation, the latter appears for little more than a motivational cameo) were thumbnail archetypes, but they were deliberately and almost brilliantly so. You didn’t leave the cinema struggling to remember their names, unlike the cast of Uprising, who are barely permitted three sentences before another plot thread has them carted off-screen.

That’s not to say there isn’t the ghost of a good time banging around inside the shell: Burn Gorman returns as the cantankerous Doctor Gottlieb, and is having a great deal of fun stuttering through the scenery he’s chewing, A brief moment of quiet that pits John Boyega against the contents of an ice cream-filled freezer while Eastwood looks on is pure deadpan joy. Humour on the whole is rather broad here, comprised of scale-game gags involving the Jaegers and some oddly dated internet references (including an appearance from Eduard Khil’s “I Am Very Glad, as I'm Finally Returning Back Home”). The very instant the BBFC warning for ‘rude gesture’ appears, you’re counting down the minutes until inevitable payoff.

Yet by the time even that promise is sealed, too many others have been broken. Everyone involved from director Steven S. DeKnight to Boyega (who shares a production credit) talks loud and proud about honouring the original, but the (and I can’t relive I’m typing this) legacy of Pacific Rim is not so much respected as ransacked. Del Toro’s enjoyable homage to the monster movies that fuelled his imagination as a child is now soiled by needless expansion, and I can’t for one moment imagine he’s truly happy with the dead weight which will forever drag down his blockbusting indulgence. Pacific Rim didn’t need a plot, and Uprising’s ruthless determination to create one betrays its true form as an empty machine in search of a soul.

Saturday, 27 May 2017

'Colossal' - Review

tim blake nelson 5/27/2017 08:01:00 pm

★ ★ ★ ½ ☆

Far from neglecting the trappings of either monumental blockbuster or dry satirical comedy, Colossal wears its bizarre premise proudly on its sleeve. Largely, it’s all the better for it. Anne Hathaway plays Gloria, an alcoholic who is kicked out by her boyfriend, Tim (a fantastically clipped Dan Stevens), and heads back to her old hometown. Waking from a particularly rough night, Gloria turns on the TV to find a giant monster has trampled over the city of Seoul. But that’s not the weirdest discovery: after watching the creature for several days, Gloria realises it’s imitating her drunken movements as she wanders through the small town’s playground, even performing her unique nervous tic.

There are many things I really like about this bizarre curiosity of a film, even the bits that don’t quite gel. I love that it almost evades marketing in any way. Oh, the poster’s rather great (and will probably adorn a rather snazzy steelbook someday), but watching the trailers try to effectively echo its offbeat combination of crowd-pleaser and arthouse oddity is almost as fun as watching the film itself. I also love that director Nacho Vigalondo gets Jason Sudeikis to play against type so deceptively. He’s playing a childhood friend of Gloria’s, Oscar, who offers her a job at his bar and tries to help her get back on her feet. On a surface level that might not seem much of a stretch, but the role grows into something far different by the third act. I’m not sure I totally bought what that role becomes, but it certainly adds spice and allows for some great glaring between he and Hathaway.

The whole film has a blindfolded taste test feeling that brought me back to watching student previews during my early uni years, such as The Double, Frank, or Life After Beth. These were films that offered not only a break from packed multiplexes and sweaty club nights, but an anticipation that comes only from something deliberately different. ‘Anne Hathaway is a kaiju’ now rests alongside ‘Jesse Eisenberg has a clone’ and ‘Michael Fassbender has a papier mâché head’ in my personal canon of ‘Strange Premise, Stranger Film’.

And Colossal is strange. At times delivered as mumblecore drama, at others improv comedy, the film demonstrates remarkable reservation with its monster stomping. The rules of Gloria’s connection with the creature are established without contrived exposition, it’s something that we discover with the characters, and there’s no better guide than Hathaway. I’ve sorely missed her on-screen since Interstellar (I never caught The Intern, nor Alice Through the Looking Glass), and the wait has been more than worthwhile. I’m honestly not sure who else could carry the film through its few misjudged moments, or make me believe in a character who can show remorse for people thousands of miles away but seems incapable of calling her boyfriend back to say sorry.

