Godzilla: Waiting for Godzilla

Godzilla
Starring: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ken Watanabe, Elizabeth Olsen, Juliette Binoche, Sally Hawkins
Rated: 6/10
Godzilla, as the title of this monster movie suggests, is big, burly and quite with the muscle power. Only, it plays too much of a waiting game to bring Godzilla, the ultimate saviour, into full glory.
Director Gareth Edwards, known for his finesse and acumen with the larger than life Monsters mount, gets too bogged down by human quibbles in this one to unveil the real showstopper — the biggest ever monster fight between Godzilla and two rogue dinosaurian behemoths — till very late into the movie, actually till the very end. This waiting game played out over a whole lot of environmental mumbo jumbo about tsunamis not being caused by earthquakes but monsters waking up in the belly of the Earth, and the frequent switch from continent to continent makes Godzilla wait for his own arrival in his own movie. But once he arrives, he is awesome, bigger than imagination and, to top it all, the ultimate saviour of humanity. Of course, it takes some time to understand the evolutionary desperation of the monster prototypes and the lab talk around it, but once that is done and over with, it is a good soiree of 3D effects, technology pushes and awesome landscaping. All this saves the film from sliding into, well, the belly of the planet Hollywood.
Gareth does well to weave the human emotionalism well with all the computer graphics sweeping away the film which was long awaited by its audience, actually since 1998 when the original Godzilla made a captivating appearance on the big screen.
The father-son story of being torn apart by a radiation tsunami in Japan which takes away their main link, the wife-mother, is slickly interspesed by all the gadgetry and does well to keep the momentum from dying while the film takes a gargantuan wait to unleash Godzilla.
Godzilla, of course, has been dressed up gorgeously with those huge techtonic spikes that take your breath away even when the whole of him is not shown on the screen. In parts, paisa vasool, though I would have loved it if it was an entirely Godzilla concentrate.
Source: Sunday Pioneer, 18 May, 2014

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