I posted this in my own topic, but it got deleted (understandably since there are so many that I didn't see), but here goes:
While I'm more of a King Kong fan, I love me some Godzilla. But since King Kong only had one good movie (I think the remake wasn't very good), I spent most of my time watching Godzilla as a kid. I love watching those puppet and rubber suit creatures battle it out. A guilty pleasure? Sure! But it was still a good investment of time for me and taught me that it's okay to root for the beast, even though King Kong did that first.
I thought this kind of monster fighting genre was dead, until Pacific Rim came out and blew me away with it's crazy silliness and cool monster vs. giant robot battles. This I felt was the pinnacle of modern day monster disaster movies, I felt nothing could surpass it. Then Godzilla (2014) was announced and my optimism for these kinds of movies getting popular again was on the rise.
So....is Godzilla good as Pacific Rim. Nope. Nada. No.
The problem is that the human drama that makes up the majority of the first 2 acts of the film is terrible. It's your typical family-crisis disaster movie where the hero is an American family man who has a personal grudge against the monster for killing his parents and separating the rest of his loving family. Very predictable disaster movie stuff that sounds like a rejected script from any of Roland Emmerich's disaster films, though here, played as safe and as serious as could be. The acting is flat and boring too, which doesn't help sell any of it.
If there is a word that I can describe Godzilla as (well two words put into one) is: mildly-schizophrenic. It wants to have this serious family drama while having this kind of light-hearted, somewhat funny but not quite, tone and have giant monsters fighting in a big city. The stuff that does involve Godzilla fighting two (yup two) monsters in the city (San Francisco and a little bit in Honolulu) is fun to watch, in fact very exciting, but there's so little of it, which upsets me.
So in my short generalized impressions of the movie, should you see it? If you're a hardcore Godzilla fan and loved Pacific Rim enough that you can deal with a thin plot and boring characters, go for it. I don't regret spending time with it, per-se, but I didn't find it wholely satisfying either, at least until the end. The movie might've done better if it was filmed more in Godzilla's PoV, with the backstory reduced more to the background. That way we can focus more on the monster fighting.
5/10
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