Lost opportunity

Rating: 1/10 (19 July 2015)

Initially in this story we were presented with husband and wife scientists played by the great actors Bryan Cranston and Julliette Binoche. This movie might have continued the tradition of scientist as hero, dating from It Came From Outer Space and Creature from the Black Lagoon, and continuing through Jurassic Park. This would have been a much better movie.
Unfortunately these two characters were phased out early in the story, and their son turned out to be the main character. Instead of a smart scientist, he's a dumb warrior. Instead of Sam Neill and Laura Dern, we got Rocky Balboa.
I blame James Cameron. Working class people are the heroes in his Terminator movies and Aliens and The Abyss and Avatar. The theme of his movie Titanic was that working class people are better in every way than upper class people.
For a key sequence in Godzilla, the high altitude drop, the film makers chose as background music the same piece by Ligeti that Stanley Kurbrick used when Heywood Floyd was shown the monolith on the Moon in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The Godzilla film makers seemed to say, we have no imagination of our own so we're stealing from a better film maker. If you don't agree, please point to anything at all in Godzilla that shows that the film makers had an imagination.
(Was this music choice another unfortunate Cameron influence? The music in the opening salvage scene in Aliens was the same Khachaturian music that Kubrick used brilliantly when introducing the Jupiter mission spacecraft in Space Odyssey. These music choices were brilliant in Space Odyssey; not so in Godzilla or Aliens.)
This movie is top-heavy with special effects. It lacks imagination and intelligence and characters we care about or even like.