More Godzilla in Godzilla, please!

Rating: 7/10 (18 May 2014)

I liked this movie. It gave me everything I wanted out of a Godzilla movie, if not nearly enough of it. Godzilla was every bit the badass he should be, not some 'little lizard in the big city' ala the horrible 98 picture, but the Earth's bull-in-a-china-shop Sheriff that he's supposed to be. While certainly not a dude in a suit, his design is highly reminiscent of the original, and having grown up loving Godzilla movies, it was fantastic nostalgia to watch him bust out old favourite moves in high-budget 3-D.
That all said, there were some things about the movie which grated. First off, while Brian Cranston does a great job, the story which the movie follows becomes rather redundant, and really actually kind of irritating, after about the first half-hour to forty-five minutes.
In the build-up it's a solid story, nothing 'Oscar for screenplay' worthy certainly, but the sort of decent drama and character establishment which the closest modern comparison, Pacific Rim, completely failed to muster. It got you emotionally invested in Cranston's character, and by extension the characters around him.
The problem is that long after the build-up, those characters remain the irksomely central focus of the movie, quite literally obstructing our view of the action. Several times the movie has these "Oh..! Oh...! AWWW, Come onn..!" moments, where some really cool monster-battling is -just- getting started, only to cut away abruptly to one of the characters answering a phone/riding a train, with perhaps brief and tiny flashes of the awesome battle you wish you were watching on a TV in the background.
There comes a point in the movie where the story of the supporting characters should really move out of centre-stage for the main character, the titular Godzilla... but it never happens. Instead, the story finds ways of carrying the supporting characters through each situation to the end, even getting one personally involved with the monsters in a really weird, goofy way.
All in all though, my review boils down to this: NEEDS MORE MONSTER BRAWLS!