Mixed feelings, inevitably

Rating: 5/10 (23 August 2015)

When I heard that the American studios were producing a new GODZILLA movie, I had mixed feelings about it. Their previous GODZILLA film, made in 1998, was absolutely execrable. The director of this new version was Gareth Edwards, who previously made the low budget MONSTERS, which I wasn't too keen on. And as a massive fan of the various Japanese film series, how could the Americans possibly hope to do the subject justice? The answer is that they don't, at least not really. Only in the last half an hour of the film does this become a GODZILLA film properly; until that point, it feels more like MONSTERS 2. Edwards obviously has a passion for huge-sized beasties, but as a film-maker he leaves me cold. Much of the running time here consists of following around an absolutely dull, one-dimensional American family who have little to do with the actual big events of the film.
Thus we get Bryan Cranston grieving his wife, Elizabeth Olsen randomly working in a hospital, and an annoying kid lurking around. The worst of the lot is the erstwhile lead, Aaron Taylor-Johnson (KICK ASS) who gives the singularly most wooden performance I've seen in a while. What a poor choice of actor for the lead role, and what a pointless role to begin with anyway. Ken Watanabe is considerably better, but under used in a show of tokenism.
As for Godzilla, he has a couple of beetle-like enemies to contend with here, and the creations are larger than ever. Inevitably CGI is used to animate the monsters and the result is visually impressive; enough money has gone into it to make this a dark and brooding visual experience. As I said before, though, it's only in the action of the last half hour that this starts feeling truly like a Japanese GODZILLA film, which is what I was hoping for the whole time. You could excise the whole, somewhat pointless, first hour and a half and still get the same result.