[Locke]

Finally got around to seeing it yesterday, my review follows for all those whom care.

Godzilla is basically the Godzilla movie I've always wanted. I love tokusatsu, it's my favourite "genre" but when it comes to the giant branch of the genre...I just can't get on board with it. Rubber suits, no sense of consistency or scale, cardboard buildings and a complete disregard for human life is all fun and games once or twice, but I fail to see how you can possibly expect me to care about a genre which revels in its own shittiness and refuses to ever progress in any meaningful way.

And although Godzilla '14 sticks pretty close to the original from '54 visually - including a Godzilla who looks like he really needs to eat more fruit - we aren't in Japan now, we are in the US. The US may not always be willing to embrace the next storytelling fad, but technological fads are something they always jump on and so while Japan is still stuck in '54 trying trying to recreate the same magic over and over again, right down to the look and feel of the film, this Godzilla is set squarely in 2014. Godzilla is supercharged with megabudget 3D up to date digital cinematic mastery, the sense of scale alone is just something else that Japan will probably never be able to match. Films like this are what a big screen 3D experience is made for.

Godzilla chooses to leave the angst between the lines, so the kids can come too. I really appreciated it for that, as so many movies these days are just way too serious. This is a film less about characters, or monsters, but the destruction left behind by both. A string of vignettes that depict the utter chaos, and carnage, of a world suddenly plunged into the middle of a battle between monsters with humans desperate scrambling to survive in the meantime.

Sadly though this may well be one of the most game breaking parts for most of the audience too. If you ARE old enough - or at least mature enough - to get what the film is implying, then your first reaction will probably be something like, "oh shit, hell of a lot of people just died in that moment, and here I was cheering and glorifying it.". This realisation that actually Godzilla is a dark, and existentially pandering, film that just happens to have giant monsters in it, is a moment the whole movie seems to be waiting for you to pick up on.

The sudden realisation certainly is where the film lost me as much as it grabbed me. I dunno, it was like just as I realised that this film was so much more than it pretended to be, it suddenly seems to abandon that idea and just become pure, mindless Michael Bay. I actually don't mind that, but it is a shame as the film opens with so much promise and ultimately suggests it'll deliver more than it has by the end.

I will say that I loved the way Godzilla was utilised. Played like Bruce in Jaws and the movies only real hero Godzilla is like a rich cheesecake, you only get a small slice, but it's more than enough. It also works really well in context too, as it's really nice that here no human, no matter how important to the story, can make a dent on the MUTOs. Really the sooner you leave it in Godzilla's capable hands, the better.

Sadly this may also be the case because no human is really important to the film, at all. The closest thing we have to a protagonist is Spielbergian Ford, but he's more a cardboard shape of a human with lots of muscles than an actual character. Ford is a father figure with a loving wife thrust into the heart of the battle as he's "the only man who can" but he's so regularly - and quite literally - upstaged by everything transpiring around him that every moment focused on him, is a moment the film seems itching to move on from. The camera desperately trying to keep him in frame, as it cranes its neck to also capture the more interesting stuff in the sequence - which is basically everything else. I didn't care for Ford even a little bit, I cared for pretty much none of the characters honestly, bar Elle on the principle of the fact that I adore Elizabeth Olsen's face.

Wait Bryan Cranston was in this?