Review of Godzilla (2014) by Alva3901 — 04 Jul 2017

Godzilla has been a movie icon for over sixty years, emerging from the deep oceans and causing havoc in cities across the world. This new depiction of the great kaiju, acting as a reboot of the franchise and directed by an up-and-coming director, Gareth Edwards, is a very entertaining film despite the complaints of there being too little of Godzilla.

I somewhat concur with this argument, however, having seen many of Japanese films, especially the original in 1954, it is known for Godzilla to be teased throughout the movie or have limited screen time, yet still have a profound impact on the film and the audience it is delivered to, and this is what the 2014 version does very well.

However, at times, it did come at an annoyance when right as we see him, the scene changes. But this should not take away from otherwise a really good film. The design of Godzilla and the monstrous villains, the MUTOs, were very well designed and augmented to represent a respectable scale to real world buildings/infrastructure.

As usual, the action scenes were a blast, with the final act dedicated to the fight we've been waiting for between the creatures. The plot carried the film smoothly, coupled with some good acting from the likes of Bryan Cranston, Ken Watanabe, and David Strathairn.

But it should be noted that the good acting came from secodnary characters while our central character, Ford Brody, played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, was very bland and one-dimensional. The film was an attempt at very human orientated monster film rather than focused on the monsters themselves, which is somewhat of a problem in a movie called "Godzilla".

However, Gareth Edwards blends both well enough to not detract what this film manages to accomplish. With the news of a Monsterverse being created by Legendary Studious, involving the likes of King Kong, I am very excited to see where they take Godzilla in his next movie in 2019, where he will pit off against his greatest foes, King Ghidorah, Mothra, and Rodan, before taking on King Kong in 2020 to determine who the real "King" is.