"The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles … hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages … And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn’t going anywhere. WE are!"
George Carlin
We are small creatures. We are, compared to other large animals, fur-less, claw-less, and fang-less. We run slower than most four-footed creatures. We can't breathe underwater, even though that's 70% of the surface of the planet we live in. The only thing impressive about us is that we can build whatever it is that we lack physically and use that for protection, food and mating. And, even that can be dwarfed by a planet that really doesn't care about our survival, as individuals or as a species.
Gareth Edwards' Godzilla presents us, even the most powerful of us, as insignificant ants whose nuclear power started the whole mess to begin with, and then uselessly scurry around trying to keep our own mistakes from killing ourselves. While a primordial, giant lizard/dinosaur actually solves the problem. Every visual in the movie tries to show how Godzilla and his enemies, monsters called MUTOs (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism), are just on a different scale from humans. In terms of size. In terms of strength. In terms of endurance. Godzilla and the MUTOs he fights are literally creatures that have survived for millions of years before even the dawn of primates. They evolved at a time when the Earth's surface radioactivity was much higher, and the Earth itself a tougher place. So they evolved to survive this radioactive, probably highly volcanic world. A world you and I would last, maybe, five minutes in.
The movie, overall, feels like Rosenstern and Guildencrantz Are Dead, the modern re-telling of Hamlet through the eyes of bit players who die mid-way through without ever understanding what was going on. We, humans, are the bit players, while Godzilla as Hamlet handles the male MUTO as his murdering uncle, and the female MUTO, as his enabling mother. Aaron Taylor-Johnson, as Lt. Ford Brody (parallels to Chief Brody from Jaws?), just happens to have a constant front-row seat on the action in every location, ostensibly to get home to his family in the monsters' rendezvous point of San Francisco. As he faces near-death along every step of the way, he spends the movie getting progressively dirtier and more beat up. He's set up as a human counterpart to Godzilla. While Godzilla battles the MUTOs, destroying multiple cities as he does so, and facing human fire because no one realizes he's just there to help, Ford Brody must live through every battle, saving a few lives along the way where he can, too. Ford and Godzilla share a special moment in San Fran, as Ford has just destroyed a new generation of MUTO fetuses, and Godzilla is nearly defeated. They share a long look, with both realizing that they'll just have to keep going, no matter how tired, dirty and hurt they are. As the movie's final battle ends, both Ford and Godzilla collapse together, Ford clearly feels Godzilla's pain and exhaustion.
Ford's father, engineer Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston), is set up as a major character, but we lose him about 1/3 of the way through. An emotional man, whose own wife describes him as a maniac, and wants birthday kisses every day, he's devastated by his wife's death while examining a nuclear plant in Japan. His crazy obsession with what authorities are hiding at the old site is partly to acquit himself of responsibility in her death, and Ford is clearly jealous that he lost his mother that day, as well as the attention he should have gotten from his Dad after. Their conversation in Joe's depressing, conspiracy theorist apartment in Japan demonstrates that Ford just wishes his Dad would concentrate on the family he has, and not the one he lost. But Joe Brody is on a very emotional mission, and his ranting after he gets caught (again) wandering around quarantined areas is the only emotional scene in the whole movie. Once we lose him to the first, male MUTO, it's like the emotion just gets sucked right out of the movie. We are left with a Japanese researcher, Dr. Serizawa, played by Ken Watanabe.
Dr. Serizawa's contribution is to amble around, shell-shocked, at everything he sees and hears. He also acts like a prophet no one will listen to, who ends up right in the end. His assistant, Dr. Graham (Sally Hawkins), can only show worry and fretting at everything happening. She basically does all the grunt work, so Dr. Serizawa can come on-screen and make a tortured announcement that leads the US Navy to watch a monster wreck even more havoc.
Almost as useless are Ford's wife and son. Elle is played by Elizabeth Olsen (yes, one of those cute twins from Full House). She's basically playing the same character she played as a baby, in charge of staring wide-eyed at anything that might threaten Ford as he makes his way home, and making comforting sounds to their son, Sam. The scenes where she runs frantically around San Francisco, trying to evade the great Kaiju battle, are really her greatest contribution to the film.
The film is also populated by various military people from the Navy and Army (Air Force too?), as they uselessly scramble to stop the Kaiju in Hawaii, Nevada, and California. Whether on land, in air, or sea, no one is a match for creatures that can create an EMP that fries electronics, and bullets just annoy the monsters, known as Kaiju to fans. Missiles probably feel like papercuts to them. If the movie is trying to demonstrate that our armed forces will bravely fight any battle that retarded military planners give them, it succeeds brilliantly. Eventually, they realize that humans are really only useful at setting up distractions for the MUTOs until Godzilla can come and really deal with them.
Where the movie succeeds best is in showing, visually, just how insignificant we are, and how little any of us can really see of the Kaiju. Shots of the monsters are, rarely, the kind of overall pans that would reveal their whole bodies, unless that's what a human character is seeing. When humans are up close, we see these monsters as we really would; in huge parts that we have to evade if we want to live, through hazes of smoke and dust from collapsed buildings. When Ford participates in a HALO jump from 30,000 feet, he must jump through two sets of clouds, with no idea what he'll see or what he's free-falling into until he passes those smoke and dust clouds over San Fran. Turns out, he has a front-row seat for Godzilla's battle, and the shaky camera shows him falling past Godzilla, only able to take in one body part at at time. When MUTOs get really up close and personal with him, the focus is on their red, glowing eyes, the better to show how malevolent they are.
When Dr. Serizawa finally convinces the US Navy Admiral Stenz (David Strathairn) to just let the Kaiju duke it and focus on getting a lost nuke out of San Fran, Dr. Serizawa basically pronounces the point of the movie, reminding us that we don't control the Earth. We just live here, for as long as the Earth feels like having us. Ford and Godzilla recuperate on a sunny day by the Bay, each trying to pick up the pieces left.
When Godzilla finally feels up to leaving San Francisco, a grateful city cheers his survival and return home. In setting up the franchise for later sequels, Edwards has firmly established that Godzilla, while too huge for human safety, is a protector. Not of humanity. Godzilla, like the Earth, doesn't give a shit about us. Godzilla is here to protect the existing equilibrium of the planet, because we can't.
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