Dull, ponderous and inferior to 90% of the Japanese series

Rating: 3/10 (18 May 2014)

I've come out of IMDb retirement just to write about how bad this movie is. I simply can't believe that so much of the advance hype about "Godzilla" was positive. To me, this movie is a near-total dud, both for casual filmgoers and *especially* for longtime fans of Toho's Godzilla series.
So what's wrong with it? Apart from a solid setup in the first 20 minutes...practically everything. Perhaps the biggest sin is that wonderful actors such as Bryan Cranston, Juliette Binoche and Sally Hawkins are given tiny, do-nothing parts. (Binoche's small role is particularly insulting; you'd hardly recognize her as the powerful star of "Three Colors: Blue.") Most of the screen time is taken up by Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Elizabeth Olsen, both of whom give absolutely dreadful performances. And the bit-part actors are even worse!
As for Godzilla...he isn't even in the movie. Well, okay, that's not quite true. His back spines protrude from the ocean a few times. And the rest of his clumsy/ugly CGI redesign shows up for...gee, I dunno...five minutes total? To make matters worse, the special effects scenes mostly take place at night; so the vast majority of the Godzilla footage is dark, murky and hard to watch. Yo, the old man-in-a-suit Godzilla may have been cheesy, but at least he was visible! And as for Godzilla's atomic breath...it looked way cooler 13 years ago, in "GMK."
In place of Godzilla, we see a lot of the MUTOs, two of his most boring opponents ever. One looks like Gyaos from the Gamera movies; the other is clearly just a blown-up version of a "Starship Troopers" bug (who thought there was any nostalgia for *that* movie?!) Neither monster has any personality or real screen presence.
And what exactly are these creatures supposed to represent? The script makes some half- hearted references to things like 9/11 and the Fukushima disaster, but at no point did I feel that the MUTOs reflected these events in an interesting way. By contrast, the original 1954 Godzilla film really feels like a valuable social commentary on life in the atomic age. This movie? It's not commenting on anything, not in any real sense. It nods in the general direction of relevance, but that's it.
So what we have here is a film that drags...a film with no real message...a film with almost no Godzilla...a film with barely any Bryan Cranston. What on Earth were they thinking? Make no mistake, this is a standard Hollywood hack job, with all the hallmarks of other bad action movies: superficial family relationships, nauseating sentimentality, confused plotting and total disrespect for its source material. Despite the director's lofty claims, it's not a faithful Godzilla movie at all - and it ain't a worthy successor to "Jaws" or "Jurassic Park" either.
Though they're far from perfect, I think the Marvel superhero movies do a far better job of capturing the innocent joy of comic books, than this movie does of capturing the innocent joy of a Godzilla monster mash. In fact, there's no joy at all here, just a lot of dingy photography and self-conscious efforts to "elevate" the material. Oy vey. Somebody put on "Godzilla vs. Biollante" instead! It's more fun, and in some respects, it even has better special effects.