Clumsy and oafish, just like the monsters

Rating: 4/10 (18 May 2014)

I kind of alternate between thinking that 4/10 is too harsh, and thinking it's too generous. On the one hand, it's a monster movie, so you get all the trope of "what do you expect, it's not supposed to be great". But it was obviously supposed to be great. That's what all the money on special effects was supposed to do - make it great. And it didn't.
The movie is like one of those dreams, where while you're in the movie theatre everything almost kind of makes sense, but once you actually think about it, the whole thing falls apart. The difference between Godzilla and a dream is that Godzilla is falling apart right as it's happening.
As far as I can tell, the special effects are the only redeeming feature about the whole movie, and I can't say that even this was something exceptional. Just kind of par for the course of what we would expect from an action movie these days. The clichéd wanton destruction, the clichéd closeup shots of the looks of wonder and surprise before something appropriately SFX-ey happens, etc. My friend, who went to see it with me, compared it to a Michael Bay film, and I think the comparison is very apropos.
The rest of the movie was worse. The acting wasn't too bad, but the plot was a complete shambles, and the music was a mess. Like, as far as the music was concerned the movie could have ended after 10 minutes, because that was the climax of the music, and nothing really topped that again. The rest of the music was just clumsy. There was no emotional subtlety, and the music fit the movie only in that like the monsters, it was supposed to crush you(r eardrums) underfoot). I don't normally notice things like the music because it's not something you're supposed to notice if it's done well, but this was just jarring. It was like being hit in the eardrums with a sledgehammer whenever the director wanted you to know that something was going to happen.
The story wasn't much better. It's a monster movie, who cares why the monsters are there. The fact of the matter is they are. Yet this movie spent way too long building a back-story for why there was a monster at all, and in the end it didn't even answer any questions. It was a complete waste of about a fifth of the movie, and I felt it was there just to fill in time. More Godzilla and more MUTO would have been much more satisfying than another 10 minutes of mediocre acting, horrible music, and a story with clumsy emotional ties that weren't even relevant. The whole thing about Godzilla being a force of nature was clumsily done, the way it introduced the different monsters was really confusing, and I really don't understand why in the middle of San Francisco, conveniently right underneath where the female had her eggs, there would be a gas pipeline with a valve in the convenient place and completely undamaged despite all the debris and destruction literally 3 feet away. That coincidence boggles the mind, and it felt to me like a deus ex machina because nobody could think of any other way for the (human) protagonist to be a hero and destroy all the bad monster babies.
The themes and symbols in the movie were very clumsily done. The only redeeming feature about the movie in this regard was that at least it wasn't in Manhattan. Otherwise you have the same old trope about the American government hiding something from the people, the role of America as the world's natural leaders in everything, etc. etc. The bit at the end when Godzilla retreats into the sea was particularly saddening. Throughout the entire movie it had depicted the monsters' movements as terrifying and unknown, but after the final battle (as it were) Godzilla is suddenly portrayed (through the really unsubtle music and camera-work) as being San Francisco's saviour - even though if you were there on the ground, or even observing the situation from afar, Godzilla could have just as easily destroyed the whole of San Francisco, and nothing the Americans had could have stopped it.
Finally, the science and reality-testing. I don't get how Godzilla is supposed to "speed up" to 33 knots near San Francisco, but it still manages to traverse the entire Pacific Ocean, thousands of nautical miles, in a reasonable amount of time. At the very least it would have taken several days, and taken much longer than the MUTO flying across the same ocean. Not to mention the whole gobbledegook about "absorbing radiation" and that causing previously irradiated areas to become "clean" again. Sorry, but that's not how ionising radiation works. And that person dying by going into "a-fib"? Yeah, right. Tell me more about how you listened to your science/medical advisors - if you even had any.
TL: DR - the directors try their hardest to bludgeon you over the head with, well, everything, but despite that, they still fail to convey a lot of the important stuff.
Don't see it.