‘Godzilla,’ unexpectedly, is the best monster movie since ‘Jurassic Park’

godzilla

RADIOACTIVE MAN | In Gareth Edwards’ surprisingly awesome film, the CGI-created Godzilla has more humanity than a sequel’s worth of Transformers.

ARNOLD WAYNE JONES  | Life+Style Editor

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3.5 out of 5 stars
GODZILLA
Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen, Ken Watanabe, Bryan Cranston. Rated PG-13. 120 mins. Now playing in wide release.
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Poor Aaron Taylor-Johnson — dude can’t catch a break. Sure, he appears to have been carved out of alabaster and leftover marble from Michelangelo’s David, gilded with Apple pie and puppy kisses. And yes, he has top billing in a summer tentpole movie.

Top billing, perhaps, but not the title role. That plum belongs to Godzilla, a 60-year-old movie monster who doesn’t make his appearance until an hour in this two-hour actioner. That’s star power: the ability to show up late to the party and still get all the chicks.

That leaves Taylor-Johnson as one of the most passive action heroes that modern moviedom has seen. This isn’t entirely a bad thing. Godzilla avoids many of the clichés of the traditional action film, even as it slyly reinforces some of its more appealing tropes. On the downside: The wife of Taylor-Johnson’s character, played by Elizabeth Olsen, spends most of the movie running while glancing upward with her big, dewy cow eyes (she also works in a hospital, as all female partners of movies superheroes are required to). And the explanation about the source of power for these mythic super creatures — that they feed on radiation — doesn’t fully justify the science of how eating and unexploded nuclear warhead would provide them with the energy needed to step all over San Francisco. And, like many action films of recent vintage, the stakes start out incredibly high — nothing short of world destruction and global financial collapse, as opposed to an isolated villain with a bug up his butt. They crash and flail and wreak the untold havoc of a toddler at a Toys R Us sale.

But overlook these miscues. Moreover, forget that abortive comic-tinged version from 1998. This Godzilla is one of the most satisfying monster movies since Jurassic Park.

It helps that we approach the film with six decades worth of backstory. The opening credits, a montage apparent classified newsreel footage from the early atomic era of the 1950s, become kind of shorthand superhero origin story. Godzilla and his nemesis, a giant winged arthropod code named MUTO, are remnants from an age when dinosaurs could feed off of radiation. MUTO has the ability, with the stamp of a talon, to emit an electro-magnetic pulse, essential bringing the whole of humanity into the stone age. How can you defeat a creature who feeds on the fallout from ICBMs?

Maybe Godzilla — as a Japanese scientist, played by Ken Watanabe, poses — can bring balance by attacking his natural predator on behalf of mankind — the kick-ass Yin to MUTO’s Yang. And just what are Godzilla’s superpowers? You have to wait and find out, but it’s worth it. (Hint: One of his best moves he learned from Muhammad Ali — an old-fashioned rope-a-dope.)

Godzilla has more in common with a classic monster pic like Alien than it does, for instance, Michael Bay’s Transformers franchise of CGI-induced headaches. Sure, there are special effects aplenty, but much of the real action is traditional chop-socky hand-to-hand, like the Toho Studio B-movies and Hong Kong action flicks that spawned the campy style of Godzilla in the first place.

But director Gareth Edwards, while honoring those cheesefests, also has a modern eye turned on the screen. Much of the battle scenes look like found footage, as if the Blair Witch went all Hollywood. It mostly avoids moralistic dialogue about whether it’s “right” to destroy these creatures (when Taylor-Johnson’s character, on his own initiative, decides he needs to destroy a MUTO nest, there’s no philosophizing about playing god; it’s Us vs. Them, and Us needs to win.) His apocalyptic view of a MUTO attack is frightening but not oppressively so, like Man of Steel felt. There are visual echoes to movies like The Birds that conjure up Hitchcockian unease about modern society, without getting heavy-handed.

Despite Olsen having nothing to do and Juliette Binoche being dispatched before you get two bites of popcorn, the cast gives a dignity to the proceedings that makes Godzilla feel high-class. It’s just too bad Taylor-Johnson never gets to take his shirt off — that much muscle deserves a proper focus, even if Godzilla gets the glory.

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chef

MIAMI HEAT | A chef and his son (Jon Favreau, Emjay Anthony) embark on a journey of self-fulfillment in the heartwarming comedy-drama ‘Chef.’

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3.5 out of 5 stars
CHEF
Jon Favreau, John Leguizamo, Sofia Vergara. Rated R. 115 mins.
Now playing at the Angelika Mockingbird Station.
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With a diet of radioactive isotopes, you couldn’t exactly label Godzilla a foodie; that title belongs to Jon Favreau, the writer, director and star of Chef.

Chef operates in a world where a schlub like Favreau can boast Sofia Vergara as an ex-wife and Scarlett Johannson as a girlfriend. (It’s also one where restaurants are informed ahead of time that a critic will be coming in to do a review.) But who cares about details like that? This is a feel-good tale of redemption, a banquet for the soul.

Carl Casper (Favreau) is a once-edgy chef at a respected L.A. eatery, who has allowed malaise to settle in at his kitchen. He longs to try more interesting dishes, but his play-it-safe employer (Dustin Hoffman) insists he stick with a boring menu: Lava cake, diver scallops, a caviar egg appetizer. When an influential food blogger (Oliver Platt) eviscerates him for losing his way, Casper has a meltdown that goes viral on social media and makes him persona non grata in the culinary community. Will Casper rediscover his passion, and finally become a good dad to his devoted but overlooked son (Emjay Anthony)? Have you seen a movie before?!?

We’ve seen the structure before, though usually the follow-your-bliss path is reserved for jazz musicians and surgeons, not cooks. It does not avoid all the cliches it could (the melancholy relationship with Vergara, who plays it close to the vest, Casper’s tone-deafness to his son’s needs, etc.) but the chef’s search for purpose is satisfying and largely real. There’s an overall authenticity to the food plot — Favreau-the-director treats us to visually delightful shots of exquisite dishes, which he contrasts cannily to the appealing-but-ordinary menu at his restaurant — and a tactile, romantic quality that never becomes cloying. The stomach truly is the way to a man’s heart — and an audience’s.

This article appeared in the Dallas Voice print edition May 16, 2014.