Godzilla the movie

I am of an age where I remember the last Godzilla movie coming out, the Roland Emmerich one. I never actually saw it at the time but I can remember thinking that Godzilla was a big thing. Also I think I watched the tv series but all I can really remember of that is some vague recollection of a bunch of kids standing on Godzilla’s head. Anyway, when I heard that there was going to be a new one I knew I had to see it. So I grabbed my God-brother and we headed to the cinema.

The new movie is…interesting. The first twenty minutes is really well done and plays with the audiences expectations somewhat. We get the kind of typical family gets ruined by appearance of monster, forcing father to go crazy and vow revenge. It’s initially set in Japan, which is pretty necessary in any giant monster movie. After that the threat moves to America where a lot of real estate gets ruined.

I’m actually finding it quite hard to describe this movie without leaving spoilers. There’s something unexpected that happens fairly on and I don’t want to ruin it. So I’ll speak only in generics and try and leave out specific details.

The main problem with this movie is that it focuses on the humans more than Godzilla. I’m ok with the reveal of Godzilla being slow and it taking a while for us to get a good look at him. The pay off for that was that we got to see a cool Godzilla halfway through the movie and a nice show of his tail and scales up until then. But then we kind of leave him again. They get geared up for a big confrontation and just as it’s getting started we cut to a tv showing a news report about it. The whole movie we follow this soldier who seems to be really unlucky in how often he encounters giant monsters. But he’ll be doing his thing and then we’ll see Godzilla stomping around in the background. Honestly it seemed like the humans had one story and Godzilla had another. The two intersected at times but they didn’t seem as connected as you’d think.  And honestly I think the humans were only there to pad out the movie. They made very little difference in the overall outcome.

There was actually a lot of stuff in this move that didn’t seem to have a purpose. There was a large army, naval and air force presence that didn’t seem to do anything except die. There was a scientist who didn’t seem to do anything except stare sadly into the horizon and mutter about Godzilla being an apex predator. There was a love interest who didn’t seem to do anything except miss her husband’s calls. I think there might have been a message about nuclear being bad. There was a meltdown at a Japanese nuclear power station at the start which might have been a bit soon to be in good taste.  For some reason nukes were a source of food so we got to see a large number gulped down as if they were After Eights. Hiroshima was mentioned at one point and I’m not really sure why.  It was sort of mentioned and then the sad eyed scientist just walked off. It seemed really weird.

Overall though I really liked it and my God-brother loved it. It definitely took some influences from Pacific Rim, so if you like you giant monsters glowing this movie has you covered. Godzilla himself actually looked really great. I’d heard some people complaining before I saw it that they’d made Godzilla too fat but, while he definitely isn’t as sleek as other incarnations, he looks fine. The ending was satisfying, though I’m still not really sure why Godzilla was there in the first place. While writing this there’s been a bunch of things that have occurred to me and caused me to laugh out loud at the stupidity of them. This is not a move that makes a lot of sense and there’s a couple of moments that just make you go ‘huh?’ But if you’re just looking to see a great deal of devastation to American cities (the Golden Gate Bridge gets wrecked again) then you could do a lot worse. My random rating is six out of ten and you can find the trailer here.