It would be relatively easy for Colossal to thrive purely on Hathaway and Sudeikis’ grimacing or its water cooler premise alone, but it’s got far more to offer than that. The monster’s appearances, perpendicular to Gloria’s struggles with alcoholism, can be read in any number of ways. Whether it’s the not-so-subtle comment on self-destruction, what our idiocy does to people we’ll never even meet, or the somewhat deeper allusions to power as a corruptive force. One could even read the film as a comment on (stick with me here) what America does and doesn’t contribute cinematically to the rest of the world. Indie films (like the drama inhabited by Hathaway, Sudeikis and Stevens) rarely make it across the border, with US cinema represented abroad only by Hollywood behemoths (like the rampaging monster swatting helicopters from the air).

These themes do get a little lost amongst the clatter of the climax, but previous exploration of them was so restrained that I forgave it. I’m unsure whether these final moments exist purely keep mainstream audiences in their seats, but as a gentle nudge into summer tentpole season, it worked. Colossal should be appraised for refusing to skimp on shiny spectacle, but never letting it blind a genuine harmony of digital bombast and dramatic buoyancy.

Friday, 17 March 2017

'Kong: Skull Island' - Review

tom hiddlestone 3/17/2017 09:47:00 am

★ ★ ★ ½ ☆

We wave a cheerful goodbye to awards season and prepare for the imminent onslaught of summer blockbuster season with this, the latest incarnation of King Kong and the second in Warner Bros. monsters shared universe. If even half of the franchise properties headed our way in the coming months are as amiable as this fantastically enjoyable romp, we have little to fear.

Kong: Skull Island leaps a few decades past the usual 1930’s escapades and lands just as the Vietnam War is coming to an end, and so that conflict becomes the metaphor at the heart of the film. A band of US soldiers led by war-starved Colonel Packard (Samuel L. Jackson) and a constantly-sleeveless SAS tracker (Tom Hiddleston) are tasked with protecting a scientific expedition to a hitherto unexplored island in the Pacific. Brie Larson tags along as magazine photographer Mason Weaver (a decent attempt to knock Mark Wahlberg’s Cade Yeager in Transformers from the top spot of dumbest action movie names).

You’ll notice I just sort of stuck Larson on the end there as a footnote but believe me, that’s more appraisal than the film gives her. She’s mostly there to provide (admittedly very convincing) horrified stares and awe-inspired gawping. And, for most of the running time, we’re firmly with her. To use a phrase I promised never to use; this movie is a visual feast. Cinematographer Larry Fong – so usually stuck with adhering to the iron-grey sensibilities of Zack Snyder – makes full use of an eye-piercing colour palette here, creating a myriad of iconic shots that you just want to bathe in. Kong’s silhouette framed against a burning sunset, napalm explosions reflected in a grinning pilot’s aviators and a dozen others that I daren’t spoil ensure this film is at least a stylistic match for Gareth Edwards' Godzilla.

While the first of Warner/Legendary’s series was about the myth and mystery, Skull Island is all about the monsters. Almost no time is wasted on shipping our intrepid cast to the island, where they’re immediately set upon not only by the giant ape, but also by skull-faced lizards, enormous spiders, tree-like carapaces and all manner of creepy crawlies. The enormous success these creatures have on drawing the eye is commendable, not least because they distract from the risible dialogue (poor John Goodman’s professor is dealt a bad hand in expedition exposition from the start).

Luckily, clunky lines are often overridden by thunderous sound design or the music. Henry Jackman’s score plays much like his Captain America: Civil War album on shuffle, but it works fine. His part usually plays second fiddle to the jukebox collection of 60s/70s hits, just in case you forgot the whole thing was a metaphor for Vietnam for two seconds.

The military forces ill-prepared to face a jungle-bound enemy, extensive use of napalm, a sophisticated and resourceful indigenous populace and more (Hiddleston’s character is literally called Conrad, for goodness sake) create an analogy so heavy-handed they may as well have called the movie Viet Kong. But Kong: Skull Island is a film that thrives on lack of subtlety, on creatures and camp and its British hero slicing up giant lizards with a samurai sword. It’s one Wilhelm scream away from a classic.

Friday, 12 June 2015

'Jurassic World' - Review

vincent donofrio 6/12/2015 11:42:00 am

Steven Spielberg’s dinosaur extravaganza returns to the big screen in Jurassic World: Ian Malcom’s prescient tirade about re-incarnating the most extraordinary creatures ever to have roamed the Earth only to ‘slap them on a plastic lunchbox and sell them’ has been fully realised. Jurassic World has spent the last decade as a fully-functional pre-historic theme park, but dwindling customer satisfaction leads overseer Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) to engage in genetic hybridisation, creating the terrifying Indominus Rex. Whilst raptor-handler Owen Brady (Chris Pratt) attempts to explain why this is probably not a good idea, the newly-minted Indominus breaks free, and once again we’re back to Malcom’s ‘running and screaming!’

