Something This Big Shouldn’t Feel This Distant

The cast looked like a dare. Bryan Cranston at the peak of his post-Breaking Bad cultural moment. Ken Watanabe. Elizabeth Olsen. Aaron Taylor-Johnson. Gareth Edwards directing a monster the size of a city block. Whatever concerns you might reasonably have had about a Hollywood reboot of Godzilla, that lineup made them feel small.

And the trailers—Christ, the trailers. Ligeti music over images of mass evacuation, Cranston’s voice cracking with grief and certainty, everything shot in a register that suggested the film understood what this story could be at its most serious: a parable about the arrogance of thinking you’re the apex predator on your own planet. Something ancient waking up to remind you otherwise.

The film itself is more complicated than either its defenders or its detractors want to admit. Edwards has a genuine gift for scale—the HALO jump sequence, soldiers falling through smoke and signal flares while two impossible creatures clash in the city below, is one of the best things I’d seen in a blockbuster in years. He knows how to withhold and then deliver, how to cut away at the moment of impact and let your imagination do the work. The problem is that the human story he cuts back to between those moments belongs to Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s soldier, who has the interior life of a loading screen. Cranston, who had actual electricity in every scene he appeared in, exits the film far too early, and everything that made the setup interesting leaves with him.

Ken Watanabe spent most of his screen time looking upward with sorrowful dignity, murmuring Gojira like a man who has read the script and knows things will not improve. Elizabeth Olsen was handed almost nothing and handled it with more grace than the material deserved.

But I’d be lying if I said the creature sequences didn’t do something to me. There’s a version of this film that’s one of the best monster movies ever made. The version that exists is uneven, frustrating, and still—at its best—genuinely awe-inducing. I went back for a second viewing just to see the HALO jump again. That probably tells you everything.