Godzilla movie review

  
  NOTE:THIS WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS
 Most actions movies are often criticized for a lack of emotional substance and too much focus on eye-candy explosions or stunts. Godzilla is more of the reverse effect where too much focus is put on weak, poorly written human drama and not enough on the actual monsters. However there is a purpose for that in something like a Godzilla as Godzilla in the past has been more of a force of nature than an actual character, you need something other than fight scenes to fill time. Yet in this film the director Garth Edwards actually attempts to make Godzilla a character of his/her own and actually sort of succeeds along with giving the other two monsters human moments that actually made me smile.
    
     That's the strongest part of Godzilla overall, the monsters- not only are they awesome to watch (two words: ATOMIC BREATHE) but are given actual touching moments in the film. That's really cool but sadly while the monsters were actually fleshed out into characters the actual characters, the humans we are suppose to rally around and hope make it out of here alive are not fleshed out at all and are either plot devices or just people to spout exposition.


   None of the characters are unlikeable but none of them are that particularly interesting, and in the end we don't give a damn about what happens to the characters. In the beginning a character that the film clearly wants us to care about is killed but we don't care because we just met this person and know nothing about them. I can't remember most of their names if I had to be honest. First off, SPOILER, Bryan Cranston is completely wasted in this movie and all of the scenes of him in the trailers are all you are going to get. He gets axed off in the first twenty minutes and overall gave quite a hammy performance for the time he was there. Elizabeth Olsen is pretty wasted in this film too and had no particular reason to existent in the film. Aaron Taylor Johnson is the really the main focus of the film but I honestly didn't care as he didn't really have any sort of personality and his scenes kept getting in the way of the monster stuff. Ken Watanabe is really just captain exposition and while the film attempts to give him a personality beyond giving information and 'enlightening' dialogue, they even attempt to give him a backstory but overall it didn't work. This is tragic because in my opinion he really should have been the main human character but I will talk more about that later. All in all a lot of the characters could have been cut or a few of them could have been morphed into one character.


     This movie is also extremely long, about two hours give or take, it doesn't hit a point where it becomes unbearable but with all the human drama cutting into all the fun monster stuff it got annoying very quickly. This movie could have been cut to a standard ninety minute movie and nothing would have been lost.

    Now I may sound as if I didn't like the movie at all but in reality I really enjoyed myself. While the movie does have a lot of flaws all of the monster stuff out weighed the boring human side story and made a lot of it worth it. There was even this cool bus driver that I really liked, I even heard a few people clapping for him, I won't give it away but you'll see what I mean. The opening credits sequence is also one of the best opening credits sequences I have seen in a long time. I still recommend seeing this movie.


    Now a topic I really wanted to address was the ethnic diversity in this film. Godzilla is for the most part of Japanese creation, what a lot of people wanted to know if this film would be culturally sensitive. Well they aren't insensitive... let me explain: they do make reference to the nuclear radiation, Hiroshima metaphor, as well as the Japanese culture that Godzilla is all about but it really is only a hand wave at best and really forced. Ken Watanabe's character actually has a bit of a backstory with Hiroshima.
  
    This movie is really an American bread basket, Ken Watanabe seems to be really the only Asian person present, there is maybe one or two black people and one Hispanic guy but for the most part it is a wonder bread cast. Heck in a scene that clearly takes place in Japan there are more white workers then there are Asian workers. Now this kind of disappoints me and also fits into the whole hand wave to Asian culture. While I don't believe It needed to be predominantly Asian I still think there should have been more than one Asian guy walking around.


   Now I am going to explain why Ken Watanabe's character should have been the main human character. As well as the fact it would have paid homage to the Asian heritage of Godzilla but overall even though he was captain exposition he was more interesting and had more to do than either Aaron Taylor Johnson and Bryan Cranstan's characters. With the backstory with Hiroshima and the fact of his connections to one of the monsters as well as what the film was going for in trying to give him an interesting personality it seemed as if in early drafts of the scripts Ken Watanabe's character was suppose to be the main character. That was until someone (probably someone from the studio) said to put in an American family the audience could relate too (even if they were boring), which in turn diminished Watanabe's role.




  Now despite there being a lot wrong with the film I still give it a 7/10- the parts that are good are good and stand out significantly.