With a new director and an entirely new cast in play, it’s remarkable how familiar Jurassic World feels to Spielberg’s original: obviously, it’s the same old formula (corporate big-wigs create larger-than-life attractions, attractions break loose and attack people), but the new characters also seem to slot right into the gaps left by the original cast. For example, John Hammond is replaced by Irrfan Khan as eccentric park-owner Masrani, Alan Grant has been switched out for Pratt’s respectful raptor expert, plus Tim and Lex now appear in the form of Ty Simpkins and Nick Robinson as two fresh-faced children taking a vacation from their somewhat broken family.

This is not to say that the performances are only placeholder, as the cast in general is remarkable fun to be around and rises to the challenge admirably (even if their development is somewhat predictably linear). Howard and Pratt get a lot of laughs from their boardroom stiff versus muscle-bound man’s man shtick, whilst Vincent D’Onofrio is in fine, ever-smirking form as an In-Gen supervisor with his own suspicious motives.

But let’s face it, what you really want to know is: are the dinosaurs any good? The short answer is a hastily nodded, wide-eyed ‘yes’, but to explain properly we have to consider that the first Jurassic Park was at the cutting-edge of the CGI revolution way back in 1993, whilst this film comes at a time when almost any decently-budgeted movie can have its computer-generated cake and eat it. In Jurassic World’s case, the CGI dinos are certainly exciting, but their integration with their human opponents is the more impressive feat, and director Colin Trevorrow and his team have even opted for the occasional use of old-fashioned animatronics to help seal the believability (and provide a loving call-back to the original)

What is also invigorating about the monsters in Trevorrow’s film is that they are really, genuinely frightening; the moments in which the Indominus steps out of the shadows and into the fear-fuelled limelight are particularly striking. Amongst it’s somewhat tamer 12a bed-fellows, Jurassic World opts for the bloodier approach to monster violence, which not only allows it to feel in-sync with its predecessors, but also reminds us why the certificate was invented in the first place: to provide a bridge between kid-friendly action flicks and more violent adult fare.

This is everything you want in a popcorn-munching summer blockbuster: big effects, a good sense of humour, enjoyable characters and thrills to spare. Children who’ll flock to see this won’t care about flimsy dialogue or linear character progression, they’ll be far too busy gaping in awe at the vastness of the landscape or hiding behind their hands from the blood-curdling roar of titanic monsters: and that is exactly what a Jurassic Park film is for.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

Monday, 6 October 2014

'Dracula Untold' - Review

vampire 10/06/2014 04:19:00 pm 0

Dracula Untold is sold both as a re-telling of the Dracula story and the opening salvo to Universal Studios’ Avengers style monsters franchise. Luke Evans (The Hobbit) stars as Vlad, a battle-hardened warrior prince known as ‘The Impaler’ who is forced to make a terrible choice when Turkish Warlord Mehmed (Dominic Cooper) demands a thousand young boys to be taken as soldiers in his army. Unwilling to give up his own son and resigned to war with Mehmed, Vlad makes a pact with a Vampire Master (Charles Dance) to take on the powers of the night in order to defeat his enemies.

It is important to say that initially I had high hopes for Untold, as the primary trailer seemed to relay a refreshing take on the story with interesting concepts that could be examined and developed with the continent-spanning war as a dramatic backdrop. Unfortunately, what we actually get is essentially Man-Bat Begins, though to make a comparison to a Nolan movie would convey connotations to intelligence, which Untold is severely lacking.

This is not to say that there are no pleasures to be had: Luke Evans scrubs up well in his role, lending just the right level of physical intimidation and emotional weight to the character (plus he looks pretty swish in a dragon-emblazoned suit of armour) whilst Charles Dance picks the scenery out from between razor sharp fangs. The supporting cast leave a lot to be desired, but this may not be entirely their fault. The usually capable Dominic Cooper is saddled with uninspiring dialogue whilst Sarah Gadon as Vlad’s wife does her best but spends most of her screen time smothered in a facial expression that is supposed to be fear but looks more like boredom.

