How do you make a movie about monsters causing havoc, and then work so hard to avoid showing us the damn monsters? That's the chief sin - though there are others - of the 2014 version of Godzilla.
The plot is Godzilla vs. Mothra. Unfortunately, that plot is relegated to the B-plot. The A-plot, the one that director Gareth Edwards and writer Max Borenstein focus on, is about a Stanford-educated, wine-drinking soldier (of course!) played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, trying to get back to his wife, played by Elizabeth Olsen. He is somehow able to get from Japan to San Francisco, for no good reason other than to take up as much time as possible to avoid showing us what we came for. Also because we’re supposed to believe that a man tells his wife and five year old child to sit tight and wait for him while Godzilla is heading for their city.
The only reason to go to this movie is to see monsters fighting. Too bad, because you barely get any of it. The movie continually loses sight of the monsters in favor of dumb humans and weak drama. The human characters don’t even matter to the Godzilla story - at all. They only cause problems for themselves by doing dumbass things (while Ken Watanabe looks very concerned). The monsters mostly ignore them, as I wish the filmmakers had. When the creatures are finally on the screen, everything is set in the dark and with shaky cams, hiding the monsters again. The film so ignores Godzilla that it botches his big second wind moment in the climax because we have to watch a guy trying to put a nuclear warhead on a boat (he fails to get it far away from the city, but apparently it never mattered anyway judging by the film's coda - but in this movie the director doesn't care if you die as long as you weren't a character, or dog, that made it to the foreground of a shot, so maybe it did matter, who knows). Edwards continually denies us the moments we need and want. Special jeers to the music, scored by Alexandre Desplat, which is often mismatched to the movie (especially in that damn climax).
A few inconsistencies, but I'm not sure that really took away from it all since the whole movie was just about as tense as you could get with a disaster flick. Good review Chris.
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