Last year’s big Godzilla revival currently exists as one of the biggest hits of Bryan Cranston’s career, and the actor has spoken out about both his appreciation of the movie and all of its success. As it turns out, however, he does have one major issue with the film – and that’s the fact that his character is killed off so early in the movie.
Currently promoting his Amazon pilot Sneaky Pete, Cranston was recently a guest on the Nerdist Podcast, and it was while discussing his character’s surprisingly early check-out time that the actor expressed his major issue with Godzilla. He wasn’t even blunt about it in any respect, simply stating,
That character dying at that time was a mistake. It was. It was a mistake. I knew it when I read it. When I read it, I said, ‘Oh, page 50, this character - who is the emotional core, the center that was guiding the story up to that point – he dies? What a waste.’ And they kind of dealt with it poorly.
In the Gareth Edwards-directed feature, Bryan Cranston starred as Joe Brody, a nuclear plant supervisor who loses his wife in an incident and believes that there is something absolutely massive and dangerous developing in Japan. His research leads him to become estranged from his only son, Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), but the two are brought back together when monsters begin attacking the Earth. Unfortunately, Joe is killed right at the end of the first act, leaving Ford to move forward as the central protagonist.
While speaking on the podcast, Cranston noted that his disappointment about Joe’s death is not selfish in any capacity, adding, “Even if I wasn’t doing this role, that character shouldn’t die at that point. That’s just bad narrative.” In fact, he even supported the idea of Joe dying in his own personal vision of the story; the difference is that he would have had it happen much later in the film. Cranston explained,
That character should have been with his son, and they should have started to bond a little bit more, and they went on this journey together to go back home and be reintroduced to his grandson. And just when they’re bonding, and like they can have a relationship, the father sacrifices himself to save his son. And that’s the way he should have died.
At this point, you may be wondering why Godzilla wasn’t able to change things around to fit Bryan Cranston’s requests – given that what he’s saying is 100 percent correct - and the answer is that his complaints were registered too late in the movie-making process. His commitment to Breaking Bad resulted in him being one of the last actors to be added to the movie, and by the time he voiced his concerns the whole production was “too far down the road.”
The death of Joe Brody was definitely one of the key issues in Godzilla - even beyond its timing in the script (the sequence where he dies makes absolutely no sense). That being said, the film is an enjoyable piece of blockbuster entertainment, and a cool franchise re-starter. Hopefully things of similar natures will be handled better in Godzilla 2.
