(Warner Bros. Home Entertainment provided me with a free copy of the blu-ray I reviewed in this Blog Post. The opinions I share are my own)
I’ve been a Godzilla fan since I was a little kid, and like most fans I was more than a little intrigued when news broke there would be an American version coming out in summer of 1998. I’m not surprised Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich were tasked with writing and directing, since they hit it big the year before with Independence Day, and some success with Stargate (1994). I remember they kept the design of Godzilla under wraps for a long time, and then they had some kind of special where they unveiled the full Godzilla statue, or the action figure. I saw it on TV, but I can’t remember what it was a part of. I was psyched for this movie right up until that unveiling and the direction they went for the re-design was surprising to me. I didn’t take to it right away. I saw the movie in a theater and in some respects came away disappointed. Mainly because I felt I had seen it already in all the trailers. Godzilla lays waste to New York in this version, and he’s on screen in the first twenty minutes I think.
In the end I must have liked it to some degree, because I bought the DVD when it came out, and I do remember the best parts of that movie were the military battling Godzilla all over the city. It did make a lot of money at the box office, but in the end the audience didn’t take to it like the studio thought they would. A sequel was announced, and I thought that would be cool, but as we all know that never happened. I believe the ultimate failure of this version put Devlin and Emmerich in movie jail for a bit. I can’t recall another big budget summer movie they helmed after that. Hank Azaria’s camera man character was the only character I felt fit the movie. And what the hell was Matthew Broderick doing in a Godzilla flick anyway? One of the things I liked was how they slimmed down Godzilla, but overall his design just didn’t feel like Godzilla, especially that weird shaped head.
For me the ’98 version did not stand the test of time, some years later I got rid of my DVD and felt no desire to ever revisit it again. So, it genuinely shocked me when I heard America was going to take another stab at doing a remake. The trailers looked good, and I felt so confident about liking it I saw it in a theater instead of waiting for the inevitable disc release. My feelings about this are from 2014, which differ from how I feel about it now. I came away feeling of two minds, that it was better than the ’98 version and just as bad. Apparently, the bad outweighed the good, because when the opportunity came to review the blu I passed it up.
I had four issues with the movie, 1). Again the design. While it feels more Godzilla, I didn’t much care for how they restored his unseemly bulk. I still feel a more streamlined monster would be better. But this is America and “unseemly bulk” appears to be our bread and butter, so, yeah, he does on one hand represent an “American” Godzilla in this respect. 2). Bryan Cranston’s death. Cranston is a big star, and I’m a fan of his, and for all intents and purposes you’d think he was the main character based on the trailers. He dies roughly 30-minutes in, and the movie switches to his son, Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who’s in the Navy and ends up having to deal with the monsters in one form or another with the rest of the military. I found this character to be less engaging than Cranston’s Joe Brody, who’s a nuclear power plant engineer in Japan. 3). Not enough Godzilla. You could actually look at this as the only slow-burn Godzilla film ever made. There are other monsters in this he tangles with but those confrontations don’t come until the third act. 4). Most of these confrontations happen in the dead of night and are not well lit. I guess director Gareth Edwards thought the less we see of the monsters the cooler the fights are? Was the studio not confident in the quality of the CGI? If so, that makes no sense, because the computer effects were dead on cool and detailed.
It’s now seven years later, we have 4K ultra high definition in existence, and studios have been re-releasing their films in this format for some time, which has brought a second opportunity to revisit this movie, and I have to say even though I will acknowledge those four aforementioned problems I had are still “present,” they don’t seem to bother me anymore. I watched it last night and I enjoyed the movie a lot more. This might be because there was enough success accrued from this second remake to get two more American entries made this time, to date I have only seen the second, Godzilla, King Of The Monsters (2019), and in my opinion they righted the wrongs from the 2014 version to such an extent I ended up absolutely loving that film, and I’m roughly three months out from seeing/reviewing the final entry, Godzilla Vs. Kong (2021), which if those trailers are any indication, I’m going to love even more. So, it could be the superior sequels have added an extra shine to the 2014 version.
I was hoping Warner Brothers/Legendary would tweak the Godzilla design like Toho tended to do in their films, but they didn’t. It seems this new American design is set in stone, but I as I said I don’t find that a problem anymore. I’ve accepted it, and in a way like it the more I look at it.
This 21st century American Godzilla has a new origin. The ’98 version kept the one we all know, that Godzilla is a product of atomic bomb testing, a mutant basically that came about back in the mid forties. The 2014 version has been given one that feels a tad Lovecraftian in that Godzillas use to exist in a time upon the Earth before mankind, and there were other “monsters” existing alongside him, that mythos gets expanded in the first sequel with the term, “Titans,” but for this flick we don’t know that yet. M.U.T.O’s are what the other monsters are referred to as, an acronym for Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism, and for this first flick the only MUTOs we know existed alongside Godzilla are the two he ends up facing off with at the end of this movie. They appear to have the life cycle of an insect (egg, pupa, cocoon/chrysalis, adult), but the male adults are almost bat-like in appearance, at least with the wing make-up, while the females of this species are bigger and wingless. They also acted as parasites on the Godzillas that lived back in them primordial times.
Godzillas and MUTOs all appear to get sustenance from radiation, a concept kept from Toho’s movies, except in those films it was only Godzilla that fed on radiation. Here when the Earth was more radioactive it was easier for these things to thrive, as the planet cooled down and radiation levels decreased these creatures moved underground to feed on the radiation that they could now only get from emanations from the Earth’s core, this will lead to another expansion on this mythos in the third film to reveal there is a “Hollow Earth” landscape where all these creatures still exist. Looks like Jules Verne was right after all.
