Lame

Rating: 2/10 (4 July 2014)

Too long, and featuring far too much drama in its opening scenes. Nearly the first thirty minutes of this focuses on the drama of the father dealing with his wife's death from fifteen years earlier- completely irrelevant to the story. It didn't need to be in the story, it was only there to make the hero (if that's what he could be considered) into a formulaic tragic hero, trying to redeem himself. His daughter-in-law, waiting at home for her husband, was only there to give us a generic hero-must-save-his-family drama. Wholly inept attempts at characterisation. The characters need to be interesting, and add something to the story, rather than become cardboard cut-outs; caricatures instead of characters. The character story in Jaws, for example, tied in perfectly and blended perfectly with the story of the shark, we learned the character's stories, and why they are the best men for the job, as they were hunting the shark. But here, the characters are just stock caricatures laid on top of a supplemental monster/ disaster movie plot. If one is going to do a movie with nothing but caricatures like this, don't take it so seriously, and give the audience its share of cheeseball fun or charm.
Ken Watanabe seems like a good actor, and left the most impression on me (most of the rest of the other actors just seemed to be phoning it in) but he has nothing to work with here, and spends most of the film looking like he's in shock, which dulls its effect after a few scenes, and makes it appear as though he is in a trance.
The effects were good, the climactic battle was good, but when Godzilla is reduced to a supporting character role, not fully appearing until four fifths of the way into the film, it seems like a waste. I'm not saying that Godzilla should be in every minute of the film , but a 100- minutes long build up to a 15-minutes long battle is too much. By the time the climactic battle began, quite frankly, I was bored, and just didn't care any longer.
Gargantuan plot holes, like the US military *not* noticing the HUGE hole blasted into the radioactive dumping grounds, and *not* noticing a 300- tall creature strolling toward the city, further sink this one.