Review of Godzilla (2014) by Ramyo — 25 May 2014

I had such high hopes for this movie but found that it was a disappointing rendition of Godzilla's return to the big screen. The movie is called Godzilla but its really the story of Aaron Taylor Johnson. He has 4x more screen time than the titular character and despite being a good actor, I think most of his scenes did nothing to advance the plot. When you have a larger than life character like Godzilla, you focus on him because that is whom your audiences came to see. The Godzilla reveal took far to long to happen, and by the time it did, he only gets a few seconds of screen time before the camera pans to a long scene with the human actors.

There is a line from Ken Wanatabe in the movie that perfectly sums up what the audience was denied: "Let them fight". It was that simple. While hoping for a slugfest between kaiju where Godzilla shows why he is the King of the Monsters, we were instead given a frustrating tease of a movie that could have been something truly epic. If the makers of Godzilla want to know how to do a Kaiju movie right, they should go watch Pacific Rim.