Do you love watching a guy in a dinosaur suit rampaging through a model of Tokyo? If so, then you probably love Godzilla. And it's possible you've never heard of CGI or modern day special effects. If this person is you, then prepare to have your mind BLOWN. Just don’t watch this movie in San Francisco, because you might have a panic attack watching every single building in your city get ripped apart.
I have to say that I’m a little disappointed in GODZILLA, but I think my disappointment is misplaced. See, I went into this movie thinking it was going to be amazing. It wasn’t amazing. It definitely wasn’t bad, it was just ok. I kind of figured that in a movie called GODZILLA, Godzilla would be featured a little more heavily than he (she? I have no idea) than any of the . I don’t know if you remember the trailers as it was coming out, but they all featured Bryan Cranston as the only speaking character. That makes you think he’ll be a major part of the movie, right? Wrong. I don’t want to spoil anything, but I will say that his screen time is probably under ten minutes. It makes sense to market him as he just finished playing one of the most interesting TV characters of all time, Breaking Bad’s Walter White, but I don’t like being intentionally misled by Hollywood producers.
So if the movie isn’t really about Godzilla, and it’s not really about Bryan Cranston, then who is it about? That would be Cranston’s son, played by KICK ASS’s Aaron Taylor-Johnson. Johnson’s character is a guy who works as one of those HURT LOCKER-type bomb disposal soldiers for the Navy. He’s married to Elizabeth Olsen (who I think is playing the grown-up version of that baby on Full House) and has a son, but these characters are really unimportant and I’m pretty sure they’re only there to make you relate to Johnson’s character more. One extra thing I will say about Olsen, though, is that she and Johnson will act together again soon as the twins Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch in the new Avengers movie. She’ll probably be more important in that.
Johnson’s character basically spends the entire movie trying to get home from Japan. Home is San Francisco which just so happens to be where Godzilla is headed. Crazy, right? What are the odds he would go there? When there are two giant cockroaches meeting up down, pretty high.I guess that was the most convenient meeting point to get their weird bug-sex on. They've been buried underground for hundreds of years, so they're both on a bit of a dry spell. They’re also being led there because the military is shipping a nuke into the city, and they eat radiation. I don’t think the nutritional value of pure radiation is very high, but I’m no scientist. You may be thinking that the military’s plan to bring a nuke into the city is the single dumbest idea in the entire world, and you would be correct. There are so many better ideas to get rid of them, like building a giant boot that could drop from the sky and squash them. Everyone knows nukes can’t kill cockroaches. Don’t worry though, because Godzilla shows up with his atomic breath and kills the hell out of them. And really, that’s what you showed up to see. Nothing else matters. I just wish it didn’t take an hour and a half of people walking around to get there.
So what’s the final verdict on GODZILLA? I think that you should see it. After the garbage film GODZILLA in 1998, this is a fresh start that gets Godzilla back to its roots. It isn’t great, but it entertained me enough to give it a pass. What it comes down to is that there’s too much focus on the people and not enough scenes where Godzilla gets to fuck up giant cockroaches and knock over buildings. The scenes where he does show up, though, are golden.
