Been on a Kaiju kick lately (1 of 3)

Rating: 7/10 (4 June 2019)

[7/10] - "Met expectations"
I admittedly don't have as much to say about this one as I do it's two sequels.
This is mostly because I've heard most of my thoughts voiced better by other people. For example, I agree with Bob Chipman that the movie would have been better if it had focused on Ken Watanabe's character rather than the rather generic main family. While Godzilla is strangely absent from the movie, this wouldn't have been an issue had the main cast been more interesting.
I will say, the movie is an example of really solid filmcraft. The cinematography, while dark, is also (usually) adequately clear. Godzilla almost always looks fantastic on screen (I actually think he looks better here than in the sequel).
And there is one sequence I want to shower with praise, when the bomb-team is skydiving into the Kaiju battle. I've always felt that a Kaiju series would be best if its creatures were portrayed as Cosmic Horror, much like the Great Old Ones in Lovecraft. While this would have created an excessively delicate racial subtext in the Kong film, with Godzilla, I think it is appropriate. The skydiving scene, more than any other, captures the Lovecraftian angle. Not only is Ligeti's "Requiem" a suitable callback to the Cosmic Horror in *2001: A Space Odyssey*, but the cinematography has an amazing way of creating scale. The broad skyline shots, where they skydivers are mere specs and trails of red smoke, are interspersed with POV shots by the skydivers. Their POV is limited by their goggles, and we only see the monsters fighting in brief flashes of light. When we drift close to Godzilla, we get the first proper sense of his might and our own insignificance in his presence. The goggles too serve as an excellent visual metaphor for the ways in which our human perspective limit what we can see and understand. By constraining the sight of the audience, they communicate the constraints of our comprehension.
It was just a magnificent sequence. I can't say enough in its favor.
{MILD SPOILERS FROM HERE FORWARD}
One of my general criticisms is only in the light of seeing its two sequels, in that it seems like the Godzilla movie's are a little trigger happy with the nukes. ...Like... I get it. Godzilla is almost always about nuclear weapons on some level or another, but their overuse makes them feel a bit anti-climactic. Not to mention, I feel like their destructive power is ultimately underwhelming considering how few people they actually kill. The sequel's use of such WMDs would have been more satisfying if the nuke in this film had been successfully deactivated and if everyone had sighed with relief. Then the actual use of them in the sequel would have more weight.