Review of Godzilla (2014) by Ken S — 05 Jun 2017

I like Godzilla movies, this one was pretty decent considering Hollywood's latest attempt to bring the King of the Monsters to the big screen. Visually, this movie works on almost every level...but it has scripting issues.

I am all for a slow burn monster movie that holds back and showing the monsters and teases...but when they a finally in full force and full view, the fight should be a little more than what this was. I was all into the monster action and then we cut back to our boring generic stock characters.

The characters is the major issue I had with this. If you are going to do the slow burn only tease til the final climax kind of movie...then the characters we are following should be interesting, or at the very least charismatic.

Cranston had energy and was interesting, but they kill him off about 30 minutes in. Watanabe would've been cool to follow, but he is a side character...Straithairn is playing someone pretty generic but at least he is a fine actor.

No instead we follow Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who is playing "Stock Handsome Young Leading Man" in this. He is dull, and blank, and not fun to hang around. He lacks any kind of charisma and it hurts the movie, which I really could have been into if anyone with any kind of charisma was in that role.

Elizabeth Olson is a decent actress, but she is playing generic girlfriend and has little to do...and both essentially are just characters who are always in the right place to see the action from afar.

It gets to a point where I just want the characters dropped, and to just close in on the action because I don't care about these people. This was a decent version of the classic Japanese series...

But it needed better characters, and the monsters needed just a hint more highlighting than they got.