Godzilla: Gareth Edwards

If I take one thing away from Gareth Edwards' Godzilla, it will be a scene where a group of soldiers perform a HALO jump into the ruins of San Francisco. As they plummet towards a cauldron of smoke and flame, gas canisters release ribbons of red smoke behind them, marking their descents like a dozen small trickles of blood. It's a scene that feels -- dare I say it? -- Herzogian in its primal power and blasphemous beauty. If the entire film had managed to live up to this scene, then it could have ranked as one of the greatest monster movies of all time. There are fleeting moments of unabashed greatness in Godzilla: when the King of Monsters finally reveals Himself in all of His glory before bellowing His immortal roar, when he gets into a roar-fight with one of the MUTOs, when our stomachs twist in anticipation when His tail begins to glow blue, and generally any of the scenes where we get a worm's-eye view of the kaiju fighting. Gareth wisely films most of these scenes from the perspectives of people unfortunate enough to be trapped on the ground. By doing so, he truly drives home the feeling that these are forces of nature which mankind can only witness. I love how Godzilla is generally shown to be unperturbed by humanity; He doesn't go out of His way to destroy things, but if a skyscraper gets in His way or a battleship gets stuck on His tail, oh well...My problem with the film is that it is bogged down with many of the same problems that plague most American kaiju/disaster films: cookie-cutter characters invariably drawn into tired subplots about family members in danger, an odd fetishization of the military (there was a reason why it took a scientist, not a soldier, to destroy Godzilla in his debut film), and an over-reliance on human characters coincidentally running into people they know in gigantic, chaotic crowd scenes whenever the plot needs to get moving again. But as a kaiju film, Godzilla delivers the goods where it counts. Hail to the King, baby.

7/10