Review: ‘Godzilla’ from the Editor Chief

Posted on August 29, 2014 by sparxteam in Editor Chief's Reviews, Film/TV, Home // 0 Comments

The King of Monsters is back, but does this movie DO JUSTICE to Godzilla?

The story is of course as simple as ever, there are some unexplained events and two monsters emerge. Following it’s all up to the king of monsters (Godzilla of course, I mean I shouldn’t even write it) to restore the balance. The movie starts off great, they give you an interesting backstory and they set the mood in the first 15 minutes. One of the things I appreciated was they actually shows you the seriousness of what’s going on, which is the complete opposite of the 1998 Godzilla (lets avoid comparing the two shall we?).

Bryan Cranston gives one of the best performance since Breaking Bad and it immediately gives you all the tools to make this movie awesome. Although he isn’t your main character it still setups you up with Aaron Taylor-Johnson to lead us through it. This is where problems start to arise; you see he isn’t a bad actor, but I feel like he didn’t sell it this time, he was emotionless even when he is in front of the monsters, and I didn’t feel attached to this character at all, but the movie it’s pretty much all about him…so yeah…Lets start saying what I like and dislike about this movie.

POSITIVE(S): We’ll start with the positive things; the monsters looked great, Godzilla left me amazed, he looked massive and “when he was on screen” I was at the edge of my seat… you see those quotation marks? We’ll talk about it later…the destruction of cities, the locations, the aftermath, it was all impressive and it made me believe that a fight between giants took place (which is of course the purpose of a monster movie).

CON(S): Now what I didn’t like. I’ll start by explaining those question marks. For a movie called Godzilla you think that he will be the center of all, but no, he is in the movie for 10-15 minutes total, on a 138 minutes movie, now I know that everyone said that in the old Godzilla movies it was the same, but we are in 2014 and we’ve seen movies like Pacific Rim, a non-stop monsters vs robot movie, so it’s just not good enough.

Also because the movie has to concentrate on the humans you expect them to be interesting right? Wrong, pass the 45-50 minutes mark they become boring and they drag the movie too much. Furthermore the biggest issue I have is the fact that every time they set up a fight it would immediately cut-off to the humans, I get that they wanted to tease the fight but personally that caused frustration and the payoff wasn’t that satisfying. When you base your movie on boring characters it unfortunately goes downhill. So overall I’ll say this, Godzilla is a great movie with an amazing CGI, and I really liked Bryan Cranston’s character. Although this movie also has some issues that at some point kind of ruined the fun. Please, don’t get me wrong there’s more than a few amazing scenes from ‘The King of Monsters’ that will give you the chills.

In the end I felt like Godzilla wasn’t there enough and that I didn’t care about half the human characters in the movie.

The rating I give this movie is: 7/10