"GODZILLA (2014)" Review

IT'S HALLOWEEN! And to kick things off, I'm going to review the King of the Monsters latest attempt to make a great monster movie!

"Well, no matter what, it can't be worse than Matthew Broderick's version from 1999, right? Right?" That's what ever Godzilla fan as well as anyone who has seen that version was thinking as they got their popcorn and settled down to watch Gareth Edwards' latest attempt to bring the legendary King of Monsters to life on the big screen. First of all, the monster itself. Godzilla looks fantastic. Plain and simple. He is a treat to watch anytime he is on screen and the final battle with the film original MUTOS rather than one of the other famous Toho monsters (because Toho did not give them the rights to those monsters until they had actually seen what they could do which was a smart move after the last disaster) is the clear highlight of the film. However, there is one point in the film set in Hawaii that will irritate and even anger anyone watching the movie. Just as we get an amazing build up and see Godzilla and hear him roar for the first time in the film (this is about an hour in, by the way), we cut away to the main human, Ford's, played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, dull family watching TV while Godzilla is fighting. Unbelievably, we only see snippets of the battle on the TV screen and then the destruction caused. Why would you do this?

Godzilla in all his glory, destroying all of our terrible memories of the Matthew Broderick version.

Another highlight of the film is the performance of Bryan Cranston, most famous for his role as Walter White in "Breaking Bad" at the moment, who plays Ford's actually interesting and motivated father who is investigating the government's covering up of the monsters. His part is easily the best acted in the film but, brace yourselves, you see every single one of his scenes in the trailer and then he is gone for the final half of the movie. If Legendary are willing to go through the trouble of getting an actor who is well known at the moment in their film, they should at least USE HIM! Instead, we get stuck with Taylor-Johnson's dull, generic marine Ford and his family with a stupid romantic subplot between him and his wife, played by Elizabeth Olsen, for a large chunk of the film which is obviously much less interesting than the actual story.

Bryan "Heisenberg" Cranston finds out how much his character is actually in the movie while his son, Aaron Taylor-Johnson looks on.

Another amazing thing to behold is the stupidity of every character in this movie besides those of Bryan Cranston and Ken Watanabe. For example, the government's plan to destroy monsters which feed on nuclear energy is to bomb them....with nuclear weapons. The government knows this as well which makes this decision all the more bewildering. The nuke is only there so we can have some extra tension with Ford, who is apparently a bomb expert, as he does not stop saying throughout the whole movie, during the climax and even that does not have as much weight behind it as Godzilla is fighting monsters at the same time. You choose which is more exciting but I'm willing to bet you would choose watching Godzilla destroy things over a man disarm a bomb. However, its not all bad. As I said before, the monsters and destruction look brilliant and realistic. The dark tone is also good and suitable to a more "grounded" Godzilla movie but another thing the movie lacks is any humour. I cannot think of any instance throughout the film where there is any element of humour whatsoever. 

BORING SUB-PLOT INCOMING!

Overall, the highly anticipated reboot featuring the King of the Monsters doesn't live up to all of the anticipation but that does not make it by any means bad, sporting fantastic visuals and good acting from a few people in the cast, but that doesn't make it any less disappointing that the main focus of this MONSTER movie is a boring human and his family. Nonetheless, it does seem like director Gareth Edwards knows what he is doing and is exciting to hear he will be back for a sequel in 2018 after helming one of Disney's many upcoming Star Wars spinoffs (Godzilla/Star Wars crossover anyone?)

Rating : 7/10

Original Release Date : 8th May, 2014

Starring : Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Bryan Cranston, Elizabeth Olsen, Ken Watanabe