Godzilla - A Short Review

Originally published 5/26/14

Having to wait for my friend to get back from his vacation, I finally saw Godzilla, and thankfully my county has a Dolby Atmos theater to see it in. Here's some thoughts I had about the movie.
Godzilla, as a character and story device, was fantastic. Literal and Allegorical, Godzilla was fierce, complex, and breathtaking.

The music and sound design was amazing, adding to the intensity, grandeur, and nostalgia of Godzilla. Probably my favorite part of the film.

While the film was great-looking, it was a bit...bland. The camerawork and effects were really good, but the overall look of the film was nothing to write home about. Truthfully, stunning cinematography was never part of the franchise, more of an expectation I had for the filmmakers.

Godzilla featured better than average acting all around, with particularly great performances by Bryan Cranston and Ken Watanabe. A number of the characters lacked depth in the writing, more specifically Ford Brody (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his family (Elizabeth Olsen as wife Elle and Carson Bolde as son Sam), and that lack of depth, coupled with poor character connections, didn't build the kind of emotional bridge I needed to identify, or care, about Ford and his family's journey.

The movie was also devoid of a lot of "close call" moments, failing to really raise the stakes over the course of the film. In reflection, this was a bit of a problem with most of the Godzilla films, with the original relying on the allegory to increase the tension, and the monster versus movies relying on the spectacle of the fight to overshadow the stakes.

There were very few things I didn't like, and they all have to do with the lack of emotional depth and visual flair that I had expected from director Gareth Edwards, given all the hype about his love for the source material and his previous film. Technically great, but lacking the kind of punch I wanted for Godzilla.

The overall narrative was effective and it did what I wanted it to: It combined the deep symbolism of the 1954 original with the monster versus films that followed and popularized the franchise.

Despite the film's shortcomings, it was written, paced, scored, and executed in the best way it could in the Studio System, successfully bringing Godzilla into the era of modern American cinema the way it should be.

Godzilla was a very good film, and I very much liked it, but it's tough for me to call it great.

I recommend seeing it, though, preferably in the non-3D format and in a theater that has a Dolby Atmos sound system.