Godzilla (2014) (USA/Japan)

⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

In 1999 the Janjira nuclear plant is destroyed, Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston in a surprisingly small role) lost his wife and colleague (the same person, it’s not like there was a colleague who ranked the same importance as his dead wife) in the horrible incident. In the following years, Joe doesn’t buy into the government’s story about a natural disaster causing a reactor meltdown and has become obsessed with figuring out just what is being covered up. His estranged son Ford, on leave from the US Navy, is forced to come to Japan when Joe gets arrested after sneaking into the quarantine zone where he and his family used to live. Joe has come across some disturbing seismic readings which match up with what was happening 15 years ago when everything went to hell, so he manages to convince his son to join him in a little trespassing. His conspiracy is proven factual when they find the air clear of radiation but before they can dig around the site more, they’re picked up and brought to the shady government base set up on the site of the old nuclear plant. The agency running the show is Monarch, formed in 1954 after the first appearance of Godzilla and headed by Dr. Serizawa (the always welcome Ken Watanabe). Their main mission is to track and monitor this ancient beast and their interest in the disaster site stems from their discovery of a strange creature back in 1999 in the Philippines which hatched and then made its way to Japan, causing the destruction of Janjira. The thing has been in a cocoon for the last 15 years, absorbing the radiation but it is ready to hatch. The creature, named Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism (call it a MUTO) has a mate and has been communicating with it, finally hatching and looking to get its bone on. This would be bad news for all of humanity but luckily for us, Godzilla is around to restore the balance of things (he being an ancient apex predator and all) and is after these MUTOs as well. Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) spends most of the film trying to get back to his wife (Elizabeth Olsen also underutilized) and son in San Francisco. This gets him teaming up with a military unit attempting to get some nuclear bombs to where the monsters are meeting up to hopefully take ‘em all out (yeah, right.) The MUTOs are decent monsters and Godzilla looks fantastic. They tease us with monster action for most of the runtime as it’s all pretty much grounded from the perspective of the human characters, which is a neat idea but I’m glad they only went this route for one movie.