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.