The cinematography is uninvolving and at times all over the place, the fairly interesting gothic production design not given enough room to shine. Action sequences are reduced to disorientating shaky cam that spins all over the place, cutting every two seconds, and at times I had a very hard time working out who was who because it just looked like a pile of medieval props having a fight with itself in a wind-tunnel. It also seems increasingly odd that in a post Lord of the Rings world where fantasy-era battles are grim and dirty that the lesson about hair was never learned: everyone in the Tolkein trilogy looked like they’d been through hell; the cast of Untold emerge from the field of battle with their hair gel still firmly in place.

Developments in the plot are laughably predictable, unsubtly foreshadowed or outright spelled out for the hard of thinking at the back. For a film based around one of the original inspirations of the Dark Knight, there are lines of dialogue directly stolen from Batman Begins (‘Men fear most what they cannot see’ etc.) and the poster campaigns also appear to be mimicking the 2005 blockbuster. But whilst Begins was an incredible setup for an epic trilogy, Untold is strikingly unremarkable as the beginning of a larger cinematic universe.

The overriding feeling upon emerging from Dracula Untold is disappointment. The concepts that held such promise are barely paid lip service and all but Evans and Dance feel wasted in a film that doesn’t have the willpower to deliver. I want to believe that said concepts will have time to develop in future installments, but I won’t hold my breath.

1.5 stars

Wednesday, 21 May 2014

'Godzilla' - Review

thriller 5/21/2014 08:20:00 pm

Godzilla is the new film from British Gareth Edwards, who broke onto the scene in 2010 with the low-budget creature-feature Monsters. Fifteen years after an accident at a nuclear power plant which claimed the life of his wife, Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) and his son Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) become entangled in a conspiracy to harvest power from a mysterious life form found on the Japanese coast. Before long, all hell breaks loose and the creature escapes as humanity is confronted with an enemy that could send them 'back to the Stone Age!'

On a purely visual plain, the film looks extraordinary. The realistic colour palette of iron greys and cold blues means that when the inevitable flames of battle appear, they are remarkably striking. The special effects of the Godzilla creature and the destruction that occurs in its’ wake are truly something to behold. We’ve gotten so used to movies with big alien monsters (Avengers Assemble, Transformers) crashing into buildings that you’d think this would be nothing special, but when those buildings become a stream of splintering dominoes, then you have a reason to gasp. The word ‘epic’ doesn’t begin to cover the sheer scale. If you don’t see it in IMAX, you’re missing out. The sound design (provided by the ever-reliable Skywalker Sound) is incredible, proving simultaneously that explosions don’t have to sound boring and repetitive, and that the Godzilla roar is one of the greatest sounds ever used in a movie.

Perhaps the most noticeable thing about the film is that, in a similar vein to Batman Begins, the film earns its ear-splitting finale by spending the proceeding hour/hour and a half doing its best to actually develop characters that you will still care about by the time the fighting starts. There is a great deal of screen time devoted to exploring their motivations, getting a feel for where they’ve come from, and then uses this to examine the climax from their perspective. The action set pieces are almost entirely shot either directly from a character’s own point of view or pans down from the monster to show the human characters interaction with it all. The air-drop sequence in particular (as shown in the preliminary teaser trailer) is a prime example of this.

While we’re on the subject of trailers, steer clear before seeing this film, because one or two of them will spoil some of the key surprises, and having only seen the teaser and initial theatrical trailer I’m glad I wasn’t in-the-know regarding certain elements of the story. The first half of the film itself feels like a teaser, and it is a long time before the Godzilla beast is fully revealed, but it was more than worth it. When he finally appears, it’s awe-inspiring, paying faithful homage to the 1954 original whilst avoiding the problems of the 1998 version.

As for the characters we spend time with before the crashing and banging starts, there’s plenty to enjoy here. Bryan Cranston proves once again that he is one of the greatest actors working today, his performance early on in the film creating a strong foundation from which the others can build. Aaron Taylor-Johnson is maturing into a fine actor, his uncertain but strong-willed demeanour reminding the viewer somewhat of his appearance in Kick-Ass, but with a gruffer edge. Elizabeth Olsen, taking a break from appearing in subversive, artsy films gives a functional appearance as Fords’ wife, and Ken Watanabe is great as usual, if a little underused.

While it’s certainly true that the plot jumps about the place a lot for the first half, dropping one character arc for another at a moment’s notice, it is this focus on character that elevates Godzilla above most monster schlock. Featuring an extremely enjoyable final act and a developing sense of threat throughout, it is a fitting rebirth of the ‘king of the monsters’ and gives director Gareth Edwards another chance to showcase his talent.

4.5 stars

Chris At The Pictures