Summary:
Giant creatures begin appearing across the globe, and a giant lizard named Godzilla rises to fight them.
My Thoughts:
I’ve seen my fair share of Godzilla movies. Whether it be the original classic “Gojira”, one of the many sequels that follow (“Godzilla vs Mothra”, “Godzilla: Final Wars”), or even the rather silly Roland Emmerich “Godzilla”, I can usually get at least a little entertainment from these kaiju flicks.
I saw this film in theaters and thought it was pretty decent. I feel like this movie sets the stage for where Legendary wants to their Godzilla franchise, and I’m okay with that. I think the design of “Godzilla” is pretty cool; I like the fact that, design wise, Godzilla looks like he did in the Toho series. I thought this movie had some cool action sequences, particularly towards the end when Godzilla takes on the two MUTOs (the giant bug things). But I also thought this film took itself a bit too seriously, and while the story is fine, Godzilla doesn’t really play a big part until the final hour of the movie. When I sit down to watch a Godzilla movie, I typically want more Godzilla than was here. I remember when I saw this film back in 2014 thinking that this was a good movie, and then when “Kong: Skull Island” came out a few years later I thought that too was a decent film, and I never had the urge to watch either of them again until we decided to do this Godzilla series. While I am actually rather excited for “Godzilla: King of the Monsters” I don’t have much hope that it will be any better than either of the previous installments in Legendary’s series. This series seems perfectly fine thus far; it’s not great; it’s not terrible; it is, for the most part, entertaining, and for a Godzilla movie, that’s about par for the course.
“The arrogance of men is thinking nature is in our control and not the other way around.”
Fifteen years after a disaster at a nuclear power plant in Japan killed Joe Brady’s (Bryan Cranston, “Last Flag Flying”) wife Sandra (Juliette Binoche, “Chocolat”), Joe gets caught sneaking around the restricted fallout zone around the plant, and Joe’s son Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, “Nocturnal Animals”) must fly to Japan to bail him out, leaving his wife Elle (Elizabeth Olsen, “Ingrid Goes West”) and son behind. Joe eventually convinces his son that he might have found something in the restricted zone, and the two sneak towards the abandoned power plant only to run into a team of scientists headed up by Dr. Ishiro Serizawa (Ken Wantanabe, “Tampopo”) and Vivienne Graham (Sally Hawkins, “Happy-Go-Lucky”).
So, really the most boring part of every Godzilla movie I’ve seen is the human element of the story, and in this film that is no less true. Aaron Taylor-Johnson, whom I think is a decent actor when given the right role, plays our main character and he does an okay job, but his actual character isn’t all that interesting. Adding to that, we had a slew of more talented actors that should’ve been given more screen time. Bryan Cranston was easily the most interesting character of the movie, and he was given very little screen time when compared to everyone else. It just doesn’t work when you start with an interesting POV character and then switch to a boring one; how is that supposed to keep my interest?
Another issue, which I’ve already mentioned, is that we really don’t see Godzilla a lot in this movie. Whenever we do see Godzilla, it’s brief flashes of him, usually from the perspective of one of the characters as they’re running away. The glimpses of him are just that; glimpses. We see him quickly and he disappears. I feel like those glimpses are enough to get me excited about the fight to come, but the actual fight wasn’t quite enough to satisfy me. I felt like I had only been given a taste of what Godzilla was capable of… now, I do think this is a good thing for the franchise, just not for this film. By keeping what Godzilla does relatively simple, we have a lot of room to grow from here. I honestly like how this film sets up the world again more than I liked the actual movie.
Verdict:
This film is fine. It’s nothing remarkable, but it did set up for what looks to be a relatively successful franchise for Legendary. So far, they’ve released this film, “Kong: Skull Island” (which I enjoyed a bit more, as it didn’t take itself quite so seriously), “Godzilla: King of Monsters” is set to release at the end of this month, and “Godzilla Vs Kong” is set to hit theaters next year. These films won’t win any Oscars (unless its in visual effects), but they’re not a bad way to kill a couple of hours.
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