an HONEST review by a lifelong Godzilla fan

Rating: 7/10 (16 May 2014)

As a child of the 70s and 80s I grew up with the TOHO Godzilla movies, as a pre-teen Godzilla movies ( and dinosaurs) were my favorite type of movies, those of you from the east coast may remember the annual tradition of the Thanksgiving (and Friday after) Godzilla marathons on channel 9 in the late 70s early 80s. fast forward to 1998 and Roland Emmerich rapes my childhood memories,...nuff said about that debacle. Now fast forward again to 2014 and the Americans once again take on the legendary Big "G", can they finally get it right?.......well sort of. I'm not going to give you a play-by -play of the whole movie,too many other reviewers have already done that,..I'm going to tell you what you really need to know. Let's start with the good : Godzilla LOOKS pretty damn good (though the complaints of looking somewhat "hefty" have merit), and equally important they seem to have gotten the NATURE of the beast mostly correct, Godzilla is the anti-hero of the monster world, he is not evil,he is heroic, yet also indifferent to humankind. WHEN (and that's the key issue)you see Godzilla it is truly exhilarating and you really want to just stare in awe of this creature as long as possible. The monster fights are pretty good WHEN they are actually showing them, and let's face it ,that is what most of us really want in a Godzilla movie. This is definitely a "movie theatre" movie and should be seen on the biggest, loudest screen possible. Bryan Cranston is great for as long as you get to see him. That's about it for the good, it may not sound like much but it makes up for a lot of the bad and still justifies a ticket purchase.
Now to the bad: Way ,way ,waaaay too much buildup and not nearly enough payoff. Bryan Cranston's character and acting talents are completely squandered. At first you are sympathetic to the human element, but after almost 90 minutes and over 20 "cutaways" to the human scenes you start becoming downright bored and even resentful, to the point that you wish the MUTOS and Godzilla would wipe them all out already so we can focus on the monsters. Stupid Military dialogue. Only one species of MUTO. ......and now to biggest gripe of all........ Godzilla, the movies' namesake, the big "G", Gojira, King of all Monsters gets a whopping 10 minutes of screen time of an entire 2 hour movie,..and if you think I am exaggerating don't take my word, I want you to bring an actual stopwatch with you, start it when "G" is on screen and stop it at each cutaway when he is offscreen ,then check the total time when the movie ends. He gets about 1 minute midway through the movie at his introduction and about 9 minutes at the end (not counting the interspersed cutaways).
Bottom Line: as the saying goes ,you only get one chance to make a first impression, and director Gareth Edwards has somewhat squandered his by taking what could have been a "Great" movie and making it into a mere "good" one by being waaay too reserved with showing the monsters. It's still worthy of a viewing on the bigscreen, it's miles above the 98 version, it's fertile ground to make a much better sequel, but I really wish they could have gotten it right the first time around by giving us exactly what we came for......GODZILLA !!!!