Absolute trash

Rating: 1/10 (19 May 2014)

Many of the other bad reviews have nailed it. After Bryan Cranston dies, this movie turns to dung. How bad? Well, Matthew Broderick's movie is looking pretty good right now......
What ticked me off the most was that all of the commercials and early talk of this movie were making comparisons to the original film from the 50's, about Godzilla being this sort of metaphor for our nuclear misdeeds, and how menacing the monster is and how scary he is. The commercials make you think he's the main bad guy and he just ends up fighting other monsters who somehow get involved. Wrong. Godzilla from the get-go is kind of the hero of the movie. He's not even really considered a threat by the military, we don't really bother to fight him, nor him us, although we sometimes get in his way. There's actually several scenes where you have the great old US Navy steaming alongside Godzilla as he's heading to go kill the bad creatures. Gawd, I was groaning at this point. It was like the old cartoon where we'd call up Godzilla to save the day with a button. He was neither scary nor intimidating. He doesn't really destroy any cities or buildings per se, his sole act of bad-guy ness was really the brief tsunami you saw in the commercials. Otherwise he's just kinda stomping around town fighting the monsters. After he kills them both at the end, he promptly leaves for the water without killing anybody...kinda like, "Hey humans, it's all okay now!" Gawd, even the TV channel depicted in the movie puts up an info banner on the screen saying 'Godzilla-Savior of the city!' Another major annoyance was that they took a bit of a cue from 'Cloverfield' and decided to NOT show you a lot of stuff, instead they'd put it on a TV in the background of some stupid personal drama scene. You don't get to see the first encounter with Godzilla and the MUTO creature, because they cut away to a scene with a TV in the background to show only part of it. You don't get to see the bigger MUTO destroy Las Vegas, because they cut away from it and instead only show the monster 'leaving' Las Vegas, lol.... On a TV in the background. All the potentially good stuff in actuality ends up on a TV somewhere in another scene.
Oh, and that's another thing. You really don't see the military actually engage any of these creatures. Perhaps a missile or two fired offscreen, but there are not really any tanks, artillery, big defenses, etc. No stand up fighting by our military. It's just a lot of stupid stuff with small groups of soldiers or shown on a TV in the background, and most everything is centered around the main character who seemingly ends up all over the place owing to his status as a Lieutenant in an EOD squad??? Maybe if he was a General.... There's one scene where you get your hopes up, as some tanks and soldiers are on the Golden Gate bridge, and yet while they begin to engage Godzilla, they instead cut away to some bus driver who decides to escape the action. Then they cut away to you seeing perhaps 5 seconds of this fighting...in the far distance. Then they cut away entirely to some personal drama stuff.
Contrary to what others have said, the CGI is rather dull and Godzilla honestly didn't look very good. He's often blurry in the few daylight glimpses you get of him, or clouded by smoke. The fact that all of the monster fights happen in the dark tell you that bad CGI is being compensated for here. 'Pacific Rim' was 10x better on the effects than this movie. Godzilla's body and everything about him also seemed too fluid, like he had no skeletal structure. Did I mention the CGI was bad? And he's got the weirdest looking peg legs and an awful amount of lower body weight.
Godzilla's nuclear breath is also lame. It 'looks' good, it just doesn't DO anything. There's no real sound effect for it, and it seems like a pulse/push type ray that just seems ineffective. He uses it only twice. Not that he had much time to. Godzilla is indeed only in the film for about 10 minutes. I got the distinct impression that they simply included it because they knew that Godzilla must do this at some point.
Godzilla does only 3 cool things in the entire movie. Two of them are the times he roars into the camera. Nice. The third is a tail slap he does on one of the monsters, however, he looks entirely too pleased with himself after doing so. It was bad watching him revel in his own awesomeness, lol. Too bad though that you can barely see this happen, it's so frigging dark in these scenes.