Godzilla (2014) - Movie Review
1"Godzilla" (2014) directed by Gareth Edwards manages to deliver on it's name and is overall quite epic. However there are definitely still some issues here that should be resolved in future films.
Dr. Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) becomes obsessed with discovering Tokyo's hidden secret after losing his wife in one of their laboratories. The truth is that the Japanese have been hiding and experimenting on a MUTO (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism). This MUTO escapes captivity and begins to attack humanity in it's search for a mate to reproduce with. Godzilla awakens and hunts down the MUTOs in order to restore balance to the world and ensure it remains the ultimate apex creature on Earth, while the American government plans to destroy all three of the kaiju by luring them with a radioactive nuclear bomb.
The 2014 Godzilla is so much better than the atrocious 1998 version I watched yesterday. This film actually delivers on epic monster battles and visible Godzilla content besides it's feet. The decision to kick off the new MonsterVerse by giving Godzilla actual opponents other than humans to go against was a very good one and was integral to it's success. While the human content always sucks in these kind of films; I will give special mention to Bryan Cranston for being the first and only actor in the current MonsterVerse to portray a human character you actually care about.
The film is not flawless though, and starting off in our list of issues is the fact that Bryan Cranston is used to bait us and is not actually the main human character in this; instead it's his forgettable and personality-voided co-star Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Ford Brody. Ford along with the military scenes make this film unnecessarily frustrating at times because they are such a waste of time and a clear attempt to save budget and prevent us from seeing the awesome monsters. I felt Elizabeth Olsen should have replaced Taylor-Johnson as the main character if we can't have Bryan, because at least she has some level of charisma, emotion, and passion to her performing. The last and arguably greatest issue is how "rare" Godzilla sightings can be in this film until the very end, it's certainly better than the 1998 film but it's still not quite at the level I want . . . Godzilla should not be a hidden entity / cameo role in a self titled film.
Godzilla 2014 is held up by Bryan Cranston, it's soundtrack, it's monster designs, and the fact it's not the awful 1998 version I was subjected to yesterday. I also appreciated that it was very horror-esque and went for some tension and scared along the way.
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