Alright, this review is going to contain spoilers, but I
want to devote this opening paragraph to providing a quick opinion for those
who still want to see Godzilla. It’s bad.
Really bad. And the trailers lied
to you. Bryan Cranston is barely in the
film. Godzilla himself is barely in the
film. There are some good parts in the
beginning fifteen minutes and some good parts in the last fifteen minutes, but
the other 95% of this film is pure garbage.
That 95% is about as bad as your average Transformers movie. I
strongly recommend that you don’t waste your time and money on this one. Still want to go see it? Then stop reading here, because it’s time to get
to the details.
The good parts in the film’s opening come down to two words:
Bryan Cranston. Cranston plays a man
driven to obsession by the loss of his wife in a nuclear power plant meltdown,
which he believes was caused by something other than a natural earthquake. Of course, he’s right, and just as he begins
to uncover the truth, the monster responsible, called MUTO, awakens from
incubation and starts wreaking havoc.
Cranston is by far the best actor in this movie, and he could have
easily carried the rest of the film’s cast… if he weren’t killed off before the
film’s first act is even over.
Seriously, the film spends a ridiculous amount of time establishing
Cranston as the protagonist, only to kill him off and shift focus to his much
less interesting son.
And let’s talk about this son, because he is emblematic of
just about everything else wrong with this movie. You see, the driving force of the plot in
this film is the emergence of two MUTOs that are destroying cities in an
attempt to get together and mate. The
son character, named Brody Ford (the most excessively American name I’ve ever
heard), is a member of the armed forces and works his way into the operations
to take down the MUTOs. And the focus of
the film is on him and his entirely bland personality. There is nothing interesting about this guy
or his motivation of reuniting with his family in the wake of the monster
attacks. It’s the same clichéd thing we’ve
seen in every disaster film ever made, and the film brings no character into
the picture to keep it feeling fresh.
Instead, we have a film about nameless military dudes
showing off their military hardware and ineffectually doing brave military
things against giant monsters. Now, I
wouldn’t mind the idea of a military-versus-monsters film except for one thing:
THE NAME OF THE MOVIE IS GODZILLA! Notice how I haven’t gotten around to
mentioning him yet? Well, that’s because
Godzilla is pretty much a background character in his own movie. In light of the MUTO storyline, he feels like
an afterthought, only showing up to fight them because… reasons. The film constantly teases a fight between
the MUTOs and Godzilla, but whenever the monsters are in close proximity to one
another, the film cuts to the aftermath of the destruction, resuming the
boring, military ass-kissing story that ultimately has very little impact on
the outcome of the plot.
I do have to say that when the film finally does show the final
fight between Godzilla and the MUTOs, for the most part, it’s pretty
awesome. The main problem is that it
keeps cutting away to Brody and his all-important quest to do fuck-all, so that
less than half the climax is devoted to the monsters. It feels like a massive cheat. I normally wouldn’t be upset about not seeing
the kind of movie I was expecting to see, but when that movie is so poorly
executed, while simultaneously teasing that something better is on the way, and
then mostly failing to deliver, I can’t help but feel like I was lured into the
movie theater under false pretenses. I
wanted to see a movie about monsters beating each other up. Instead, I got a military recruitment video
with a few monster clips here and there.
Please, do not go see this movie in theaters. If you must see it, rent it when it comes out
on home video. But I implore you, don’t
spend your money at the theater. That
will only encourage filmmakers to cheat us again in the future.
Have a film you were looking forward to that was way below
your expectations? Leave a comment below
to tell me what it is.
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