Review of Godzilla (2014) by Stuart K — 04 Feb 2015

"Godzilla" - not enough Godzilla!

Joe Brody: Because what's really happening is that you're hiding something out there! And it is going to send us back to the Stone Age!

Ahh... Godzilla. The title of the film is misleading. Godzilla is barely the star of the film, and aside from Bryan Cranston, most of what we get are dull human performances, and not at all what we came for. Godzilla doesn't have THAT much screen time, and the epic battles that we were all looking forward to seeing, no matter how awesome they are when they finally occurred, are really short.

There's about 8 minutes or so of Godzilla screen time, and this is a two hour movie. Maybe I'm being overdramatic about this, maybe it's not 8 minutes and I'm wrong, but if this discussion occurs at all there must be some sort of problem. You can google this to find out how many people were talking about this. Go ahead.

So now that we've established that this Godzilla film doesn't have enough Godzilla, let's focus on everything else. The first time we see Godzilla, the first close-up being around 40 minutes in, the camera pans over and we see parts of this monstrous creature until he roars into the camera. It's really a shame that there wasn't more of this! It's awesome. It really is. The design and sound of the creatures in the film, especially Godzilla, are really old school and classic.

Most of what we see is the path of destruction that the collosal creatures left behind, no, we don't actually see it happening. When there are massive monster battles, they're spectacular, and they should be because this is what we came to see! Well, we also came to see Walter White.

So a Godzilla film with very little Godzilla, and too much focus on characters we have no reason to care about. I can commend it on its sound design, the building of suspense that it so often accomplishes, and the pretty old school score by Alexandre Desplat. Hey, at least it's better than the 1998 film.