It isn't the fault of the monsters, who are quite spectacular and who take part in at least one rousing battle in San Francisco. The problem is that every time the movie starts to pick up steam, we're forced back into the company of the dreary human protagonists, whose presence weigh down and ultimately sink the movie.
It all starts with engineer Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) witnessing the death of his wife in a nuclear power plant accident in Japan. Something destroyed the plant and the town that surrounds it; but the grieving Brody doesn't accept the official line that it's the result of an earthquake. He believes the Japanese authorities are hiding something big on the site of the disaster. In the years since his wife's death he's become a nutty recluse, clipping out newspaper articles about unexplained disasters and festooning the walls of his apartment with them.
Brody's obsession drives his only son Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) away from him, and the young man becomes a career military officer and starts a life of his own. Almost immediately after arriving home from a tour of duty in Iraq, Brody Jr. must leave his adorable wife Ellie (Elizabeth Olsen) and adorable son Sam (Carson Bolde) and travel from their home in San Francisco to Japan to bail his dad out. The police had caught Brody pere trying to reach his old home in the abandoned Chernobyl-esque town.
Meanwhile, Japanese Dr. Serizawah (Ken Watanabe) and his assistant Vivienne (Sally Hawkins) are introduced as researchers from an organization called Monarch, advising the military on the thing currently residing on the site of the ruined power station. Eventually they meet Ford and explain to him that his father, whom everyone had dismissed as a nut, was right after all; and that the nuclear accident was caused by a creature dubbed a M.U.T.O. (Massive Unknown Terrestrial Organism). There are two known M.U.T.O.'s, and a third creature known as Godzilla, last seen in 1954. The military had tried to destroy it with an H-Bomb, but it had no effect, and the effort was buried under the cover story of a nuclear test.
Serizawa believes the two M.U.T.O.s are trying to reach one another, and he suggests that Godzilla be allowed to intercept them. His theory is that Godzilla's role is to "restore the balance" to the world when things get out of whack, although there doesn't seem to be any evidence to support this assertion. "Let them fight," he urges the military.
The Navy, however, decides to deploy a nuclear warhead with a yield so great it will make the Bikini H-Bomb of 1954 look like "a firecracker". You'd think that dropping a 15-megaton bomb on Godzilla without doing any damage to him whatsoever would pretty much rule out any sort of nuclear option, but the film seems grimly determined to keep the Navy as an active agent throughout the movie. So the warhead becomes a kind of MacGuffin, a device that the military first goes to great lengths to deploy, and later, when it winds up in San Francisco and a threat to millions of people, spends just as much time trying to defuse.
In fact, through most of its running time the movie that Godzilla most closely resembles is not 1954's Gojira but 2012's Battleship, as the Navy keeps elbowing the giant monsters out of the way (Godzilla himself, it should be pointed out, doesn't even appear until a good hour into the movie). Like a lot of contemporary films the military is awarded an almost embarrassing amount of deference, as we are reminded repeatedly and emphatically that our heroes in uniform are brave, daring, competent and good-hearted people, and that there is no challenge they are unable to handle. The problem with this is embedded pretty deeply in the Godzilla canon: the military isn't able to handle Godzilla. The filmmakers try to get around this with constant displays of military prowess, and we see soldiers and sailors firing weapons and jumping out of airplanes and making hearty oo-rah speeches to one another (the Navy, in fact, gets far more screen time than the monsters). This ploy almost works; in fact, it's likely that a lot of audience members will walk out of the theater without it ever occurring to them that the military could have stayed home and the outcome would have been almost exactly the same. The only human character who has any impact on the story is Brody himself, and that is because of something done on his own initiative.
Brody's relationship with Ellie is clearly meant to be the emotional anchor of the movie, but it is perhaps the most dreary depiction of a military family ever put on film. Aaron Taylor-Johnson is a blandly good-looking guy of the Taylor Kitsch variety, and Elizabeth Olsen suffers from a debilitating and apparently terminal case of cuteness. Not cute is their pouting oaf of a son, who is kept around for the heartstring tugging scenes of daddy being reunited with his adoring family, scenes that carry the emotional weight of a MacDonald's commercial.
You may hear that this version of Godzilla is better than Roland Emmerich's 1998 version, and it is. But then, what movie isn't?
