I must say that, despite my better judgement, I was looking forward to seeing “Godzilla” because it did have a nice trailer and then there is of course--the 'nostalgia factor'.
But we should always be aware of the potential to fall into the "Trailer Trap", lol. Why? because sometimes, oftentimes, more times than not the trailers showcase only the really good stuff albeit a condensed version, still that can cause the actual movie to pale by comparison if the tone is set too high.
Such is the case here. This one was better than the 1998 “Godzilla,” perhaps, a little but hey that’s not saying much, not much at all really.
A lot of big name actors, including Juliette Binoche, Bryan Cranston, Ken Watanabe, Sally Hawkins, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen showed up for this new version of 'Godzilla' -- a very disappointing monster movie from director Gareth Edwards and his screenwriter Max Borenstein.
Together they somehow made the 'genius' decision to turn our beloved Godzilla into a good guy 'the hero' if you will, which for me just came off laughable, sorry fans but the whole idea of the 'entire balance of nature' being locked away in the DNA of a creature monster from the deep, whom apparently has one purpose now to rise up and same humanity from any monstrous threats that occur beyond our own ability to resolve, really? well it's just too preposterous to even be entertained by me.
The bad guys, actually a guy and a girl, are a pair of MUTOs – “Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms” – that have been roused from their slumber, or whatever, by Filipino miners.
Let's say for a moment that the storyline appeals to me, I'm still trying to figure how it takes over an hour to even introduce the main character visually to the film, I was bored, like really bored watching this, when he did 'finally' show up the effects were good, the monster fight scenes were OK too but they were a small part of this film, seems they were more intent on selling us the philosophy here than they were on entertaining us with massive destruction and the senseless mayhem of a giant monster traipsing about the planet out of control.
The summary of the main plot was quite simple and evidenced by Ken Watanabe's incessant dialog spelling it out for us, I guess in case we were too dense to get it, the MUTO's were way beyond the human race to handle or to even figure them out, so our only salvation became to blindly pin our species survival on the unknown creature from the deep... lol.
In short I didn't care for it, it was overly long two hours and eighteen mins, drawn out even more so by countless, pointless ramblings and filled with way too may scenes designed to expose the dramatic depth of the human characters, in what should have been a simple action/disaster monster flick, the entire first hour could have been reduced to maybe 20 mins with a little narration to fill in the gaps and the whole thing would have been far more watchable for me.
I give it 4/10 Stars due to parts that were good were really good, sadly though the bad parts were really bad and they were the bulk,
In short Godzilla needs to 'NOT BE' relegated to the role of extra in his own movie.