Bryan Cranston has done multiple projects throughout his career; some of them quite brilliant, others failing to deliver up to the expected mark. For 2014’s action/sci-fi Godzilla, the latter was the case. Although it wasn’t a bummer, it wasn’t a massive success like last year’s Godzilla Minus One either, and even Cranston shares similar disappointment with the script of the film.
If anything, Bryan Cranston made it known that he found the entire movie’s script to be a ‘mistake’ from the beginning because of one key element about it: The character who introduces the viewers to the entire story and the one whom audiences presume to be the lead dies at the beginning without even giving the audiences a bond to root for.
Bryan Cranston didn’t like Godzilla‘s script because it had no bond to root for
While Kaiju storylines are usually masterpieces in themselves, they require the perfect human-monster balance to truly succeed among audiences, the way Godzilla Minus One did. And that’s exactly what 2014’s Godzilla didn’t quite have, and ceased to leave the mark it should have had.
Everyone who has seen Godzilla knows how it begins: Bryan Cranston’s Joe Brody loses his wife as a newly-hatched Kaiju triggers a reactor meltdown at the nuclear power plant in Japan that he monitors, leading to him eventually devoting his entire life to figuring out what caused that meltdown.
Since all of this happens at the very beginning, it might as well be said that it was Brody who introduced the audience to the unknown threat of Godzilla. This is why many were expecting him to continue the story as the lead as he was the very one who ended up unveiling the mystery.
However, while he and his son Ford (played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson) are seen investigating that very place in the initial stages of the movie, Joe Brody ends up getting killed in a tragic natural disaster caused by a new MUTO or Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism.
This is why, for one that began with Bryan Cranston‘s Scientist Joe Brody introducing audiences to the entire story, the film didn’t quite do justice to the character. And Cranston agrees, citing this very thing as the reason behind his disapproval of the film’s script.
Talking on the Nerdist podcast, the Breaking Bad star shared the same as he said:
“That character dying at that time was a mistake. I knew it when I read [the script]. When I read it I said, ‘Oh, [at] page 50 this character who was the emotional core at the center, that was guiding the audience in the story up to that point — he dies?’ What a waste.”
Because the character who was at the very emotional core of the story ends up dying literally at the very beginning of the story, no true human bond could be seen in the movie because there was no better storyline to continue worth rooting for than Joe Brody’s.
All of this was the summarized reason why Bryan Cranston was so disappointed with the film’s script and called it a bad mistake right from the beginning — because it gave the audience no human bond to root for, and thus, no story to truly relate to to add that humane essence to the story.
Bryan Cranston pitched a slightly different storyline for the same
Make no mistake: Bryan Cranston wasn’t disappointed with 2014’s Godzilla because his character dies, no. If anything, he had no issue with his character biting the dust, but he wanted him to have a proper storyline before eventually dying somewhere in the middle or farther end of the film.
Sharing his pitch to give that very desired effect in the Kaiju story, Cranston continued to say on the podcast:
“Just when they’re bonding and it looks like they could have a relationship, the father sacrifices himself to save his son. That’s the way he should have died.”
However, even after making them believe that it was indeed a “bad narrative”, Bryan Cranston couldn’t extend his character’s storyline because the production was too far along as he was the last person to get hired in the film because he was working on Breaking Bad.
Just like that, due to all these reasons, Bryan Cranston’s character spelled doom for him right from the start, and he couldn’t stop it, nor alter it, paving the way for Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Lieutenant Ford and Elizabeth Olsen‘s Elle Brody to continue as the protagonists instead (which, needless to mention, didn’t hold the depth that Cranston’s character would have, but what can be done?)
You can still watch Godzilla on Amazon Prime Video.