This is a film where it pays to pay attention to the opening credits, because there’s a prologue-ish history grafted within. The bullet points you’ll come away with were all those atomic bomb tests we did in the 40s and 50s was not the military just randomly testing their omega level weaponry, but them trying to annihilate this Godzilla monster! There’s a great extra on the disc titled, Monarch Declassified, which has three short featurettes, I recommend watching the first one, the other two will give away to much of film, if you haven’t seen it yet. But the first two features are structured like period piece training films that will educate you more precisely about how we came to learn of this “Gojira/Godzilla” back in those “atomic testing” times. And this was all covered up by the military, we the public were only told it was the routine testing of new weapons, when in reality they were trying to blow the fuck out of this creature.
Our human characters are (as I mentioned) the Brody family, after the credits the timeline jumps ahead to 1999, we meet Joe (Cranston) and his wife, Sandra (Juliette Binoche), who’s also a nuclear regulations consultant working with him at the power plant in Janjira, Japan where strange seismic activity has been recorded for the past few days. Happening at the same time is the accidental discovery of Godzilla fossils in a cavern underneath a mine in Honolulu. Within these fossils was a still living MUTO egg, but it hatched and crawled out before the government sponsored Project Monarch showed up to take command.
This film introduces us to Monarch, an organization bred from those first encounters with Godzilla in the 40s. Their initial mandate was to study Godzilla, but over the course of the sequels we learn they study, catalog and try to prepare the military, and protect mankind from encounters with other monsters that existed alongside Godzilla. The lead scientist we’re introduced to in this first movie is Dr. Ishirō Serizawa (Watanabe). This character pays homage to the original Dr. Serizawa in Godzilla (1954). His first name, Ishiro, however, pays homage to Ishiro Honda, the Japanese director of many Godzilla and other kaiju films. A Dr. Vivienne Graham (Sally Hawkins), is another Monarch scientist who works closely with Serizawa. Both of these characters are sadly killed off in King Of The Monsters.
This 1999 flashback is there to setup a family tragedy subplot as the power plant is attacked by the MUTO larva (unseen), and Sandra loses her life. The MUTO went there to feed on the nuclear energy and has remained in its ruins until 2014, in a pupa stage, absorbing radiation. It hatches as Monarch attempts to kill it, and its awakening, and subsequent echoing to a female that will soon hatch over in Nevada, USA, will also bring Godzilla into the mix. The introduction of MUTOs into modern day society has thrown a natural order out of balance, and Serizawa see’s Godzilla’s sudden appearance as a kind of counter balance that’s being struck.
Unlike the 1954 original, the 1985 re-introduction, and the American 1998 version, this movie isn’t about mankind taking on Godzilla, but Godzilla being a kind of unintentional protector of the defenseless humans that walk this planet against other monsters, something further movies of Godzilla’s Showa era began to lean into as he battled other monsters Toho created, with my least favorite of these films being very kid oriented. The 90’s Gamera remakes turned Daiei Film’s creation into a defender of mankind too, and I wonder if that franchise’s direction had some kind of influence on this new Godzilla movie?
One other thing I forgot to mention I disliked about the 1998 Godzilla was how they turned his atomic breath into a more fire-breathing weapon. I will say at least in this 2014 version they returned his atomic breath back to a weapon more line with what he was originally conceived as having, but he uses it only twice in this movie, to great effect I will too. Godzilla does unintentionally take out some humans that get in his way, I’m thinking of the Golden Gate Bridge encounter when he first arrives in San Francisco, bashing straight through it at one point as it’s crowded with humans attempting to flee the carnage.
The ending is upbeat with Godzilla returning to the depths after demolishing the MUTO’s and Ford reuniting with his wife, Elle (Elizabeth Olsen) and his little boy, The military on the other hand does not come off so well, their outrageous plan to nuke the monsters thankfully didn’t happen. Yes, they were going to nuke a bunch of monsters who gain sustenance from nuclear radiation. Jesus Christ.
I keep forgetting there’s a fourth movie linked to this Godzilla franchise thus in all reality making it a quadrilogy rather than a trilogy. Between this film and the first sequel is the flick, Kong: Skull Island (2017), an incredible setup for Big G’s tangling with Kong in movie number #4.
Warner Brothers Home Entertainment brought 2014’s Godzilla to 4K UltraHD/Blu-Ray Combo back on March 23rd! You can buy it here on Amazon!
Video/Audio/Subtitles: 2160p 2.39:1 ultra high definition widescreen—English Dolby Atmos, 7.1 English Dolby TrueHD, 5.1 German Dolby Digital, 5.1Portuguese Dolby Digital, 5.1French Dolby Digital, 5.1 Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1
Extras Included . . .
- MONARCH: Declassified – Discover explosive new evidence not contained in the film that unravels the massive cover-up to keep Godzilla’s existence a secret.
- Operation: Lucky Dragon (2:44)
- MONARCH: The M.U.T.O. File (4:29)
- The Godzilla Revelation (7:25)
- The Legendary Godzilla – Go behind the scenes with filmmakers and cast for an even deeper look at the larger than life monsters in the film.
- Godzilla: Force of Nature (19:18)
- A Whole New Level Of Destruction (8:24)
- Into The Void: The H.A.L.O. Jump (5:00)
- Ancient Enemy: The M.U.T.O.s (6:49)
PHYSICAL MEDIA LIVES AT . . . 