Early Monarch

We were never big kaiju fans. We never watched modern King Kong or Godzilla remakes, like Godzilla (2014). It was Kong: Skull Island that got us interested. But that isn't why we queued up the 2014 Godzilla. We saw a preview and thought it looked fun. It wasn't until we saw "Project Monarch" on a memo that we realized.

It starts in Tokyo, with Bryan Cranston as the scientist in charge of a Japanese nuclear power station. He is concerned about odd seismographic readings, to the point of obsessions. He sends his wife (Juliette Binoche), a safety inspector, into the reactor to check it out. Then things start blowing up, and he has to lock her in the reactor, for reasons. So she dies.

In present day, Cranston's son is all grown up, played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Quicksilver). He is a soldier whose deployment has just ended, letting him go home to see his wife and son. But just as he gets home, he is called to Japan because his father, now nuts, is trespassing on the closed-down reactor.

So he goes to Japan and his father convinces him to check out the reactor. They find out that it isn't radioactive - that's a cover story to conceal the fact that a giant parasite has been growing off the nuke plant's radioactivity. So Ken Watanabe and his assistant Sally Hawkins take them into the secret Monarch program, and tell him all about the nuke test at Bikini. Godzilla and the MUTOs.

There is a lot of family drama in this monster movie. Eventually, we get Godzilla fighting the MUTO parasites, and stomping on cities, etc. And the style is very modern, sort of documentary almost. (Although there was a lot of rainy night scenes to cover up the CGI.) So we liked the action, didn't take to the whole multigenerational Daddy Issues stuff. 

I don't know what the rest of the world thought, but this movie didn't really spark the whole Monsterverse thing. Everyone took a step back, and deep breath, and knocked it out of the park with the next few movies. Glad they stuck to it.