Godzilla (2014)

 The return of arguably the most famous kaiju to Hollywood copped quite the flogging in its reviews but 2014's most anticipated monster movie had a lot to love.

Much of the preview criticism centred on a few things: the lack of Bryan Cranston, a Godzilla that was a little tubby around the edges, and a lead character (Ford Brody, played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson) who makes it very hard to connect with.
I agree with two of those points, but the amount of care on Godzilla's appearance - so what? Godzilla is a mythical monster, who cares about his size? Cranston is brilliant as ever as nuclear physicist Joe Brody (Ford's dad), but everyone else in the film just feels one-dimensional, wooden, and simply boring. The way this film (or any other version of Godzilla should be) told, they are all simply supporting talent to the massive on-screen presence of Godzilla. But they don't have to be so bad.


Taylor-Johnson just lacks some of that appeal, and I think I would have been happy to see he and Cranston switch roles. While it might have been difficult to buy Cranston as a military man, it might have made the film a lot better.
The story itself is not overly bad. With the Japanese tsunami and the ensuing chaos surrounding Fukishima's nuclear plants still fresh in the memory, writer Max Borenstein feeds off this to give a fair reasoning as to why Godzilla and a handful of his kaiju buddies appear. They feed off radiation, and manage to tie the United States' atomic bomb testing in as a cover for trying the wipe out these creatures in 1954. One day the father-son Brody pair are arrested and held for trespassing in a Japanese facility, with Ford left handcuffed in a vehicle while Cranston steals the scene with one of his special "going nuts" sequences. Finally we get to see a massive monster/kaiju emerge from the egg in the middle of the installation, escape and wreck havoc.
I didn't mind the film until the sequence where Ford is looking after a young child on a train in Hawaii that just happens to be following a line straight into the path of the fighting kaijus. The visual effects of the tsunami, Godzilla's emergence and the winged kaiju (and their fight) are all outstanding, but story-wise it's about the point when it falls apart.
How does Ford Brody just happen to be in the wrong place, at the wrong time, so often? How can he fly across the world and continually run into these warring kaiju? I don't mind a central human character to follow but make it a little believable. The 1998 Godzilla was horrible (even though I loved it as a child), but at least we could believe Matthew Broderick kept managing to run into trouble because he stayed in the same place. Old mate Brody flew across the world, across the United States, and happened to be on the spot when the kaiju first appeared AND during the climactic battle.
That doesn't mention how the US armed forces can have several helicopters in the air, fly out to and circle a desert facility, then take a few minutes to discover the HUGE trail leading from the facility to the massive kaiju wrecking havoc in Las Vegas. Ugh.

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I have a serious problem with the ending too. Shave the last few minutes off and I'm okay with how it ends. Godzilla doesn't have to wake up, wink to the camera, be followed by a news station (where they slip the "King of the Monsters" reference in) and leave a completely destroyed San Francisco behind as he swims back into the ocean.
Unnecessary.

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All in all, Godzilla was not as bad as a lot of critics made it out to be, but it was in no way the best it could have been. The teaser trailer had me amped in the months leading up to its release, and it was devastating to discover that most of the footage was from the last 20-odd minutes of the film. I guess it was somewhat naive of me to expect that to be from the opening stages of the film.
Still, it was leaps and bounds better than the 1998 version, and for that we should be at least a little thankful.