Plodzilla: Slow. Very... very... slow...

Rating: 5/10 (16 May 2014)

GODZILLA 2014 is an excruciatingly slow soap opera with a giant monster thrown in almost as an afterthought. In fact, take out Gojira altogether and what you have is a television-sized soap opera about a military man and his family with video game cgi battle scenes. Consider this puzzling fact: every time Gojira and one of the other two monsters in the movie butt heads, the director cuts away to something else (the first time, he cuts away to a television newscast of the monster, the second he literally has a door close on the action, shutting the viewer within and the battle without). We also get to see the After Party aftermath, but never the REASON for the rubble... For some of us, we paid twenty bucks to see THE MONSTERS, not the soap. I almost applauded when the sole Japanese cast member (who has a bit part as a scientist who stands around doing a lot of heavy thinking), says (of the monsters), "Let them fight." Even though this admonition came about two hours into this three-hour ordeal, the audience I saw the movie with (a good dozen people were there) breathed a collective sigh of relief. Finally, we were going to see some action! And we did- and it was great (the fx guys knock it out of the park); but it was also too little, too late to save GODZILLA. The Rol Em version was FAR superior (this version is about as humorless as it gets, what with the pointless and seemingly never-ending military musings). See this one for the Big Brawl at the end or because you like state-of-the-art fx, but don't expect a whole lot else.