Ladies and gentlemen, we present Godzilla: The Review.
The Skinny
(No spoilers)
Should you see this movie? No, Hell No. You’re better off burning your $13 dollars in front of Little Orphan Annie.
Should you see this movie? No, Hell No. You’re better off burning your $13 dollars in front of Little Orphan Annie than spending it on this movie. Godzilla drags horribly, the main characters are extraordinarily drab, the action you pay for is in no way worth the price of admission, and there is an obvious lack of the title character: Godzilla. In what could have been a worthy homage to an iconic sci-fi character, we instead receive a sad movie that fails the “King of the Monsters” at every turn. If you see it, watch it on Netflix, but only if you are using it as background noise for vacuuming.
The Deep Dive
(Spoilers)
The tail lighting up and fire breathing were cool, though. But don’t get excited. It only happened twice.
Looking at Godzilla through a certain lens, it has two very different plots. The first involves the monsters’ awakening (these three are “Cloverfield’s Sister”, “Mothra-lite”, and Godzilla). Two of the monsters want to mate, and they travel the world looking for sweet nuclear fuel and places to make whoopee. Godzilla will have none of this, and intends to play spoiler by beating the hell out of both parties. Boom!
…and that’s half of the movie. Sure the movie says that he is there is “restore balance”, but truthfully: Godzilla just wants to pick a fight. I’m not mad at him. Let’s just drop the pretense.
The second plot involves the humans, who are desperately trying to kill anything that isn’t human. A number of the action sequences
involve humans firing bullets, missiles, and all sorts of objects at beasts that could not care less.
Now these two plots might not sound so bad, and they might even sound normal for the genre. However, there is one big problem: Neither plot
is executed well. AT ALL.
Monster plot
We are continuously shown showdowns between the two mating monsters and Godzilla; however, we are only show snippets of each fight (“Oh, they just starting fighting but the doors in front of me closed!”). Similar to the movie Cloverfield, this makes sense. Not seeing the actions builds anticipation and raises the stakes for the big battle to come.
The problem is that the big battle never comes. What does occur is short, underwhelming, and in no way lives up to the hype that has been building for two theatre hours. Were there a couple of cool scenes? Yes, no doubt about it. Were they worth the ticket? No way, no how. To make matters worse, we see far more of the two mating monsters than we ever do of Godzilla. For a movie named after the guy, you’d think he would get a little more screen time.
Human plot
I honestly can’t find one redeeming quality from this part of the movie. The movie bonded the audience to two characters within
the entire movie (Bryan Cranston from Breaking Bad, and Juliette Binoche from The English Patient) and then killed them off within the first 30 minutes. The rest of the time we are forced to watch people who elicit zero empathy from the audience (one being the kid from Kick-Ass, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, and “happiest” of the Oslen sisters, Elizabeth Olsen). It’s sad to say, but by the time the movies climax rolled around, I could not care less about the fate of anyone. By not linking the characters to the audience, the films fails to establish the stakes involved and the movie thereby lacks the drama necessary to sustain itself.
I get why you would want the humans to be ineffective against the monsters. That’s what makes monsters. But if this is the case, don’t spend so much time with the ineffective humans. It wastes my time and screen time, and removes us from what we all came to see: a giant lizard smash stuff. There, I said it!
When we buy a ticket to “Godzilla”, we aren’t expecting Shakespeare; just a decent monster movie. This movie fails at this task, and failshard.
The tail lighting up and fire breathing were cool, though. But don’t get excited. It only happened twice.