Greg Cox - Godzilla

[kooshmeister]

In the Philippines, in 1999, a group of scientists from a group known as Monarch arrive at a huge mine that collapses. The scientists, led by Dr. Ishiro Serizawa, discover a huge fossilized skeleton of an immense prehistoric creature. Attached to the ribcage, they discover two enormous fleshy sacs, like eggs. One of which has hatched. Whatever was inside caused the collapse of the mine and promptly tunneled straight through to the ocean.

In Janjira, Japan, we meet husband and wife team of nuclear power plant technicians Joe and Sandra Brody. The two Americans work at at a Japanese power plant while their son, Ford, attends school. Joe has been tracking mysterious earths tremors coming from the Philippines, concerned about their effect on the plant. That day at work, they rock the facility, and an evacuation is ordered. During the collapse of the plant into a massive sinkhole, a fatal radiation leak kills several personnel, including Sandra Brody.

Years later, an adult Ford Brody is a bomb disposal expert and lieutenant in the US Navy. Returning from a tour of duty to his home in San Francisco, he is reunited with wife Elle and son Sam… only to get a phone call from the American embassy in Tokyo. Joe Brody has been arrested by the Japanese police for trespassing in the forbidden zone surrounding the collapsed Janjira power plant, which is off limits due to lethal levels of radiation. Catching a redeye to Tokyo, Ford bails his dad out of jail. It turns out that ever since the destruction of the power plant, Joe has been obsessed with what caused it, believing it’s linked to the tremors he detected. In particular, he thinks whatever happened is still happening there.

He’s been attempting to get to the Brodys’ old house in the forbidden zone to get his notes from that day to prove that the tremors are still occurring. But he keeps getting arrested by the cops who insist there is lethal radiation, but Joe thinks the Japanese government is hiding something. He and Ford go there and obtain the discs containing Joe’s notes, only to be arrested by the police. Instead of being taken to a civilian police station, though, they’re driven to the site of the old power plant, now run by Monarch and Dr. Serizawa, where the scientists are monitoring something inside of a gigantic cocoon. The thing hatches into a gigantic winged insect creature dubbed a M.U.T.O., which kills Joe Brody and destroys the facility and escapes.

Apparently, the creature is part of a long-extinct race of radiation-eating prehistoric creatures. It hatched from the egg the Monarch scientists found in the Philippines and has been developing underneath the old Janjira power plant ever since, absorbing all the radiation. And it isn’t long before the other egg the scientists found, which has been kept at a US military nuclear waste disposal site in Nevada since ‘99, also hatches, into a female M.U.T.O. Dr. Serizawa and Admiral William Stenz of the Navy are concerned about the two creatures mating and spawning an indestructible race of monsters.

But Serizawa believes they have a secret weapon, another prehistoric survival, the last of a species that once preyed on the radiation-eaters, and vice-versa, an apex predator he calls Gojira, or, rather… Godzilla. It is Serizawa’s sincerest hope that Godzilla will find and kill the other two monsters, saving the human race.

This was great; I missed the beginning (we arrived slightly late and came in just as Joe was being told about the seismic activity at the plant) and so I was nice to see what I’d missed, with Serizawa and co. finding the Godzilla skeleton in the mine.