Worse, the seismic patterns are similar to the ones observed 15 years ago. Something is talking, Cranston tells his son, and something else is answering back. The audience, by now, is primed for the best CG FX ever: Show us the money! In 2010, director Gareth Edwards amazed the world with a micro-budget giant monster picture with the generic title Monsters. Presumably he had 100 times the bucks for Godzilla, but he holds to the strategy of less is more. Monsters was better for what we didn’t see.
So was Cloverfield, which got away with depicting a giant-monster attack on New York City entirely through the lens of a video camera carried by ordinary citizens - it was The Blair Godzilla Project. In Godzilla, Edwards goes heavy on refraction: a piece of a mammoth spidery leg landing in the foreground, a spiky tail sliding between skyscrapers, a reflection of a demonic head in the window of a moving train. He does the Spielberg thing of dollying in on people whose eyes are goggle-y from what they’re seeing. Children clutching adults’ hands are especially effective subjects, and so is Elizabeth Olsen, with her waifish peepers on that flat, wide face. Edwards puts her at the forefront of crowds where she really registers, like a round-eyed-kitten painting.
The problem is that he - unlike most modern sci-fi directors, who throw so much CGI at you that they make miracles cheap - seems peculiarly stingy when it’s time to deliver. The buildup to the first creature, a spiderlike thingie with flaming slits for eyes and the endearing acronym M.U.T.O. (for “Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism”), is like a Gypsy Rose Lee striptease. Godzilla shows up later, also one bit of (green, scaly) skin at a time.
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