Never shall the twain meet.
All I ask of my giant monster movie is to have giant monsters in it the majority of the time. If a movie is entitled "Godzilla," then I expect to see a lot of Godzilla. Sadly, this is not the case with Legendary's reboot. It is far more concerned with following the trials and tribulations of Mr. Boring Bland-face, which is what I'll call the male lead who is not Bryan Cranston, since I can't remember his name. The humans receive an awful lot of the focus in this picture, which is odd. The old Godzilla movies were corny and campy, but at least they delivered on their promise of seeing giant monsters battle awkwardly. The fight scenes between Godzilla and the MUTOs, his insectoid nemeses, are brief and obscured by smoke and darkness. Just when you think you're about to witness some honest to god monster action (oh yeah), the damn movie cuts to Mr. Boring Bland-face's kid watching the fight on television. We see more of Mr. Boring Bland-face's wife than Godzilla. She's pretty, but she's no Godzilla. He's a supporting character in his own movie. There are brief moments of spectacle. The size of the marauding beasties is impressive, and you get a real sense of scale at times. The auditory clicks and rumbles of the MUTOs are strange and alien, and Godzilla looks pretty cool. Unfortunately, this movie shares a lot of similarities with Cloverfield, another giant monster movie that focused too much on its boring human characters while showing too little of its main attraction. In a horror movie, it pays off to hide the monster. It builds fear and lets the imagination go to work. Godzilla's not a horror movie. It's not about fear. It's about giant fucking monsters beating the shit out of each other. I don't know how the film makers didn't understand this.
Verdict: Red Delicious--somehow, someone missed the point, and you just bit into a piece of cardboard.
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