Unstoppable

Not a day after the premiere of Godzilla, a reboot of the 1954 Japanese monster movie, the snarky comments started up: Godzilla is fat! He’s taba-saurus! He’s got thunder thighs!

Why all the body shaming for a 350-foot lizard that has spent decades under the ocean sucking up radioactivity like it’s Duff Beer? So what if he’s the Homer Simpson of monsters, with a pronounced gut and a waddling gait as he knocks about Tokyo? Nothing a little Spanx couldn’t take care of.

Personally, I can get behind a monster with no body issues. He just shows up, with his atomic breath and beady eyes, and wreaks havoc.

But here’s the thing: director Gareth Edwards’ take on the Japanese franchise brings us back to the original Godzilla (Gojira in Japanese) who turned out to be more of a protector than a threat to Earth.

Anyone who sat through the many (laughable) sequels to the black and white Godzilla of 1954 as a kid knows that the creature’s personality began to mutate after the initial outing: from blind, destructive rage monster — metaphor of Hiroshima and nuclear testing gone awry — Godzilla became lovable, beloved mostly by Japanese children, who got to see the sea lizard as a savior of Japan, rather than its destroyer.

Why? Because other monsters started showing up, spawned by radiation, or drawn to Earth by alien powers: Rodan, Mothra, Ghidorah, et al. And they needed their asses kicked. So who you gonna call? Godzilla.

We get bits and pieces of this 60-year franchise in the new Godzilla (showing at IMAX for maximum 3D effect), which stars Bryan Cranston (Heisenberg with hair, so maybe more like Malcolm’s dad again), Aaron Taylor-Johnson (of Kick-Ass and Nowhere Boy fame), Elizabeth Olsen (the third Olsen girl), plus Ken Watanabe as a concerned Japanese scientist who puts everything in perspective (“Godzilla is here to restore balance of nature.”).

The film opens, intriguingly, in the Philippines, circa 1999. Watanabe and his partner (Sally Hawkins) investigate a massive sinkhole that contains the remains of an enormous beast — it turns out to be a dormant creature which they transport back to Japan, for some reason keeping it beneath the Janjira nuclear energy plant. (For some other unclear reason, this plant is located a couple miles from a Japanese grade school.)

Cranston is nuclear physicist Joe Brody, worried about strong electromagnetic pulses emanating from below Tokyo. But his efforts to figure out the mystery are cut short by a plant meltdown in which his wife (Juliette Binoche) is killed; his son Ford (Taylor-Johnson) grows up in the US after the nuclear disaster, while his father stays behind, convinced there’s a conspiracy.

Father and son meet up in present-day Tokyo, where they’re quickly brought up to speed: a large winged monster is coming to life below the abandoned Jinjira plant, and scientists are lying to the public about it.  (An obvious reference to less-than-forthright government radiation warnings in the wake of Japan’s nuclear meltdown in 2011.)

This winged monster turns out to be the runt of the litter; there are other beasties out there, all drawn together by electromagnetic pulses underground and a fierce craving for radiation, which is their main food source. The scientists dub them M.U.T.O. (or “massive unidentified terrestrial organisms”) and think of smart ways to get rid of them — such as feeding them more nukes.

Yes, in the tried-and-tested way of scientists from all 1950s monster movies, their only response is to blast the creatures with nuclear weapons — which proves problematic, as the monsters tend to just chew on the nukes like Cloud 9 bars.

Where Edwards excels is in presenting the scale of these monsters. Glimpses are kept brief at first — a leathery tail here, a spider-like leg there — gradually revealing creatures that are capable of decimating a city. When they do start rampaging — through Las Vegas and San Francisco, as well as Tokyo — it’s a fairly awesome spectacle. Shot from a street-level perspective, and often surrounded by smoke and moody lighting, the monsters of Godzilla do look convincingly unstoppable.

What keeps it a bit more grounded than Dean Devlin’s forgettable 1998 remake with Matthew Broderick is the human-level dilemmas — Olsen and son separated from her military husband Brody; a child separated from his parents on an elevated train, heading straight for Godzilla’s flicking tail. You care — a bit, at least — whether or not this family will be reunited.

The other thing that keeps this remake grounded is choosing to make Godzilla sympathetic. Rather than a lithe, lizard-quick T-Rex killing machine (as in the ‘98 remake), Godzilla here is simply a grumpy monster woken prematurely from a nap: cranky, and very, very hungry.

He may be a lumbering lard-ass, but there’s basis for Godzilla’s new appearance. The original movie featured a guy in a latex monster suit, after all, shot in slow motion as he tore up scale models of skyscrapers and power lines. Thunder thighs were there from the beginning. The designers reportedly wanted a look that crossed a Gila monster with a bear. With his tapered snout, beady eyes and shortish arms, Godzilla 2014 does fit the bill.

Naturally, there are some large-scale wrestling matches between monsters, and these are effective, but even more haunting are shots of military paratroopers streaming down into the city to fight the monsters, as Alexandre Desplat’s score echoes the Monolith music from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Or the sight of Godzilla lurking on the horizon through a string of red lanterns in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

At times, the pace of Godzilla is as lumbering as its monsters, but it does stay faithful to the spirit of the original 1954 Toho production. Waddling gait and all.